Round two

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5

I really don’t want to be a person who is a bottomless pit of woe. This is not the life I imagined for myself. I want to process this emotionally and rationally and get back to my rather dull life, imperfect as it was. I’m deep in the throes of grief again. On April 8, 2010 my dear father died. And on April 3, 2011 my dear brother Mark died. My dad was nearly 89 when he died from complications of open-heart surgery. My brother was 55 when he died from being shot in the back. I thought I knew what grief was when my father died and I was wrong. This is something else, something beyond grief, something crushing that sits in the middle of my chest and grabs my throat from the inside. It’s angry and aching and seemingly inescapable.

People are asking me (rhetorically, I presume) where God is in all of this. How could a loving God permit my brother to be murdered? I don’t know. I’m not even asking Him for an answer to that big question now. I’m just asking Him to help us get through the days. Please. Lord, this pain, this grief is . . . there’s not a word for it, but surely He knows. Will we be stronger because of this? I don’t want to be that strong; I don’t want to believe anything this horrific could ever happen again.

But how do I process this grief? By giving up the need to make sense of it in my flawed human mind? By giving up on trying to grasp God’s plan? Once again I go back to Proverbs to try to discern what God wants me to know.