harps//strings

It is all a string. Everything is connected in some way. The more you pull, the more you unravel. Once the anger subsides, we find that a seed of bitterness has already been planted. In our anger, we unknowingly readied the soil. In our rage, we watered what had already been growing since that time. It has already taken hold before we even realized it. With the loss, everything seems to come a little too late. One should be thankful that the watering can is now empty then. Now begins the work to uproot what was hiding in the deluge. Thorns and thistles. Such is the cost in the land of the living. 

That’s the problem with grief. Everyone else’s miracles, everyone else’s breakthroughs, they all become an offense. It points out what should have been and what should have happened. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to highlight our ‘lack’. It pursues and constantly reminds us what is missing. And the tension, again, resurfaces. Deeper and more significant than we ever thought. How much has taken root, I wonder. 

Why did the miracle not come for those who also prayed; who also contended and fasted? Why did it not come for us? We are forced to come face to face with the dread and the unknown a second time. And a third time. And a fourth and fifth time. In our individual lifetimes, will we ever get an answer? Will it ever stop? 

One cannot help but ask these things. Grief forces us to come face to face with this. But it is no longer the lack of answers that offends us. It is the fact that the answers will never be enough. So the same questions come again and again, with no resolution. Each time, it opens the wound wider and wider. A bombardment, telling us what we were afraid to say aloud. All spilling out as if it was necessary. Mandatory and crucial. And maybe it is. Maybe it is the part of the journey we cannot and should not avoid. 

It may be the only version of the gospel we can hear right now. One that brings imperfection to the forefront and its contrast to Him. The gospel, I suppose, has and will always be an object of offense. It expects perfection in a world where there is none. And it will continue to demand completeness until the end. 

It is discouraging and disheartening. To think that we may do all the ‘right’ things and still be denied what was begged for. Was it not ‘right’ to pray for resurrection? Was it not ‘right’ to pray for healing? And above all else, was it not ‘right’ to go to Him who claims to save; to the one who told us Himself to lay our burdens down at His feet?

Why then is there still loss in the wake? Why then did we not get even an ending? Did our hearts not burn hot enough? Were our intentions too impure and corrupted for even our prayers to be heard? 

All we are given are the hanging questions. Another itch that cannot be answered. Not yet and maybe not ever. These are the questions that keep me awake at night and cling even tighter during the day. Not from a place of anger but from a place of confusion and bitterness. Of offense. 

How are we to determine His will when we experience things that are often opposites and contradictory? How are we to follow when we are met with apparent silence?

He says they are both important. Both coexist to sharpen and build each other, if we let them. The breaking and breakthroughs. The day and the night. Both matter. An answer, yes, but not an answer to the questions we asked. And it is not an answer that will ever suffice. It is an answer that violently agitates more than it resolves. 

Grief puts us here and lets us sit in it. We sit and we are allowed a chance to survey the rubble. A chance to see what is left and what is gone. And a chance to come face to face with God and ask ‘why’. That is it, that is all we are given. So I suppose offense is the posture of sitting in the wreckage and the action of bringing God to justice. 

Maybe this is also a form of worship. It compels us to ask and it compels us to judge. And it directs it all to the only one who can take it. Maybe we have not been emptied out enough or maybe grief is after something much deeper. Either way, it is determined to take everything from us and it is determined to be rid of it. We are forced to come to the feet of the cross and make a choice. Choose death to make way for resurrection or choose life and grow in bitterness.

If anger needed to be spent to be extinguished, will our bitterness die with our justice? It seems so. God was indeed judged and executed. We seem to forget that our justice and our bitterness were the wood and nails of His punishment. We forget that it all died that day when He said it was finished. Grief allowed us to put to death God and God allowed grief to bring us here to do so. 

If we are to heal, then the source of the poison must be removed before all else. I have to believe that it was. The thorns and thistles were removed from our soil onto His head. My offense and claim of guilt drove the nails in and fixed Him upon the cross. Death, it seems, could never be avoided. Not for us, and not for God. 

But our bitterness died with Him. What we are left with is a chance to stand once again and keep walking. What hindered our path was removed. Now good and proper soil. Where we will end up is still a mystery like everything else in this season, but grief will lead us. With God put to death, grief may be our only guide.