After reflecting a lot on some of the challenges we've faced over the last year, I've also been noticing how common it is for people to want to justify or give reasons for why bad things happen. I remember being young and hearing about a classmate's mother who was dying of lung cancer. I asked my mom, "did she smoke?" "Did she eat unhealthy?" "Did she...?" "Did she...?" To all of my questions wondering what this woman did wrong or what her family did wrong to have this happen, my mother merely answered, "no" I was searching for answers that weren't there. I remember that being the first time in my life that I felt true fear- that I realized even if I do everything "right" which of course I don't and none of us do, but even if we did, bad things can still happen.
Thankfully, I was able to go about the rest of my childhood and young adult life fairly unaffected by this phenomenon, as I never really had to face many difficult realities growing up. Unfortunately, it has made recent events that much harder to handle, since I have had no experience, skill or coping mechanisms for how to get through hard things. I realize many people around me face some of the same challenges for coping.
I have wondered often about what people think when they hear my baby died - if my aunts tell my cousins it was because I didn't take good care of myself, so my cousins never have to worry it will happen to them or if my sisters in law and mother in law talk about things I ate or drank that caused this to happen. Or if my coworkers talk about why I was on the "wrong" side of statistics. Maybe I think about that because a part of me would want to do that- want to explain it away, so I wouldn't feel vulnerable to the same sad fate.
Yet, if we're really honest with ourselves, we know we are. That's what scares us- that we're not all that far apart from the people who lost all their savings in stock investments, who have high medical bills and can't make house payments, from people whose parents die too early or whose children are never born. We're not all that different. We wish we were, so we could protect ourselves, reason with ourselves about why they "deserve" what they have and we "deserve" what we have, but this is where the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" good old capitalist philosophy of "you get what you deserve" doesn't always come through for us. This is where God would seem to make chaos of our reason, throwing all our dreams and well-thought out plans up into the air and letting them fall at will.
Some dreams we may see again and others are lost forever. So, what's the point? What "lesson" does this teach us? What behavior does this reinforce? What does God want us to get out of this awesome, and yet, sometimes, seemingly cruel experience we call life?
For as much as we control and achieve and "work for" and for as much as it serves us in the land of opportunity, we are far behind our "third world" neighbors in learning that none of it is ours- not our homes or our cars or our schools or societies, not even our spouses and our children. This is the lesson of lent- "Remember that you come from dust and to dust you shall return" None of it matters except in how it will bring us closer to God. And, for that, "bad things" hold as much opportunity as "the good." It's not easy to see- we want to be like the person in the footprints poem that assumes God leaves us to walk by ourselves in those most difficult times- that when there are no "blessings" as we would have them, we are sinful and God is far from us.
How often we miss the point- that sometimes what happens to us, where we live, what kind of car we drive or even how many children we can bring into the world are the most irrelevant aspects of life, since these things do not inherently enable us to love any more or any less. They only provide us opportunities- opportunities to choose what to do next.
A part of me wishes I could explain away our loss because that would be easy. Then, I could assure myself that doing things differently the next time, I could shield myself from ever experiencing that kind of pain again. Yet, countless examples of people who did everything "wrong" and have a healthy baby at the end of it are another way God has kept me from falling into this tempting trap and remembering that I have everything I need to live a purposeful life right now, just as those who face much less suffering and those who face much more suffering do. Because love is always there- it's always there to be chosen, to be taken- it is why bad things can happen and we can still find hope.
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