Sunday Morning Meds--Wounds

“He heals the brokenhearted 

and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3

Our newspaper cunningly stopped placing free obituaries a few years ago; today, obits are paid columns; almost daily, those notices spread over two whole pages of the front news section. Even though no one has ever escaped it, death is still news.

Some deaths more so than others. Soon, my wife’s mother will pass away. For her, it couldn’t be soon enough. She has no mobility, very little sight, feels constant dizziness. When she goes, we’ll ache; but there will be precious few at her funeral, and other than the effect on her husband and my wife, she will leave this world almost seamlessly.

I remember a few tragic accidents of my boyhood, and children lost to friends. I wasn’t at my father’s bedside when he died, but I was there for hours before the night he finally succumbed. I’ve not been the same since.

In the town where I live, the death I’ll not forget is the passing of a high school senior who fell to a mysterious killer that took her slowly, while all around her hundreds of thousands of prayers rose daily. A teacher at the Christian school that young lady attended told me it was the worst semester he’d ever spent in education because the kids—unaccustomed to death and drawn like moths to the flame of deep emotion—simply couldn’t study. Their friend was dying, and no one—not even God almighty—seemed able to lift a finger.

Finally, months after first feeling something akin to flu symptoms, she fell to that mysterious disease—mercifully, I suppose. What once seemed beyond belief became, well, inexorable. But it took months. Imagine the endless, fervent prayers of hundreds of high school classmates. Imagine the minds, hearts, and souls of her two parents.

One of the most difficult lessons a believer learns in life is that sometimes God doesn’t answer our prayers, no matter how often we pound on his door or how arduously, even tearfully, we beg. Sometimes we just don’t get what we want.

Her parents worship beside us every Sunday. They carry wounds whose flow of grief in the last decade hasn’t abated. The death of their daughter must rise from the broad plains of their many years together like some black obelisk of cut glass. It will always be that way—until the day each of them are gone.

Life in that high school long ago returned to normal. Talking about what happened even a decade ago now would be as ho-hum-ish as a history lesson. The faculty back then are long gone. There may be a picture of her on a wall, but few students have any idea about her story.

Believers like me live in the assurance that assertions like this verse—“he heals the brokenhearted”—isn’t just cheerleading, even though we know mysterious killers stalk the countryside. Faith consents to the illogical assertion that somehow He will be there, even when he seems far away or absent altogether, that he will heal, that he will, forever and ever, bind up our wounds. 

Faith sinks its teeth in and tries to hold on.