Entry Fifty-Eight: Psalm 12
We are getting to know more families torn apart by tragedy. There is something comforting about meeting other human beings who have faced the ugly, paralysing effects of grief, and yet have survived…and not only survived, but grown through the process. They are further on down the road to recovery than what I am…some even further along than Levi and his family… and this is has given us such hope. Watching them live life now, makes me think of a parent helping a baby walk for the first time. They are the parents…I am the child…their strength is the hand holding me up…leading me…guiding me…breaking my fall, as I am still prone to falling into darkness.
These new friendships remind me every day that I am not alone. That there are many who suffer all around me…who also feel that they are the only ones being systematically torn apart by something they cannot see or touch. To me, their battle scars are like nectar to the honeybee…I am sustained by their beauty of their resilience…their ability to pick themselves back up out of the cesspool of pain, and their determination to rediscover meaning and purpose in life even while carrying with them the unfillable void of loss.
It is a strange truth…finding strength in weakness…comfort in pain. But if life is a school, teaching us what it means to really live, then everything must have a purpose…suffering included. Suffering is the heat that extracts a precious metal from the rock…that purifies it…and the more the heat, the better the metal. Or at least so I am told. The Psalmist tells us that the Word of God is better than silver refined and like gold purified seven times in a furnace. And he writes this in the context of our God arising to bring safety to the oppressed and the needy. Suffering teaches us that we are dependent…dependent on God and on our fellow human beings. I need my friends…my new family…and we all need our God.
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