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God Loves Me?

God loves me, I’m told,  with a Love that surpasses human understanding.  

Do I reflexively accept this declaration because I actually believe it, or

is this merely the assertion of an impersonal, “religious” play on words to  

describe a presumed relationship with God? Is He God, or is He my Father?

Did He love so much that He gave His One and Only Son? To die on a cross

thousands of years before I was born? Really?

In fact, what do I know about love, either as a common or proper noun?  
And not to get the horse before the cart, what do I know about the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, and Omnipresent  Father of us all? Seriously, are these questions
just distractions Ireceive to duck and dodge feeling the real (and legitimate,
I proclaim), rage I try to keep under control as I avoid the gut-wrenching
anguish of loss, or do the answers really matter?

These questions take me back to teenage years when  as a novice,
fledgling writer whatever I wrote reflected the author I was reading.  
When I was reading Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities;
A Christmas Carol; The Adventures of Oliver Twist);  Mark Twain
(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Tramp Abroad;
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer); or Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice;
Emma; Love and Friendship), I managed to sound just like them,
which proved, I guess, proved that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.  
William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury; Absalom,
Absalom!) probably was the most difficult.  First of all, I couldn’t even begin
to even understand him and certainly couldn’t unravel his style.  
Plus, he was super boring, probably because, try as I might, I couldn’t figure out
what was going on in his distinctly Southern world.

Since my daughter’s death, however, I now question everything! Nothing’s safe.
 I’m worse than the two-year old, with her endless string of why, why, why.  
It may have been the suddenness of her death---the lack of warning or preparation---for it.  
She and I had grown comfortable with questions As a preteen, she used to say that
inquiring minds want to know.  “In fact, Mom,” she’d say, the inquiring mind must know.
 Sadly, I didn’t get to the hospital in time to ask “Why?” “What’s going on? Why now?
I thought everything was going so well!”  Most significantly, I couldn’t ask why she
hadn’t waited on me to get there and ask.

We did everything together.  That is, everything she didn’t do with her older sister.  
We were the proverbial close-knit family of three. For months afterward, my litany
was why, why, why? But with  every answer that would percolate upward, others,
like clumps of dandruff, would fall down. The whys interrupted what little sleep I
could negotiate. It was like trying either to untangle a ball of yarn or sew up loose
ends on an old, tattered garment.  Crazy. The “what ifs” just about drove me to a
different kind of distraction.

So, does God love me with the Proper-noun love, or do well-meaning, kind friends
attempt to placate me with words designed to soothe about as long as a Tylenol?
If He loves me enough to give Jesus Christ as the Ransom, then why did He let
my Daughter die? There! I gotcha!  A dear friend wrote a book about Counting the
Cost of serving Christ; shocked, I told her that if the cost entailed the death of my
one-of-a-kind Daughter, I never would have traded that for her! My goodness, what a price!   
One I would be unwilling to give.  Period.

I’m left with tussling between what I want  and what I can never have---not on this earth plane
---because even now, 15 months and 27 days later,, I ache for her.  Nothing can distract from
the pain of her being summarily snatched away.