Dealing with Death

Many of my favorite authors say that they write what they need to read. Philip Yancey is especially fond of talking of his writing as a wandering journey of faith, where he is wrestling with and trying to hammer out his understanding of some aspect of life. He deals with grace and disappointment and longing for the Kingdom, those sorts of things. A lot of the stories I post here are things I need to read. Some time back, I told a friend that the only reason I post these things to the internet on a blog instead of keep them in my private journals is that it’s nice to have access to them anytime, anywhere. It sounds to me a bit ego-centric, but it’s a help for me to be able to access these stories and reread them at various times. I don’t have to go digging through my journals trying to find something. That’s especially true as I process through something someone smarter than me has said or realized. I work their insight into my soul like kneading yeast into bread. This blog is my work surface, the words my rolling pin.

This morning, I found myself re-reading the About the Invitation portion of this blog. I say there that “these pages..are the blood-and-guts expression of a man’s journey of passionate and at times faltering faith through this world…” I often write about the beauty or adventure or desirous seeking after God. My posts are most often expressions of hunger and reaching toward Christ. But, in the spirit of the About page, I realize I need to feel free, too, to write about “times of faltering faith.” I’ve got them. God knows I do.

So here it is, my first truly “faltering faith” post. I have no idea where it is going to end up, but this is where I need to start: a dream…

I’m standing in an overgrown field. It’s been neglected for quite a few years now. The barn is dilapidated. Where cows and horses once grazed, only weeds remain. The sounds of children running and playing have been washed out by the hollow drag of air across the fallen timbers. The sky, a bright blue in my memory, is now a pale grey, as if it is sick with mourning. No one lives here anymore. The life that once filled this place has vanished.

Another scene: I’m sitting with a man who has come to the end of his days, at least he wishes it were so. For as long as he can remember, though the days have been filled with activity, it has been activity for activity’s sake, and they have felt only empty, and he feels emptier having lived them. He knows nothing, and everything he once knew seems as dust. He has nothing to stand on. Life for him has been one long, unblinking daze.

Yet another scene: A woman sits across from me. She is broken, damaged by years upon years of neglect and abuse. Something deep within her was stolen as a little girl, and she has lived a desperate life trying to get it back. Nothing has worked, and in fact has only led her to darker and scarier places where she has had to bargain her way back again. She now exists with even less of herself than she had when she left her painful youth. She is alone, holding only tattered fragments of herself.

The stories continue. One after another after another. To say that “something” has been stolen, that “something” has been lost, is perhaps the greatest understatement of all time. To say that “things are not what they should be” is terribly, tragically, true. So much so that to look at life square in the face hurts deep within and freezes the soul like stone. Only the bravest can do such a thing, or those leaning on the crutches of addictions. And yet, this is the first place we are asked to go. This is the first thing we need to do, to see the desperation of our situation. We are utterly, totally, completely lost. We are barely alive, alive only enough to know we are not alive and the life we dreamed of has alluded us.

Don’t get me wrong. I have sit through hundreds of evangelical presentations and sermons to reach out to the lost with something of the hope of the gospel. They are (mostly) very good, and very true, and very needed. But they also often skip over the painful truth that we are not the people we should be. It’s often as if the presenter or preacher is also too afraid to look square at life and say, “We are a dead people. We have lost everything.” Yet, that’s where so many are. I know that to be true. My days are spent walking among the dead-at-heart and lost-of-soul.

Before the gospel, the good news, can mean anything, we must take a hard look at the life we have in our hands. Small. Silly, really, in the way we cling to such small things. Fragile. A shred of something, but we don’t really know what the original was. We hold a piece of a mosaic but cannot see the picture. Only shades of color, and even that is fading.

There is a hope. It is a great hope. The news is a great news — that we get to have life — LIFE. We get to breathe in gulps of life-giving oxygen again. Our blood gets to run warm through our veins again. Somehow, to our amazement, the broken fragments can come back together. The empty spaces filled. We can have again what we are made for. But it does not happen apart from taking a hard look at what we get and realizing, oh, finally realizing, we cannot get there on our own. We are dead. Only a life-giving Spirit can bring us back.

The promise of Jeremiah 31:13, that “maidens will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow” only happens as we are first familiar with our sorrow. Looking around at the brokenness around us, what other choice have we got? “Because of this,” wrote the prophet Micah, “I will weep and wail… I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl” (1:8) This is the only way to make sense of James’ command to “grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom” (4:9). Jesus promises us that He will turn our grief into joy again. Why? Because He will be all that we lost, and we will see Him. Our life. Our everything.

Maybe this isn’t so much faltering faith as it is a burdened heart. What is the only other appropriate response to suffering but to weep with those who weep for their loss.