Once again this week, I turn to the generosity of Michael Dodd to provide the weekly devotional. I have been talking to and counseled by a very dear friend of mine, who is a preacher in Alabama, and he has helped me in getting my faith back. I’m still not ready to write a devotional yet, but soon I think I will be.
Some years ago when I was visiting my parents, my young niece was there wearing a woven anklet with the initials WWJD on it. I asked her if she knew what they stood for.
“What would Jesus do?” she replied promptly, smiling up into my face. Then she looked down at the anklet for a moment and turned a puzzled look on me. “What does that mean?” she asked.
Obviously the anklet was more a fashion statement than a religious statement for her at that age. The question she asked, however, was a profound one: What does it mean to ask what Jesus would do?
I suspect some of the people behind the marketing of WWJD jewelry and accessories may have only been asking how much they could make financially, but behind it no doubt lay a sincere wish to find a simple way of calling people – young people, in particular – to reflect on their behavior in the light of the behavior of Jesus.
In this, they were continuing the tradition found all the way back in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Imitate me, as I imitate Christ.” (I Corinthians 11:1) In other places, the context makes clear that imitation of Christ is also meant: “Become imitators of us and of the Lord.” (I Thessalonians 1:6); “Therefore be imitators of God.” (Ephesians 5:1) And, of course, one of history’s most popular books of Christian devotion bears the very title The Imitation of Christ.
John of the Cross in his Ascent of Mount Carmel, offers this advice to the person seeking union with God:
First, have habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with his. You must then study his life in order to know how to imitate him and behave in all events as he would.
Ascent of Mount Carmel I,13, 3
I would like to point out something that may be easy for believers to overlook in this advice. John says we “must study his life in order to know how to imitate him and behave in all events as he would.” That seems straightforward and points us toward the Gospels, the word of God. And clearly we must turn to the Gospels as our primary source for understanding the life of Jesus.
Yet there is a danger that we need to beware. Sometimes we unconsciously fall into the error of thinking that the Word did not become flesh so much as that the Word became text. We do not turn our gaze upon the living person of Jesus but upon the text of scripture. And we easily think that the particular translation that we have before us or that we prefer is the fullness of the word of God.
It is not so simple. There is an Eastern story about the spiritual master warning his disciples not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. Even the inspired text points beyond itself.
John of the Cross talks about focusing on the life of Jesus. To me, this means that we gaze upon the living Jesus, not the words about Jesus. God’s Word became flesh, not text. When we focus only on the words about Jesus we can let ourselves be led astray. If you think I exaggerate, reflect on the tragic divisions within the Christian community that are due to different interpretations of biblical texts. We need to contemplate what Jesus did and learn the lessons contained in his example.
So What Would Jesus DO?
Michael Dodd
Michael Dodd has written and lectured about Carmelite spirituality and history for over twenty years. His work has appeared in publications in the United States, Europe and Africa. He is the author of The Dark Night Murders: A Fray John of the Cross Mystery and Jerome Gratian: Treatise on Melancholy. The above devotional is from his book Elijah and the Ravens of Carith: A Twenty-First Century Reflection in a Medieval Carmelite Mode, which can be purchased on Amazon.com in paperback for $9.95.
Michael Dodd was kind enough to provide the following devotional today. I was so glad that Michael agreed to send a devotional which comes from a book of devotionals that he wrote. Michael always provides the perfect words for encouragement, and I always value his advice tremendously. When Michael sent this devotional, he wrote “Attached is an excerpt from my book for your consideration. This passage refers to a drawing of Christ crucified done by St. John of the Cross [left], later made much more famous by the Salvador Dali painting it inspired [right].” When he sent this, he also said that he “realize[d] that this passage may hit very close to the bone for you at the moment and might not be one you want to use.” Here is what Michael sent me:
In his profound teaching on the experience that has come to be called the dark night of the soul, John of the Cross helps the person experiencing spiritual dryness see the experience from a different perspective. He helps me see that God has not abandoned me, despite my feelings or my confusion, but that God is perhaps being present to me in a new way. This may be unfamiliar to me and seem to be regression, whereas, properly understood, it is in fact a sign of spiritual progress. It is a matter of changing my perspective so that I begin to see things from God’s point of view.
A wonderful example of this can be seen in a famous painting of Salvador Dali, based on a drawing of the crucified Christ by John of the Cross. The original drawing, preserved in the museum at the Monastery of the Incarnation in Avila, intrigues the viewer because of the angle from which it is drawn. Most familiar views of the crucifixion are head-on or perhaps looking up at the figure of Jesus on the cross. John’s drawing looks at the body from the side and a bit from above. It is such an unusual angle that the viewer’s first impulse is to shift position or even to reach out and turn the drawing, trying to make it fit into the expected perspective. Dali’s beautiful painting emphasizes this view from above, so that one is looking down, as it were, from heaven on the scene of Christ’s death. At first, it may look like a bird’s-eye view, but then the thought come: It is perhaps a God’s-eye view.
