Lord, here we are again.
Broken hearts all round; stars, still new, still beautiful, still shining, plunging before they’re spent. Families bleeding grief for lives lost and futures changed and nothing will be the same for anyone in that crash again – or anyone who cared for anyone in that crash. Ever.
A bully attacked someone I love. Once, twice…how many times more? Are you out of lightning bolts, God? Do you need a David, perhaps? Because I have a slingshot and I know where to get stones.
They walked into my office, those good, sweet friends. Serious written all over their usually cheery faces. “He’s pretty sure I have ALS,” he said, of the specialist. “But he’s sending him for a second opinion, just in case,” she said. And I heard their hearts. Clutching for trust; for our good God who has never yet let them walk lonely.
There’s more. A relationship between two friends. Set in cement, I’d thought – now shattered like dropped china. And the dearest sister in the world to me fights a serious post-op complication. Nicked the bowels, she’d told me earlier. Just a bit. I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to think it. No. She will survive this. We shared the same womb, a few years apart; then the same room a few feet apart; then decades of life, provinces apart. She’s a piece of my heart and she’s not allowed to leave this planet before I do. No, sir. No siree.
Lord, are you listening? Some people are wondering about now – why bother trying so hard to live right and set good goals and be kind and wise and Christlike, when so much – everything really – can be stripped in a breath? A squeal of tires? A needle poke? A slip of the tongue or scalpel?
And while I’m at it: Honestly, Father. It’s supposed to be spring around here. Resurrection season. “Winter is past; the time for the singing of birds has come,” says your Word. And you haven’t missed a spring yet. But it’s mid-April and it snowed again today, an icing for the knee-high stuff still covering our yards. Winter has a hold on us. Hearts are freezing over. And don’t get me started on politics or news.
It feels like the wolves are circling.
I’ll just say it, Lord. People are wondering about you. Badmouthing you. (Funny how so many don’t believe in you until they need someone to blame. Or till they want to tag a fairy-tale afterlife on a life that has never, not once, acknowledged that you gave it in the first place and have the right to take it whenever you want.)
God, I know your thoughts and ways are higher than ours. Remind me please, remind us all, that you walk among us, weeping with those who weep; rejoicing with those who rejoice. And that you alone are enough in times like these.
Open our eyes, Lord. We must see Jesus.