Enlarge Your Soul Through Grief and Loss

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Enlarge Your Soul Through Grief and Loss
Wednesday, February 4, 2015

“And about three o'clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?"
that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" 
Matthew 27:46 (NRSV)

Nicholas Wolterstorff was a professor at Yale and he’s a theologian.  His 25‑year‑old son was killed in a rock climbing incident and he wrote a book about it later called “Laments for a Son.”  If you’ve lost a son, it doesn’t get much more catastrophic than that one.  And he wrote this.   

“Eric, my son, was bursting with plans.  And now it’s all gone.  All the rich future he held, gone in those tumbling seconds.  Nothing fills the void of his absence.  He is not replaceable.  We can’t go out and get another just like him.  There’s a hole in the world now.  In the place where he was there’s now nothing.  Only a gap remains.  Please don’t say it’s not really so bad because it is.  I can only endure with Job.  Endure.  I do not know why God did not prevent Eric’s death.  I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I also believe my son’s life was cutoff in its prime.  I cannot fit these pieces together.  I am at a loss. 

To the most agonizing question I have ever asked I do not know the answer.  I do not know why God would watch him fall . . . “  

I seems to me that part of our life on earth will include times, maybe long periods of time when it appears that God is simply absent, when we look into the world around us and see it staring back at us with nothing to say. Although I have been able to satisfy myself with my own “answers” to seemingly inexplicable and excruciating (notice the word for cross –‘cruc’- at its roots) events, I also know that living these “answers” while living those events is a completely different story.   

God set up Human Life so that it is to be lived not explained.  Our explanations will never attain to what God reveals to us when we live whatever He allows.

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