One thing I have heard repeatedly is parents saying that they can't imagine what those hurting parents are dealing with as they prepare to say their final good byes to those innocent children taken from them too soon.
It's impossible to imagine what it's like to send your child to the safety of their school and have the unthinkable happen. It's tough to imagine what it would be like to lose a child in a quick moment. It's difficult to imagine how one second can change every part of your life.
But some of us an imagine. For every parent who has had to plan a funeral for their child in the midst of unthinkable heartache, we can imagine.
Maybe our loss didn't make national news. Maybe our child was taken in the quietness of the night instead of the rampage of media cameras, but loss is loss, regardless of the avenue.
Some of us had no prayer vigils, no flooding of support from strangers around the country, no other families to reach out to us who knew where we walked, no causes to rally around. While our circumstances are different, we are all somehow united in a club we never intended to join, joined forever in sharing a heartache that by the Grace of God, most people will never have to experience.
Some of us really can imagine what it's like to see that Christmas stocking and wonder if the pain and the emptiness will ever go away. And it is not just this Christmas, but every Christmas that will ever come. The stocking will always be empty, and there will always go with it a sense of emptiness in the hearts of those who loved them.
Some of us can imagine what it's like to tell siblings that death is final and that their sibling won't ever come back.
And some of us can imagine all too well that emptiness and desperation of trying to breathe, and trying to understand the senselessness of this great loss.
They say time heals all wounds. It doesn't. Time has no more power to heal our heart than we do. Time simply teaches us to live in the light of the loss.
God is the only One who can bring healing into this terrible tragedy. God is the only One who provides hope in eternity which comforts us now.
We all approach this in very different ways. Some want to blame the use of guns, some want better security, some want to blame the parents of this shooter, and some want to blame God.
But my heart just cries for the parents who have now begun this awful journey. No, I haven't walked where they have walked, and I won't pretend to understand what it is like to suffer this horrible act.
But I know what it means to look at the staircase and wonder if my son will ever walk up those steps again, and I know what it is like to never be able to count the amount of people in my family without pausing and recounting because even after two years my heart can't comprehend that he is really gone.
And like every parent who has been forced to say goodbye too soon, the wounds are reopened each time we consider another parent walking through this path.
May God and healing in this community as only He can do. Only He can fill those empty places and restore these families with the hope of eternity.
No comments:
Post a Comment