Overwhelmed by the bad

In too short a period of time, I saw, felt, and heard about too many bad things. Someone's near-fatal, crippling accident. A friend's parent's death. A friend's child's death. My dad's cancer, resuming unabated. Watching Hotel Rwanda for the second time. Reading a book about the Holocaust through a child's eyes. A miscarriage--the experience of death from within my own body.

I felt overwhelmed by the fragility of life, the ease with which horrendous disasters happen. As I drove with my one-year-old to the supermarket on a dark, wet road, watching a bicyclist's reflector blink red in front of us like a heartbeat, I felt certain that even a simple twist of the road could send all three of us hurtling through the fence into the river down below.

It is so hard to reconcile these dark moments with other moments--my son runs through the park, chomping the grass under his feet with squeals of delight for every dog, bird, and plane he sees. Somehow the earth gives birth to both. A free preview of both heaven and hell. The Life-with-God and Life-without-God.

All I know to do when these moments overwhelm, and it is too terrible to look ahead, is to imagine myself instead burying my face into the fabric of God's chest. When I know what I can ask for on behalf of someone else, I ask. When I don't know what to say, I imagine myself like those friends who wordlessly lowered their crippled friend through the roof.

And I pray for myself, that God would help me never, in the face of whatever, never to loose my grip on him. He is my only hope for what's to come. I think of my college Old Testament professor, summing up the book of Revelation, its words written for a church coughing up the blood of its martyrs: We know who wins in the end.

In the end, there is a new earth. A new order birthed by Christ. With only the heaven. The God-with-us. And none of the hell.