When tragedy comes knocking

To try and understand is so difficult, so frustrating, such despair.  Like a natural disaster heading right for our doorstep, tragedy strikes with a vengeance.  It leaves you angry and vulnerable and weak and hopeless.  It can rip open your heart, leaving it exposed, raw, as if putting nails to a chalkboard or foil to braces.

Tragedy allows your heart to feel what your mind sees.  It pulls you closer to each other, family, the community, yet why does this always have to be at the expense of another?!  It doesn’t seem fair and it doesn’t seem right.  How can God take an innocent life like that?  Why does one tragedy after another keep occurring?  Am I next?  Is this why I am watching all of this unfold, so it can prepare me for the worst?  When will these raging storms calm themselves into that peaceful serene ocean I love to watch?

Tragedy:  you can see it on the news, it affects a friend of your friend or it can be personal.  In any form, how does one clear the murky water?

God tells me in Isaiah, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.  As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Will I ever be able to understand?  No, probably not.

Will it ever fade with time?  No.  It will always be there; in your thoughts, in those picture albums, in your dreams.

God doesn’t promise that bad things won’t happen, but He does tell me “when you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.  When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned.  Nor will the flame scorch you.  For I am the Lord your God.  The Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”

Corrie Ten Boom, a lady from The Netherlands, helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust by hiding them in her home.  She was thrown into a Natzi concentration camp for her efforts and surprisingly, survived to tell about it.  She has told countless people to “hold everything in your hands lightly.”  This doesn’t mean to build walls and not grow relationships; rather to know that everything in this world is temporal.

If your spouse, children, career, health, and wealth are the only things you have to cling to, what happens when something unexpected occurs?  If everything in this world is temporal, what are we left with to cling to?  It’s simple, if we choose to let it be.

It’s not “what” is your foundation, but “who” is your foundation.  Is your hope in the things listed above or will you allow your hope to be in the One who gave you those things?

A story tells of a farmer who had a fire on his land and in his barn.  After the fire was extinguished, he surveyed the damage; he found a mother duck that had died; all hunched over and badly burned.  As he lifted this mother duck off of the ground, he heard squeaking coming from underneath and found she had shielded all of her ducklings to protect them from death.  Each one had survived, though she gave her life for them.

Psalm 91:4 tells me that Jesus will “cover me with His feathers, and under His wings we shall take refuge; His truth shall be our shield and we shall not be afraid.”

Will we have tragedy and death and cancer and natural disasters in this life?  Yes.  Will they hurt and shock and stun us?  Yes.  But if we let our hope be in a God that will be with us through it, if we trust that His thoughts and ways are not our ways, will we be able to get through?  Yes.

My go-to verse for tragedy is Psalm 91:14-16; change the pronouns for further clarity for yourself: “Because (your name) has set his/her love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him/her.  I will set him/her on high, because he/she has known My name.  He/She shall call upon Me, and I will answer him/her.  I will be with him/her in trouble; I will deliver him/her and honor him/her.  With long life I will satisfy him/her and show him/her My salvation.”

What comfort.  What love.  We will have despair.  We will have hopelessness.  But friend, set your eyes upon a Heavenly Father who loves you beyond comprehension.  He can deliver you.  Feel Him spread His wings tightly around you so that when the tragedy comes knocking, the pain will be bearable.  Tragedy will occur and if you let it, this is where you will see Him like never before.

If you don’t have this hope, take the first step; email me.  Let me help you find hope in the “who” and not the “what”.

So get out there and start “Holding Lightly with Abandon”!