An Ocean Of Grief

Be forewarned...this post is probably going to be pretty raw and unfiltered. So FYI.

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A 93 year old man and a 7 month old girl died this past week.

The 93 year old man was named Norman. He was a faithful attender at the church I work at. His first wife died of cancer in 1992 I believe, and he re-married in 2001. From what I was told, his last eight years of his life were his best.

The 7 month old girl was named Caitlyn. Her mother was a student in my first youth ministry at my home church in Colorado. I can not even begin to describe the amount of time that I have spent with her over the years - face-to-face, emails, letters, etc. She was one of those students who always had problems and situations in her life. When I left for Dallas, she was still in high school and went off the deep end for awhile and her life was a mess. She started getting her life back together when her first daughter was born, and last year when I was in Colorado I had the opportunity to spend time with her and with her husband and attempt to help them through the difficulties in their marriage. When she found out she was pregnant, she was extremely excited, but I remember wondering if that was so great of a thing because I wasn't sure she was ready to face being a mother of two children.

I never got to meet Caitlyn, but I know she was a joy to be with. Her mother's facebook updates and messages to me were filled with statements of how wonderful she was.

She died Friday night in a tragic crib accident staying with her grandparents on her dad's side. The funeral is this Wednesday.

Even though I didn't know her, the tragedy of her death and the addition of one more thing in her mother's already hard life reminded me of my own mom's hard life and this floodgate of emotion opened up in me last night and this morning. I don't know if you have ever felt like your heart was literally breaking in two, but that's what it felt like to me. I'm writing this post because I'm afraid that if I don't talk about it now, that I'll repress it all back in again and something else will happen and the flood will begin again.

I think I have these huge cracks in my heart that I've attempted to fix myself with glue that doesn't last. I remember in college, my mother's death hit me all of a sudden in the middle of my junior year (three years after she died), and I thought I would never recover. Unfortunately, at a Christian college you're supposed to act like you have it all together, so I just shoved the pain back in and bandaged up the wound and put on a fake smile and kept on moving.

This morning, as I sat in Starbucks drinking coffee and waiting to film one of our church members doing their job at Kroger, I penned these words in my journal:

And I'm stranded on this island in an ocean of grief
So won't You be the one to rescue me?
Will you be the one to rescue me?

And I'm hanging by this thread of my own insecurity
So won't You be the one to rescue me?
Will you be the one to rescue me?

I haven't written a song in ten years, but those words are starting to sound like one.

When I filmed the church member this morning, I almost lost it again. This particular church member is mentally challenged and it opened up some questions in my mind that I've wrestled with for a long time. Questions like

I understand that disease and disabilities and the like are the result of the Fall, but why are those things seemingly so random?

If my heart feels like it's breaking with the weight of my grief and my unanswered questions and situations from my life, how can You God deal with the weight of the entire world's grief? (this is a proof that I use in the evidence against God when I have my doubts.)

I've had my own near-death experiences (brain tumor), and I've experienced the pain of seeing someone you love almost die (my daughter when she fractured her skull) and succumb to death (my mom), and as I grow older nothing is easier and nothing is dealt with and I'm afraid that one day something will happen and I will become so numb from it all that I'll have a nervous breakdown and give up.

But for now, I still have faith.