From today's Times and News-Star
Some
days, everything’s whipped cream and sunshine.
The
grits stay hot, the lights stay green, everything’s funny and your team wins.
But
other days … the shadows show up. Then they take over. CNN Days, I call them. A
counting of fatalities. An ongoing investigation. News about the shooter’s past.
Features on the victims’ families. Shooter is usually singular and victim is
usually plural.
Those
are the days when I get awfully quiet. I wonder if you are the same. I wonder if
you just want to pull the shades down and the covers up, feeling too
discouraged and too helpless to do anything, including waste any more time
trying to figure it out how to make it better, and where it all went wrong.
The
question of why God allows suffering is one that won’t be fully answered here,
due to limitations of both space and intellect. But at this time of the year,
maybe more so at Easter, we know that the God of the Bible suffers with us. The
manger tells us he suffers with us, the cross tells us he suffers for us. So
while we might not understand why these tragic events are allowed to happen, we
do know that it’s not because God doesn’t love us. This is a perfect prince who
became a pauper, one who knows what it’s like to lose the most precious of
earthly gifts – a child – and at the hands of unjust, evil men.
Suffering
is never because God doesn’t love us.
I
heard this song for the first time Sunday, “The Rose of Bethlehem.”
“There’s a fragrance much like hope
That it sends
upon the wind
Reaching out to
every soul
From a lowly
manger’s crib…”
Hope.
Through the miracle of the manger. Hope that a world insane will be set right,
that evil fails and right prevails, that all wounds will be healed and hearts
restored, that the glory and joy and feast of eternity will be so overwhelming
that it will, as I gratefully heard a pastor say long ago, make all these
horrific days and times and trials and heartbreaks seem like no more than one bad
night in a cheap hotel.
But
… there remains today. And tomorrow. More CNN Days to come. Such is the
forecast in a fallen world. What can I do?
Maybe
keep suiting up? Run the next play? If a Christmastime manger in a tiny town in
the dead of winter is significant, then you must be. I must be.
"I
am only one, but I am one,” said Edward Everett Hale, the flawed but prolific
clergyman of the 19th century. “I cannot do everything, but I can do
something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the
something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by
the grace of God, I will do."
It sounds corny, but Charles Dickens and his one-man chain gang, Jacob
Marley, had a point.
“Mankind was my business,” Marley says from the grave to Scrooge. “The
common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence
were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business.”
Mankind in our business. In the manger is our help and our hope
that baby steps, even ours, add up.
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