If you read the accounts of the Passion in the four gospels, you cannot help being struck by the way the perspective in John differs from the perspective in the first three gospels. The story is the same, and we tend to merge details from each version into one continuous storyline in our imagination. Yet the Jesus in John seems to be moving in a different atmosphere than the same Jesus in Matthew, Mark and Luke. I would contend that it is not the story that is different, but the perspective. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the story very much from the human point ofview; John gives us a mystical glimpse into the same events with the eyes of God.
In the Dali painting, the bloody brutality that marks our ordinary perception of Calvary is missing, and instead there is an air of timelessness and even serenity. Instead of the walls of Jerusalem in the background, we see a boat beside a body of water, and nearby stands a figure in the uniform of the papal Swiss Guard. The mind is directed not to the past but to the future, to the action of God that will flow from this supreme act of love on the part of Jesus: the establishment of the church as the sacrament of his body and the instrument of the invitation to universal salvation.
When you and I stand on different sides of an image and look at it, we see the same object, but what we see is not the same. My view – and yours – is always partial. That is why we move around from side to side, walk around behind a statue or peer at a painting from different angles. Our view remains partial, but we seek to see more so that we may see more fully. We sometimes mistakenly think we have seen all there is to see. Dali’s painting, like the original drawing of John of the Cross, is a reminder that there is more.
Dryness, therefore, can call us to change our way of seeing things, our way of seeing the world and ourselves so as to open out hearts and minds up to what Jesus calls “God’s work.” Dryness, tragedy and sorrow can be seen as an opportunity for grace more than as a sign of divine anger.
I’m not sure Michael expected my response. I had been talking earlier with my friend John, who will most likely also be providing some devotionals until I can get back on a firmer spiritual footing. After reading the above devotional, a few things kind of clicked and I wrote Michael back saying: “It did hit close to home, but not in a bad way. John and I had a long discussion this afternoon about our relationship with God. He said that God is always with us, but sometimes he is silent and allows us to work through things on our own, especially when it is a time of great pain. We also discussed heaven. I was always taught that you did not enter heaven until the Day of Judgement, but he said that he’s always believed we go straight to heaven. He allowed me to realize…that for God, time is meaningless. So even if we do go to heaven on the Day of Judgement, time is meaningless once we are there, so those who have gone on before are able to enjoy the greatness of heaven and look down upon us even now before the Judgement because for them it has already happened. Maybe I’m making a stretch here, but when we look at things from God’s perspective as it is done in the two paintings and in the Gospel of John, then we can take greater comfort in the passing of loved ones. They are already in a better place.”
Michael Dodd
Michael Dodd has written and lectured about Carmelite spirituality and history for over twenty years. His work has appeared in publications in the United States, Europe and Africa. He is the author of The Dark Night Murders: A Fray John of the Cross Mystery and Jerome Gratian: Treatise on Melancholy. The above devotional is from his book Elijah and the Ravens of Carith: A Twenty-First Century Reflection in a Medieval Carmelite Mode, which can be purchased on Amazon.com in paperback for $9.95.
By the way, Michael did not ask that I mention his books, but I think anyone who reads this blog and also reads the comments know that Michael is a very special person, wise beyond words, and we all love him.
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
15 And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.
Luke 2:1-20 (KJV)
When I was young, my mother had a Book of Christmas, I think that was the name, and it had all kinds of Christmas stories and legends. There were three things she read to my sister and me each year at Christmastime: “A Visit from St Nicholas” aka “‘Twas the Night before Christmas,” the editorial from the September 21, 1897, edition of The (New York) Sun commonly known as “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause,” and she would read us Luke Chapter 2:1-20. While the first two, I will always remember in her voice, it seems like I can only ever hear Luke 2:1-20 in the voice of Linus from the Peanuts’ classic ” A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The thing is, I hear the whole twenty verses in Linus’s voice; however, in the Peanuts’ special, Linus only recited Verses 8-14.
Merry Christmas, everyone, and I hope all of you have a wonderful day.
When I wrote this post, I was in an extremely dark mood. I want to emphasize that I do not feel abandoned by family and friends, but the abandoned feelings are only directed at God. In a way, I guess I understand the Deists of the Enlightenment. They believe that God was the creator, and then left us alone. The problem that I have with that is that Christ came and died for our salvation. Even Jesus had doubts of abandonment. In the cross (Matthew 27:6), Jesus said ” Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” which translates to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Maybe Christinity is only a salvation religion. Maybe we are to live a good life in hopes of being welcomed home to God in heaven, and God doesn’t protect us here on earth. Maybe there is no power to prayer, except when we ask forgiveness. This post was what I was feeling last night when I wrote this, but I think it’s important to put those thoughts into words. Maybe someone can help me through this grief. I’m not sure that God is there to do so.
