How do I introduce Emily? I thought about listing her talents, but I got a little worried I might forget some. If you want to be amazed by the scope of her accomplishments you can visit her website here. Emily is always an honest writer, not afraid to show her soul and bare her secrets. She is an encouragement to me and one of the sweetest women I've ever encountered. Ever. You can read more of her words on her blog, Imperfect Prose.
Thank you Emily, for sharing your heart here.
Weak voices of a congregation singing Great is Thy Faithfulness on a Sunday, and it’s the quiet chorus of farmers and families made humble by the death of a young mother to a brain aneurism, and sometimes the stained glass seems to mock for all of its color.
The words are dry, and I’m remembering another. The baby who flailed her arms, this daughter of friends who waited eight years to conceive. The doctors have no answers, and I thought I did, but they become nothing in the face of a child suffering. Nothing compared to tears leaking helpless from eyes so young and I wipe them away but I cannot erase the seizure.
And I have no voice for hymns that have no heart, and where is God’s heart?
It’s a question age-old. I’ve never truly asked it, but I do that night. If God is good, how can he allow such bad? I speak into a kitchen emptied of friends and wine glasses and cards. Even watching Mum battle brain cancer, I’d still sung the hymns, for she’d lived a full life and though it was hard, she’d danced, but this: this watching a baby die who’s known no life—no bike ride or Sweet 16 or diploma or pay check, I cannot. So how can He? The One who claims to be good, to be love? How can he not reach cosmic hand to wipe the pain away?
I don’t expect an answer, don’t want one, but it is given. My husband says he believes God selects these child-souls special, offers them a choice: To go through life and live a long one, full of health and joy, but then, to end in hell for not knowing him. Or, for their time on earth to be a fast blur of pain, only to return to heaven to live for eternity...
This, he says, is the only way he can keep on believing.
I remember the words of another wise man who said, it isn’t why a good God allows bad things to happen, but rather, why do good things happen at all? We are, after all, so undeserving.
The stained glass reflects across bent shoulders of a town singing faithful, and though weak, the voices are in tune. It’s a song we’ll be singing long after we’ve returned to heaven, a song we’ll dance to with children and mothers whose lives have been cut short only to last eternal…
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)
