How many distractions are needed? How many tv s and radios are on to create a background sound that lets us live? And what if there were no distractions, no other thoughts than the ones solitude and silence bring?
Doctor Johnson and friends once discussed whether life has more pleasure, or more pain. Someone asked who would want to live their lives over if they could change nothing. No one there answered yes. Maybe with the passage of time, bid hunks of it, we reach a "critical mass" of sorrow? For some of us it is too much to bear. Any kind of work helps drive out the demons of sorrow. "Keep busy" is the admonition, perhaps gained from long experience.
But as water builds behind a dam, many losses increase and just will not go away. It can come to a point where it cannot be denied or put away. Words of encouragement are often platitudes to those who suffer. Even the truth of the scriptures will not take all sorrow away. The promises in them are to be relied upon as a future deliverance, but the present must be borne.
I am mindful of a mother and father who lost an eighteen year old daughter. They will experience their first Christmas without her, a season she loved. No words are sufficient for them. Only our prayers are our greatest gift to help such to survive.
To each our test, before our tears are gone forever. Until that day we may spend many lonely nights of contemplation. Christianity is no fun, I hear. Neither is the world.
Yes, this is our fourth Christmas without our youngest son Daniel. It does not get easier. We simply say less about it to those outside the family and this provides them with the false perception that we somehow "got over" his passing,which occured at the beginning of the Christmas season.
ReplyDeleteOur bucket of sorrows indeed grows over our lifetimes, but so does our capacity to feel, see, and hear God in all that we see and do.