{but for now}

pain.

how can so much anguish, so much soul-wrenching, gut-tearing agony be contained in just one small four-letter word?

how does one syllable sum up the weight of an entire world of woe?

and how does one rebuild from the ruins?

......what does one lose in the furnace?

they say the storms come to wash us clean, but what of the pure ones? those who have never known sorrow, suddenly defiled?

what of the senseless, deliberate evil? the innocent fallen beneath the crimson-stained scythe?

the questions, fruitlessly wracking the tireless mind -

where is God? who is God? how is good who He is, when this also is Him? for there is nothing good in this!

and the theologians, the safe ones, will tell you not to cry out in wounded fury that if God is real then He is a liar. He is a sadist. He is cruel - cruel and careless and cold and callously indifferent. He must be.

How else is one to reconcile the wounding -the striking - the cutting bruising breaking, with Him who is the Healer? the binder-up of wounds?

who is the Almighty?

who is He who plans men's lives and holds them in the palm of His hand?

where is He who shelters the weak, and with His strong arm comes to salvation-aid the defenseless?

has He slept? has He turned from man His face? is He busy? preoccupied?

or, perhaps most terrifying of all, is He watching? still watching, yet doing nothing, never intervening?

all that, and more beside, flash lightening-quick through a mind weary and heart-sore, desperately hunting for answers in the aftermath of the unimaginable, and yet finding none.

where does the seeker end? and where does the Almighty begin?

where does the soul come to an end of questions, and rest in the peace of God?

i do not know.

but what i do know is this.

through the breaking, through the pain, through the unimaginable - the unspeakable - atrocity upon grief without name - a thread has been woven.

i cannot see the entirety yet, but this i see.

this will not let me go, and this is my faith - my hope.

this will remain as i gather up the tattered fragments of what was, and begin again in always search of life.

this.

that 'we do not know the worth of a single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him'

All, all is grace.

And i know that the Eternal is yet the Eternal. He could not otherwise be.

...I could not otherwise be.

And if the Eternal is the Eternal, then He will have the last word.

standing in the face of the unimaginable - the death of God to the soul of the child who was Elie Wiesel, these words came. that all is grace, that the Eternal will have the final word.

to Ann Voskamp, whose book I picked up on a whim, and who arrests me with her brutal honesty, the same words come. that this, too, is grace. that all is grace.

even when the heart splits in two, torn at the thought of a loving God who has planned the breadth of each ones life, planning this pain.

'i won't shield God from my anguish by claiming He's not involved in the ache of this world and Satan prowls but he's a lion on a leash and the God who governs all can be shouted at when I bruise, and I can cry and I can howl and He embraces the David-hearts who pound hard on His heart with their grief, and I can moan deep that He did this - and He did'

in her words I find mirrored my own confusion, my own pain and woundedness. How could a good God....?

the never-ending, never-answered question. How?

and for her too, the answer came. the only answer we will ever see, ever receive.

that all, all is grace. and that if the Eternal is indeed the Eternal, then it is He, and not I, whose voice will echo when all questions have stilled and ceased to be.

but for now, the Voice-Eternal whisper-sings, repeats, in the joy and the pain and the heartache and confusion of my own disbelief that, whether i see it - whether i ever see it or not...

for now, "all is grace"