trying to understand

i have heard several stories over the past couple of weeks that have just left me dumbfounded and truly grieved. stories that you hear and you think, "if only...." or "what if..." stories that involve death that result in a matter of feet/inches and stories of death that involve the mystery and cruelty of disease.

my mom shared with me about a 49 year-old woman who was killed last week at an intersection near UGA. she just happened to be in the wrong place when a man had a seizure and lost control of his car…….broadsiding her. she was a crosswalk guard at a middle school in athens and was on her way to work.

a professor here at centre and colleague of david's received the news last week that his 22 year- old daughter was shot and killed while visiting boston to attend her 90 year-old great aunt's birthday celebration. the night before the birthday party, she was sitting in a car waiting to leave a party with some local friends when a fight broke out with gun fire and she received a stray bullet to the head.

i met a young girl last week who's parents are divorced. she didn't have a relationship with her mother and lived with her father who had been dating a woman for awhile. this woman made an ultimatum...pick your daughter or pick me. the father chose his daughter and broke up with the woman. the woman leaves outraged and is dating another man within a few short weeks. a month or so goes by and the young girl wakes up one morning to attend school (senior in high school), and finds her father murdered in bed. no one has come forward with any information. it's speculated that the murder involved the ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend.

met another beautiful senior in high school who recently lost her dad to a cancerous brain tumor back in october. her mom had quit work to take care of her dad full-time. while her mom was taking care of her dad, she started to feel bad. the young girl's mom died two weeks ago from liver cancer. both of these senior girls are faced now with making a college decision alone.

my heart literally grieves when i hear these stories. lives that end in the most random circumstance...and lives that are robbed by disease. what if the woman in athens had taken a ten minute shower oppose to a twelve minute shower that morning placing her safely on the sidewalk? what if the professor's daughter had leaned down when the gun was shot to retrieve her cellphone out of her purse to call 911? for the seniors in high school...the thought of facing their future and the rest of their lives without a mother or a father...how are they going to cope?

i experience so much emotion when i think about each of these stories. i am baffled with the question WHY? i get mad thinking about the innocent bystanders. i just now thought about the man who had the seizure....how will his life play out knowing that he accidentally killed a woman? i feel saddened for the young women and the fear and grief they are experiencing losing their parents. i hate cancer. i was in knoxville a couple of weekends ago and saw a young woman who resembled one of my best girlfriends who's life was taken by pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. i was so caught off guard by this woman's resemblance, that i just lost it...uncontrollably. little did i know how fresh, how raw tami's death is still in my heart...she's been gone almost two years now. the emotions that all of these people are feeling (not to mention all the people that are a part of their personal lives) are all real...including mine. we are struggling with questions, with sorrow, with anger, with a loss. when i think about all of this, i eventually find rest in believing, trusting, and having faith that i really know nothing and will never comprehend the sovereignty of our God. as much of the different emotions that i experience when i especially think about the accidental deaths...i just tell myself...it was suppose to happen, aly...it's the way it happened...you can't go back and reposition someone. i have to trust that in God's incredibly complex sovereignty, all these death's were/are purposed, and they will all be used to glorify Him ultimately. there is a bigger picture that we don't see and as much as our flesh wants to kick, fight, and scream in resistance to the reality of death (or really anything for that matter), we have to ironically "die" to that and lay it all at the foot of the cross. ugh....such a difficult act to do...