Our Pain, Our Stories

Our local newspaper has asked its regularly contributing religion columnists to write a few sentences on the Virginia Tech massacre. I'm one of those columnists, and I'm struggling with it. "A few sentences" are very difficult. It's far easier to write long than short. I'm going to try out some thoughts here where I don't have that constraint.

The shock and grief are so universal it seems trite to restate them, useless even to try to express their depth. At the same time I am relieved and grateful--many of my friends have children attending Tech, and all of them are okay. Our Campus Crusade for Christ colleagues were all in a staff meeting, off campus, yesterday morning. They are now counseling and praying with many students, and taking part in numerous helping-type gatherings and events on campus. Up to four of their students may have been among the casualties, and they're waiting anxiously for more word on them.

I'm reminded tonight of tragedies, wars, and disasters throughout history and around the world today, far more of them than we could ever be aware of. (I wish Virginia Tech, 4/16/07 were more unprecedented than it is.) I was talking with my kids about this tonight: "We think about these stories through history--heroism, grief, courage, loss. There's a story there that isn't over. It's continuing today, and we're part of it. Someday our own courage and contribution, and our own loss will be told, privately in small family groups, or possibly (who knows?) down through history. The people we read about in books are gone now. We will be too, someday. All that will remain is our stories, and the trace we leave on others' lives."

The effect of a shooting like this is starkly horrifying, and I could never wish for my own story to include anything like it. My heart--like yours--goes out to all the families and friends of the victims. Something like this has come close to me, though--two of my first cousins were killed in random murders (in separate incidents several years apart). Another cousin took her own life very tragically. Tears can still well up all too easily when I think about it all. After the first murder, my heart searched for the "why" answers, and none seemed to fit. Sure, I knew of the theological explanations for evil, sin, and death, but at a time like that, the question wasn't theological. It wasn't the philosophical puzzle of evil and suffering. It was "Why did this person I love have to go through this? Why does my family have to hurt so badly now?" For my aunt and uncle, it was, "how can we possibly survive this pain?"

Only one answer seemed to make any sense. It wasn't an explanation, though; it was a connection. God the Father saw his own Son die, brutally, unjustly. He knows what it's like to watch that happen. Jesus Christ himself was "a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." He's not distant, disconnected, uninvolved. He is involved in the deepest of our hurts, and he cares. He is in it with us.

You can see in the Virginia Tech community today the desperate need to be together. Even campuses here where I live, a five-hour drive away from Tech, are gathering students for vigils and for interpersonal support. (My aunt and uncle made it through with the help of a support group that knew their unique hurt: Parents of Murdered Children.) At times like this we need to tell our stories, to share them with someone else who's going through the same thing, or has gone through it before. God himself is one of those who can be with us, as one who knows pain too.

How I long for everyone to understand the depth of comfort and love he can give! It's the same comfort that carried us through my mom's sudden death last August. It's expressed nowhere better than in Romans 8:31-39:

"What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:

"'For Your sake we are killed all day long;
"We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.'

"Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

We cannot expect our stories to be easy ones. Our pain is certain, at times, to be excruciating. We are each part of a much bigger story than ourselves, though. Wasn't that one of the great lessons of The Lord of the Rings? It's true for you and me, too, not just for Frodo and Samwise and the rest of the Fellowship. (Do we see ourselves that way?) The story can have a strong, peaceful, bright ending, for nothing can separate Christ's suffering-yet-conquering people from his love.

Posted: Tue - April 17, 2007 at 09:26 PM |

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Our Pain, Our Stories

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson