an explanation

For those of you who read my fragmented previous post on someone's water lily in puzzlement, I apologize. The college minister at our church lost his parents in a car accident on Friday. His daughter, who is three, was in the car and as a result suffered head trauma and other internal injuries.

My first response was horror, that chaotic wave of confusion and sadness. I spent much of last weekend brooding over both the weight of grief the family must be experiencing and over the fickle nature of life and death. I'm a bit terrified to drive at all, because the accident could not have been predicted or prevented by his parents. It was completely out of their control. And for the first time in a long time, I became afraid of death.

I tend to operate from day to day on the idea that as long as I have long term obligations I will have to live long enough to see them through. But the truth is that death is not respectful of commitments; it does not choose on the basis of merit; it makes no distinctions at all - we personify it so often we've started to think it actually has the ability to rationalize. As I stated in my previous post, we forget that we are not living out predictable narratives. We are not the protagonist in a formulaic tale who, almost by definition, cannot get killed before the falling action. We are people, among a billion, who interact with our environment and with one another on a daily basis - always moving, always at risk.

The only thing I can figure is that the way to move on is to stop asking the irrelevant question, "Why?" and get on with this task of living with no certainty of tomorrow - of living only with the certainty that God is watching if not controlling our motions, that some joy may grow from the ashes of grief.

Please pray for my friend's family and for the full recovery of his daughter.