Posted by jan
on December 22, 2008, 4:10 am, in reply to "why me..."
72.175.193.124
amen & amen, trish... i wish i didn't have to carry the burden of emptiness & loneliness that i do... but i do. speaking just for myself here, during those first two years, i had to admit that i honestly *did* think that because my girls and i were good obedient christians, that we should be spared the extreme agonies so often suffered in this world. well, lora was walking smack-dab in the center of god's will for her life, and boom, she was gone. so there went that big chunk of theology/assumption. and then i stopped avoiding certain scriptures like "he makes the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust". i found one of lora's bible study notebooks, and in it she had notes about john the baptist with the following in quotes "god doesn't promise us safety"... just stuff like that, that showed me, quite clearly, that i thought god "owed" it to me to keep my children safe at all times.
at the time of her death, i was praying almost-daily for the lord to keep my children safe... that particular day, i was in training for work and didn't get a chance to pray -- and lora died. so then i went through the whole superstituous thing, like maybe it was because i didn't pray for lora "that day"... as though there was some kind of inherent "magic" in my prayers... but that didn't really sound like christianity the more i pondered it.
i think back to the 1800's when in our own country, so many many children died from childhood diseases... and it simply was not the case that they did not bond with their children like those in places of massive starvation must necessarily do to remain sane... and it isn't the case in the philippines which is considered a third world country and where poverty is rampant (i only know this from having been there first-hand). i think the coping mechanisms vary from culture to culture...
and i think that every single mother who loses a child, no matter where they live, goes through the agony of "what should i have done differently?" and "why my family?" it's only natural.
but even while we do this, i just wanted to remind all of us that this community of bereaved parents isn't just us, nor is it just america... it's global... god doesn't hate us, and he isn't punishing us. the world is quite simply full of sin and sinful people making sinful choices. i think once we are able to look back on this life from an eternal perspective, we'll see all the times god *did* intervene, even amidst our free will choices -- the number of times our children narrowly missed disaster prior to their still-too-early demise.
i hope i'm making some kind of sense here...
hugs,
jan
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