Nothing Good Will Be Lost

It is only by admitting the searing pain of loss that we can begin to open ourselves to healing.  So here is what I long for.  I pray that the hole in my life might become a path through the depths to a higher place.  “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I,” cries out the writer of Psalm 61.  Parker Palmer put it this way in a radio interview: “I understand that to move close to God is to move close to everything that human beings have ever experienced.  And that, of course, includes a lot of suffering, as well as a lot of joy” (Einstein’s God, page 238).

I sought to share some of the things I have tried to remember in my grieving.  And now I remember those things as I go through it all again.  I remember that our God knows what it means to lose a child—and God knows what it means for me to lose Anne.  Our God is not simply a spectator in the drama of Creation.  Our God is not sitting at some computer in a Divine Control Room, punching buttons and managing machinery.  Our God is not some cruel person who tortures insects in order to feel powerful.  I know that our God has become a fellow sufferer and celebrant, a fellow participant in the agony and the joy of Creation.

The cross of Jesus Christ is God living a human life and dying a human death.  The cross of Jesus Christ is God living through the darkness of abandonment and hearing his son cry out, “Why have you forsaken me?”  God knows suffering from the inside and not simply from the outside.  God has become a vulnerable child, a dying man, the crucified one, so that sin, death and evil will not be the last word.  God has been bereft, forsaken, alone, screaming into the darkness and hearing no answer.  That is a God who can truly be with me in my grieving and pain.

So in those hours and days when I cannot even breathe God’s name because it hurts too much, our God speaks that word of life and hope that stands beyond every death.  I cling to the words of Paul in Romans 8:26: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  At those moments when all I can do is to take deep breaths, to sigh again and again, I remember that God’s Holy Spirit is pushing that breath of life through me.

I remember that because Christ is risen nothing good is lost.  I trust in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting through Jesus Christ.  And I know that this isn’t some sort of escape plan concocted by God to get us out of this mortal mess.  No, God has big plans for us and for all of Creation through Jesus Christ.  And God will not permit sin, death and evil to derail those plans.  The empty tomb is our assurance of that.

Whenever a child dies, we rightly say to ourselves, “All the good that would have come from that life!  All the love, the joy, the hope, the happiness—what are we missing out on?”  Now I discover that the same things can be said about Anne’s untimely dying.  It is right that you and I would grieve such losses in our lives.  But I trust that all that goodness is not lost forever.  

In fact, I expect that in the New Creation each of us and all of us will experience eternally all the potential that God has built into each of us.  Nothing good will be lost.  My Annie is being taken up in the New Creation, and all the good in her lives forever in Christ.

This is the real and final value of Paul’s words in Romans 8:38-39.  “For I am convinced,” Paul declares, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  This isn’t the promise of a Divine Parachute to pull us out of trouble.  This is God’s promise to finish everything that God has started.  Death may delay the process for a time.  But not even death can derail that promise.