Jeanette Outside Reading #5

"Noon has darkened. As fast as they could say, ‘He’s dead,’ the light dimmed. And where are you in the darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness, I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is not your absence in which I dwell, but your elusive troubling presence?"
--Nicholas Wolterstorff Lament for a Son

I've been reading this because a lot of people in my life have died, just cumulatively and also over the past couple of years. Most recently, a month ago one of my family's oldest friends was killed in a car crash. Senseless, and not a dramatic or important enough death for a person as dramatically important as she was. A banal death for one of the most beautiful people who's ever lived. 

I've only been to one Christian funeral that I liked. Ever. It was my grandfather's (on my mom's side). It was a perfect mixture of thankfulness and sorrow.

I've been to 26 funerals so far in my life. I feel like that's a lot, but maybe not. Most of them have been tragic deaths--murder, cancer, car accidents, accidental overdose, pregnant, etc...and they've all been awful because nobody will acknowledge that it's sad.

 I hate "Celebrations of Life". No. No. No. No.

A funeral, that's the ONE DAY that's specifically set aside for mourning. And I don't mean that everyone has to be sobbing all the time--mourning is multi-faceted. Can you laugh? Sure. Can you joke around? Sure. Can you remind each other that God is good?

Of course.

But DO NOT try to tell me that death isn't sad. Don't spend half an hour telling me that God Works In Mysterious Ways and that Everything Is Going According To His Will and that it's fine, because it's really really not fine for someone to die the day before their birthday and it's not fine for my pregnant friend to get t-boned by a drunk driver at 10:45 in the morning and it's NOT fine for someone's mother to walk in to wake their son up from a nap and not be able to do that because he's dead.

It's not fine.

Those things should make us sad. Those things should make us angry. Those things should make us demand a response.

And God can handle all of that. And I think we should give him the chance to at our funerals sometimes.