God only Knows

I have been thinking for awhile about writing a post about someone I know who is dying. Not a close friend or relative, but still a church friend, someone I have worked with on various projects, someone who is young and has two children and a husband. I was going to write about the sadness and the unfairness of it all. But I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it, and so I didn’t.

And she died today.

She was forty-two. She was one of the nicest people you would ever meet, she worked with kids because that was her passion and she thrived on it. When I think about people who don’t deserve to die young, who SHOULDN’T die young, she would be at the top of that list.

There was a time when I would’ve been really, really angry about this. About the unfairness, the seeming senselessness. And I don’t understand it now at all. But I’m not angry, just sort of resigned. Anybody who’s lived in this world long enough knows that bad things happen to good people, that “deserving” really has very little to do with anything. Good people die, bad people live and thrive, and life goes on.

I sound really jaded. Maybe I am. But I also like to think that there’s a different set of rules operating in the world, rules that don’t match our ideas of fairness and justice. Because there’s grace, too. And when something good, something amazing that you don’t expect, lands in your lap, that’s like the most amazing thing ever. You don’t deserve that goodness, but there it is. That doesn’t really answer the conundrum, but it’s the other side of the unfairness coin.

Grace and pain are unpredictable and often undeserved. The simplicity of the “eye for eye” philosophy, the way that we all seem to think that the world should work—that’s just not true. And if it’s not, that’s got implications for all sorts of things.

I don’t know. Through a glass darkly and all that. Life is like a freaking Lost episode.