What's Going On?

Here I am, a woman many would describe as reasonable and reasonably successful, thoughtful, caring, poised---even gracious---feeling like I'm about to lose it.  Lose what? Control, not just in the moment.  Control over my life which, at this juncture could be described as one well lived. Yet, all I can think of right now is an "Old School" song that warned, "Don't push me cause I'm close to the edge.  II'm abut to loose my head.  Don't push me!" If my anguish is this raw, how much more poignant, impotent, and confused might it get? What to do?

I can turn to my knowledge (however limited or expansive) of God.  I can assert "God is my refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble," whether I believe it a little or a lot.  I can recall those Sunday School picture cards of a man kneeling at the base of a mountain, his head haloed in luminous light, and feel a smidgen of comfort.  Or I can find solace in a best-selling novel that makes my heart race and provides a narcotic, at least for a moment or two.

Since my Daughter's death, I have recognized that friends or acquaintances can't suffice as sources of comfort and respite.  Not because they lack compassion or the desire to be help staunch the bleeding from my heart. I know they would if they  could.  It's that they do not have whatever it would take to serve as the "balm in Gilead" I read about in the Old Testament years ago.  Someone even wrote a hymn about it.   There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole.  There is a balm in Gilead, to heal a sin-sick soul."  No perfect words, no singular turn of phrase, no insight from friends can assuage the pure, unadulterated pain that loss carries. I feel like the prey a King of the Jungle holds in its jaws. "No man is an island entire unto himself," the poet John Donne declared; true, yet each one of us grieves alone.

So here I am, the day after the unimaginable tragedy at a  South Florida high school. Achingly silent, I soak up the televised impotence families I'll never meet in real time grapple with.  Why am I enthralled and engrossed only in my pain. It's been almost a year since my Baby Girl died, but it feels as recent for me today as it does  parents, relatives, classmates, and friends of the Victims now.  Grief ebbs and flows.  Maybe that is why, twenty-two years after the Sudden Infant Death of Philip, my first grandson, I know that grief has no end.  It cannot, you see because each one of us, any one of us, all of us, are entrapped in the unrelenting suffering loss brings, BECAUSE we wish it had never happened!  But for a few minutes, life would not have succumbed to death.  Perhaps then, the chimera that haunts me, you, us would simply vaporize and torture no one anymore.

I'm still close to the edge, but thank You, Jesus, You've never left, forsaken, or forgotten me, and You refuse to now, Hallelujah! 

 "If you cannot preach like Peter, If you cannot pray like Paul, Just tell the love of Jesus, And say He died for all."

There is The Balm in Gilead.  His name is Jesus.