Mortality

Our area has been rocked with a number of untimely deaths over the last several weeks. These range from an athlete who collapsed and died at the beginning of a morning practice, a small child who drowned, a well known area businessman, and local youth, the latest having passed away just yesterday. Mortality is making its presence known in a fierce way.

In the midst of grief, people are asking the questions common to such pain. Why did this happen? Why would we lose someone so young? Some people may use faith language, asking why God would allow this. In a genuine effort at comfort, folks may say that it's part of God's plan, that it was the person's time, or that we'll understand it better by and by. There may or may not be truth in any of these statements, but I don't think they do much more than provide momentary relief.

If there is a God, where is God when tragedy strikes? I vaguely remember a story from Elie Wiesel's piercing book, Night. The book is about Wiesel's experience in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. As I recall, camp inmates were being forced to watch the execution of a boy for some infraction or another. He was executed by hanging; not by letting him drop, thus breaking his neck, but by hoisting him up by the next. Thus his death was excruciatingly long and painful. Someone in the crowd either cried out, "Where is God now?!?" Either that, or Wiesel thought those words.

How would you have answered that question? Where is God when inexplicable, unjust, or "untimely" death (when is death ever "timely"?) takes place? Let's all wrestle with that before I finish the story in the next post. I'll see you around the next bend in the river.