Just Like A Broken Leg

Just like a broken leg, a broken heart heals slowly and can’t stand much touching after the break. Right now I just need a while to see for myself how things will “live out” after the silence of your death has become a permanent part of my ongoing. These words represent the most important things I’m learning down where this valley is dark but where I’m hopeful there’s a light beyond and out ahead.
I’ve been called upon to shift very swiftly from the shock and numbness that first comes from such a disclosure to the task of now living with a degree of normalcy in the shadow of such enormity.
One of my challenges is to go on living. The Bible arranges life and thought in just that sequence. First, we are called upon to live passionately and openly and then to use our minds to try to understand and interpret what we have experienced. If I try to put under-standing before living of life everything freezes and I become immobilized. “Persons can put off making up their minds, but they cannot put off making up their lives.” The temptation to think life rather than live it is always a dead end street. Adam and Eve for instance. God spread the whole creation out before them like a banquet and invited them to participate fully; to live passionately. But instead of immersing themselves in life, they turned rather to the tree of knowledge of good and evil and lusted after it. Before they lived they wanted to know all the answers.
Why? is the question my mind ponders. To that question the Bible gives no answer, but it has challenged me to face up to the situation and move on into the darkness. If the Bible says anything about life, it is that the existence of ours is deep and complex and mysterious affair. Just as icebergs only show a fraction of themselves above the surface, so events are always more than they appear to be at first glance. More is going on in every moment than meets the eye, and the Bible always cautions us against pronouncing too quickly. You can’t always judge an event by its first appearance, any more than you can judge the content of a package by its wrapping. I need to be patient, I know. Something easier said than done. I need to let events run its course. God is not through with anything yet. Who knows what might unfold out of all this process. How do I know, finite as I am, the full import of events?
The Bible is right in warning us against living too much on the surface or by appearances only. It reminds us that despair is always presumptuous. How do we know what lies in the “Not Yet” or how some present “evil” may work itself out as a blessing in disguise. Despair is presumption, pure and simple, a going beyond what the facts at hand should warrant. Who am I to speak about what lies hidden out in the not-already-experienced? Rather than remaining neutral toward the possibilities of the future, I have grounds for hope in what God is.
Look at the Apostle’s Creed, “he suffered, died and was buried.” The only verb used to describe Jesus’ life is the word “suffer.”
I have no answer to what happened to you, or why such events happen in this world, but out of the biblical perspective I have received the challenge to move forward courageously and not get paralyzed in intellectualizing. I am called to live in order to know rather than trying to know in order to live. Reality is deep and slow and mysterious. The Bible and my faith does give me just enough light to move on and to give thanks and to form a basis of hope.