I hadn’t intended to write about death and dying this week, but that’s what’s happening around me, so I have to address it.
Last week I lost a dear friend to cancer. Jim Wiles was a fine man. We served on a nonprofit board together. I read one of my children’s book to his daughter’s class when Anna was in first grade. (She’s now a sophomore in college.) We attended the same church, and we were friends with his parents. Like our son’s-in-law sister, Sally, Jim lived a good life and died way too soon. Yesterday a woman who follows my blog wrote to tell me that she had lost a family member in a car crash.
Our tendency is to ask why God doesn’t intervene and stop these tragic and untimely deaths. An Episcopal bishop whose son died in a car crash was asked where God was that happened. He said, “I believe God’s heart was the first heart to break when my son’s car went over that rail.”
If we turn to God and ask, “Why?”, we may not get an answer. But if we can remember that when we grieve, God grieves with us, we may find that God’s love will provide us with the strength, the ability, and the “How” to go on.
