The sky is falling.
The world is broken and breaking and it can be hard to remember that it is being restored and redeemed.
Headlines boast good news for a prowling lion, roaring and devouring. We feel like prey confined in a cage of fallen earth. It is hard to feel safe. It is hard to look at our children without thinking about the mothers who no longer can. It is hard to feel distant when blood is crying from the ground all over – when global news thrusts us all together into one confused mass of humans asking why.
This is not the way we are supposed to live.
And wanting peace doesn’t mean we don’t want justice.
And, yes, there is hope – there is always hope. Joy in the morning, dying to gain, peace for the mourners. But right now it feels like night so we’ll keep looking for signs of dawn. Straining our necks to see the first ghosts of Sun dance near the horizon to a song of that restoring, a melody of “finally, it’s over.” We’ll see it in delicious foods and positive pregnancy tests. We’ll get small reminders that the darkness – it’s not here forever. It’s being overtaken.
Even now.
And can I just add something as we gaze here together, as we hold each other’s hands and look sideways into a dark sky together? Can I just softly remind us all that tragedy is tragedy? None of the horrors or the heartbreak deserve more or less grief than anything else… A good man dying of the darkness eating him up in secret is just as sad as the thousands suffering because of that same darkness – it’s all the same; it’s the same root, the same cause and our hearts break over the same reality. Over a fall from the way things were meant to be. Can we call out all the sadness in one tone, with voices full of sorrow for all the pain we can and cannot see here in the dark? We don’t need to compete tragedies with one another… We need to honor that it is all broken and it all needs restoring. And then we need to turn to the only One who can do anything about it.