They Are Gone

There are families without homes in my area, from horrific storms that wound through our area Friday.  Worse, there is one pile of rubble without a family to claim it.  They are gone.  No clean up can bring them back.  Mom, Dad, three precious children.  No insurance to bury them.  Of course we are working on that through Bank of America...taking donations because caskets and cemetery plots cost money.  I wonder if the undertaker will work for free.  The "overtaker" does.  He doesn't charge a dime to take over our emotions and make us feel defeated and hopeless.  Especially in this situation.  We cry as we feel the extended family's pain.  He laughs as he sends daggers through our human heart and mind.  Satan, by whatever name you call him, is like that, you know.

Hope.  Now, there's a Word.  Tragedies have been happening since we left Eden.  We read about them in the Bible and gloss them over because they were so long ago.  Did these awful things hurt less then, thousands of years ago, than they do now?  How much did Eve and Adam hurt when one of their sons killed the other?  An earthquake took all of Job's children at once...did having the most beautiful daughters in all the land later on take away that pain?  Did he give them an inheritance along with their brothers because he missed his dead daughters so much, for the rest of his life?  I don't know.  We will have to ask him when we get there.

Get where?  Heaven.  That's where it all finally makes sense, all the pain, all the sorrow, all the loss this life passes out to us.  Right?  Do you really believe it?  I do.  I've been at the bedside of too many dying people to believe anything less.  I've stood next to the veil that seperates us from spiritual eternity, both when women give birth and when people give their final human breath.  Eternity is where our questions get answered, our tears are dried, our pain becomes a memory and our life never ends.

Hope...it is a word, spoken in faith.  Faith is a decision to believe what we cannot see, smell, or taste or touch.  Eternity is a promise made to us by God.  And when God gives something, it doesn't have to fit the boundaries of our little, limited minds.  God gives us no end, but also no beginning.  Isn't that what eternal means?  It never wasn't.  We always existed in some form.  Some of us experience long lives here in human form.  Others, not so much.  Is it possible that those who stay on, and on, and on really aren't getting a blessing?  Is it possible we might make Our Father promise to bring us back to Heaven as soon as we complete our work here, that very minute please, so we can be Home again, with Him and the angels?  I think that is possible.  I put my faith in that belief.  Specifically at times such as this.

That little family did what they needed to do, learned all they were sent here to learn, then got to go Home, together, and never mourn the loss of one another as a reward.  They were obviously poor by the world's standards.  They were obviously rich by God's standards.  We fulfill destinies...whether we can understand or see those destinies this side of Heaven or not.  God knows when.  God knows why.  I don't.

So, still I hurt for those left behind with a funeral debt and a pile of rubble and a hole in their heart where that family used to live.  But, I also refuse to be overtaken by doubt or fear or rage in the face of this unthinkable human tragedy.  Because there IS more.  So much more.  I more than Hope...I have Faith.  I believe.