Ask the questions that have no answers.
So goes a line in one of my favorite poems. And oh, I have been. Recently it seems like that’s
all I do. Why… why… why… over and over again, as often as a little kid….
I’m sitting in a stiff chair in a hospice room, nursing my
baby. Across from me sits a couple who have been married for sixty-eight
years, and one of them is dying. His soul is already halfway home, his eyes
looking more to heaven than to earth, and his body breaking down bit by bit. It
hurts my heart to watch them, because when I do, I slip into their shoes,
imagining what that will be like someday. When I look their way, my heart
starts crying, “Why, God? Why is he suffering so much? Why does a body fail
so slowly? What’s the reason for this drawn-out pain? Why?”
The questions that have no answers.
I duck my head. I blink back tears and watch my baby
nursing. And in the days that come, the days that lead up to this man’s final
homecoming, I pray these questions and others like them over and over again.
Why, God?
Not a week later, the news of another loss reaches me. That
evening finds me standing in the shower, crying where nobody can hear me and
where all evidence of my tears will be hidden. After all, what right do I have
to cry? This other news I’ve heard is heartbreaking, yes, but it’s not my
pain. My two healthy babies both lie
asleep in cribs, breathing peacefully. Our family pictures are whole and happy.
What right have I to stand there, braced against the wall, and sob as if I’m
the one who’s lost a child? But the broken picture of a family in the middle of
that haunts me. The stories I know of others who’ve lived through that rise up,
and it’s for them that I cry now. It’s for them, and their pain I cannot
understand, that I ask the question again. “Why give a child only to take them
away?”
The questions that have no answers.
I tilt my face up into the stream of running water, as if
that could somehow clear my thoughts enough to provide some semblance of an
answer. But it doesn’t. There isn’t a complete answer anywhere this side of
heaven, and so the question remains:
Why, God?
And then, the even more
impossible question:
What now?
Sometimes, for all their bleary-eyed confusion, wakeful
nights bring clarity. Sometimes, when the silent stars fade into the pale pink
of morning, we are left with something that, while not an answer, has at least the
semblance of a way forward. I sit alone, watching a glory of a sunrise take
invisible, night-dark clouds and turn them into fiery orange blooms with dusky
purple hearts. I feel the wind breathe by me, stirring the leaves into wakeful
chatter before it slips in through my window. I hear the clap of wings as a
string of birds takes flight, singing their hearts out as they glide up and
away. And as they do, my own heart whispers,
What now?
And a quiet voice whispers back this apparent non-answer:
Give thanks.
I don’t think that anything we could say or do in moments of
heartbreak is really able to ease the sting of great loss: these shallow
thoughts won’t bring healing or peace to those wrestling with the questions
that have no answers. But I think the reason we find ourselves asking these
questions is because it brings us to our knees, empty-handed, because our hands
must be empty to receive. And the small gift I received in the clarity of
the early morning light were these almost-forgotten words, and they were as
close to an answer as I could come.
I know
there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that
go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of
the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves
and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on
humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that
falls and all the good things that a good God gives.*
There is no answer to why suffering is prolonged, or why
sorrow swallows up things that are good and beautiful. There simply isn’t.
But to leave my focus on the wounds of the world leaves no
room in my heart for the Healer to do his work. And He does work: in the
sunrise out my window; in the rough warmth of my husband’s hand in mine; in the
brightness of a song trickling through the radio… the list goes on and on.
Those small things, those tiny gifts from God, are not dependent on anything in
this world, and if they aren’t then neither are the big promises he makes us. And
His answer to all of us in this heartbroken world is this revelation:
Not “I will make all things new”: that would be some
far-off day we may never see.
Not “I have made all things new”: because how could
that be in light of these ageless, unanswered questions?
But making— what wild hope there is in that one word!
Right now, as we speak, He is doing something. And so He calls us to ask the unanswerable
questions right in the middle of our grief, so that in so doing we can also whisper thanks for the answered
promises that exist all around us... knowing that he is making all things new.
Right
now.
*Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts
