Just another day...

We mark our lives by milestones:  First word.  First step.  First lost tooth.  First day of school.  Driver's license.  High school diploma.  Going off to college.  Marriage.  First child.  We mark our days by celebrations:  Mother's Day.  Christmas.  Birthday.  Graduation.  Wedding.  As people who live a chronological life, significant events in the timeline of our lives have special meaning, shaping and changing us as they come around.


But not all the significant events in our lives are positive.  Our lives also include accidents, illness, death.  We experience loss, divorce, betrayal.  We suffer assaults, wrecks, murders.  After all, we live in a fallen world.  


These events, though not ones noted for celebration, shape us, change us, as do the milestones and holidays.  In our time lines, for many of them, there is a distinct before and after in the person we are and the life that we live.  Noting them, marking these days in our lives, is not, therefore, something we should eschew...no matter how much the world tells us otherwise.


First, we are thinking, feeling creatures.  This is the way that our Creator crafted us.  He imbued us with emotions, responses, with thoughts and reactions.  To have them, to allow them to happen, is as normal and natural as breathing.  To avoid them, to ask others to do so, is to go against the wisdom of our Creator, to deny our own creation.


For the mother who lost her son, the day of the accident and the day of his burial are ones that will always be with her.  As those dates roll around on the calender for her each year, they are most decidedly not just another day.


It is a rather unloving act, therefore, to shame her in her grief, to say to her in word or in action, that her grief over those days--be they three or thirty years in the past--is something that is wrong.  For those are the days that have shaped her, they are the ones that have changed her.  She had a son she could hold in her arms, walk beside, talk with, laugh with, weep with...and now she does not.  


Those who have such events on our time lines sometimes handle them with grace and sometimes with despair.  Of course, we long for grace more than despair.  Of course, we who have loved ones with such events on their time lines, wish for more grace than despair.  But in our wishing for grace, we must still allow for the despair...and everything in between.


Second, we must do so not merely because we are created with thoughts and feelings but also because it is in such events that Jesus comes to us, shapes us, changes us.  By and with and through the cross the Holy Spirit gives and builds faith, teaches us the magnitude of His forgiveness and mercy, and strengthens us in our weakness.  For our faith is a faith of reception and our theology is a theology of the cross.

For this very reason, we ought not run from despair, from anguish, from doubt...in ourselves and in others.  We ought not to turn away from the hard things, from the darkness of this life.

"For in Him we live and move and have our being..." begins the 28th verse of the 17th chapter of Act.  In a way, perhaps this is how each verse of our lives should begin.  In Christ, we live. In Christ, we move.  In Christ, we have our being.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." we learn in the first five verses of the first chapter of John.

Jesus shines in our darkness.  Our being is in Him.

Two days from now is the first anniversary of the most violent event in my life.  It is a day my body has already felt coming.  A day that is written upon myself and my puppy.  Neither of us are "over" the pit bull attack.  Both of us are still felled by it in many and myriad ways.  We stumble and fall beneath the memory of that violence.  We struggle in our responses to others and to inanimate reminders.  Already several people have told me that it is "just another day" and that I should do my best to ignore it.

Only it is not.  I cannot.  And, if I could, I would not.  There are no words rich enough, full enough, to describe what I have learned of faith because of that day.  No, I would never choose such an event.  I wish with my entire body that it had never happened.  I fear and tremble still over the memory.  July 12th is forever changed for me.  I have forever changed.  And yet I am truly thankful and genuinely humbled at the gifts of that my Good Shepherd has given me by and with and through this cross.

In my utter brokenness, when my world was little else but pain and terror, the Holy Spirit nonetheless worked mercy, grace, forgiveness, and healing in me.  When I saw nothing but despair, no end to the misery of my mind and body, He sent others to patiently read aloud the Living Word to me, to fill my ears with that which He could and did use to bring the gifts of Christ to me.  When I could not leave my home, He sent pastors to bring the body and blood of Christ to me and he sent people to help take me to the body and blood of Christ.  I sought these not because I had hope.  In fact, I had nothing, was nothing, could see nothing.  I sought them because the faith given to me through the hearing of the Word and in my baptism called for such, reached out for that which I needed.  The Gospel came to me, filled me, and sustained me, even in my blindness, even in my weakness.  The Gospel clung to me until I learned hope.  The Gospel clings to me now.

I fear Thursday.
I rejoice over Thursday.
I feel terrified and peaceful, discouraged and hopeful.
I am angry.
I am awed.


In all of this, though, I am...in Christ.


Jesus shines in our darkness.  Our being is in Him.  Surely, therefore, in our lives there is no day that is just another day.




I am Yours, Lord.  Save me!