Sunday Morning Meds--Wounds and faith

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3

A few years ago already, our newspaper cunningly stopped doing obituaries for free; today you pay. Those notices still spread over two whole pages; because even though no one has ever escaped it, death is still news.

And yet, if you spend any time in an old folks’ home, you realize how many old folks leave this world almost seamlessly. Some deaths, however, are never to be forgotten.

Years ago, a high school senior fell to a mysterious killer that slowly took her life away, while all around her—even in her hospital room—hundreds of prayers arose daily. A teacher at the Christian high school she attended told me that year was the worst he’d ever spent in a classroom because the kids—unaccustomed to death and given to fervent emotions—simply couldn’t study, their good friend in deadly anguish for so very long. She was dying, and no one—not even God almighty—seemed able to lift a finger. 

It took months, but a death that once seemed beyond belief came on inexorably. Months after she first felt some ordinary flu symptoms, she fell to a mystery—mercifully, I suppose. Try to imagine the minds, hearts, and souls of her parents, the endless, heartfelt prayers of hundreds of high school friends.

One of the most difficult lessons is that there are times when God doesn’t seem to answer prayers, no matter how arduously we beg. Sometimes we just don’t get what we want, even when what all we want is precious life.

It’s been years now, but her parents carry wounds whose flow of grief has never been fully stanched.  Their daughter’s death stands in their souls like a black obelisk of cut glass, and it will be that way until the day each of them are gone.

Long ago, life in that high school returned to normal. Talking about what happened so many years ago would be as ho-hum today as a power point on the Peloponnesian wars.  A few staff remember, but most who were there are gone. Someplace in a hallway her picture may be hanging, but none of the students who daily open lockers nearby have any idea of who she is or was.

Even though we know mysterious killers stalk the countryside, believers like me live in the assurance that assertions like verse three— “he heals the brokenhearted”—aren’t just cheerleading. Faith somehow consents to the illogical assertion that somehow, He will be there, even though it seems he’s out of the building, that, as promised, he will heal, he will bind up our wounds. Faith sinks its teeth into that promise and just tries to hold on.