Honestly, I have no inspiration for a Sunday post. I feel abandoned. I have friends who check on me, and they try to comfort me. I’ve been told that my strong faith will bring me through this period of sorrow, but at the moment I feel like God has abandoned me. It seemed like he made my life as bleak as possible when I lost my job, all the money worries I’ve had, the chronic headaches, and a myriad of other problems. Through all those my friend that I lost had been like the voice of God. He’d always encouraged me. He allowed me to fully be my true self. He knew me better than anyone on this earth ever has. With him and God, I felt like things would turn around and things would be better. I had hope and I thought I’d been rewarded for my faith when I did find what was the perfect job for me.
Suddenly it seemed like I had been rewarded for my faith. My headaches were gone. I was happier than I have ever been in life. I had a job that was an absolute dream. I had friends who loved me, one in particular who I loved back so very much. I looked forward to waking up each morning. Then on my thirty-eighth birthday my world came crashing down. I found out that my friend had died in an automobile accident. I’ve tried to come to terms with the loss. Friends have done their best to comfort me. I have tried to appear happy again, but I can’t. I can’t because my faith can’t bring him back to me. God ripped him away. My headaches have returned. My depression is worse than it has ever been. I am constantly on the verge of tears. I feel as if the happiness I’d experienced when I moved was mere false hope. I honestly feel abandoned by God. The hope and happiness that had filled my heart are gone. I hate feeling this way, but no matter how hard I try, no matter what inspirational words I read, no matter how much I study the Bible for answers, and no matter how much I beg God for some relief, the sorrow won’t lessen. I don’t doubt that God exists, I know he does, but it’s my faith in Him being a part of my life that is what’s in doubt.
When I moved to Vermont, one of the things that I’d feared, really my only fear, had been how I’d be able to handle driving in winter conditions. I thought it was inevitable that eventually I’d have a wreck. If I did and didn’t survive it, then the world would continue. It wouldn’t be a great loss. My mother could stop fearing that someone would find out that she had a gay son. My father would have the one child left that he’d always loved the most anyway. I’ve always been a disappointment in his eyes. My friends had their boyfriends, husbands, and wives to love them. They would survive. I have no one who is that close,,and I fear that I never will again. Yes, I have friends, and they would mourn, but they have someone to comfort them. The one person who I had, the one person who loved me unconditionally, the one person who accepted me just they way I am, had a boyfriend that he loved and could comfort him. Yet, when my best friend died, I am alone and a long way from home.
Yesterday, I was awoken by the pain of one of my cluster headaches. This is something that hasn’t happened in nearly a year. I’ve had headaches, but none have caused me to wake up from the pain. I got up, took some medicine and was able to fall back to sleep. I woke up a few hours later and felt much better, so I decided to go do the shopping that I desperately needed to do. For the most part, my shopping day was successful (I found some great winter boots), even if I never did find the 6 inch springform pan that I was looking for. As I was driving home, it was snowing, not bad and not enough to really make conditions terrible for driving, but it made me think about what I’d originally thought about being in a car accident. This might not make sense, but I always figured if anybody in my life would die in a car accident it would be me. Never did I imagine that it would be my best friend who would die. Nor did I ever imagine that he would end up back in the hands of the parents he was abandoned by. I couldn’t believe it when I found out that his parents refused to let any of the people who’d become his family, when they declared that he was no longer a part of theirs, to attend a funeral for him.
By the time I got back home, not only was my headache back with a vengeance, but I was intensely depressed. As my head pounded and I dreaded the idea of a new cycle of cluster headaches beginning as they have for the past several weeks, I thought about how I felt abandoned by God. Last Sunday’s I talked about my anger and doubt. I am still angry. I am so angry that God would let such awful things happen in this world. The ironic thing is, my friend used to say he didn’t quite understand God, and that if he really existed, how could he let the terrible things that happen in this world happen? My friend had many awful things happen to him personally, and he couldn’t understand why God had allowed it to happen and why God did not protect him. I’d always consoled him and said that God loved him and some things weren’t God’s fault because humans are given free will. Humans are to blame for these tragedies. To be honest I’d never known how to answe those questions. It bothered me that I couldn’t, and I couldn’t find the answers. Now I find myself with the same doubt.
I spoke with his boyfriend after my friend’s death. He talked about how I’d helped my friend with his faith. He had struggled with it a lot, but ultimately he said that God must love him because God had brought me into his life. My friend had never told me that. I always felt a connection to my friend that we were destined to know one another, and apparently he thought I was a gift to him from God. Now I wonder, if he was a gift in my life as I’d believed he was (and apparently he felt I was God’s gift to him), then why did God take back his gift. Why had He only allowed me to have him for a short time? Why didn’t God let me say goodbye? I just don’t understand why, and I don’t understand how God has seemingly left me. I want to understand. I’ve searched for answers but they all ring hollow to me. I feel like I’ve been abandoned.
For the friends who are still in my life who are reading this, please don’t think this lessens my love for you or that I don’t greatly value your friendship and all the love and support you have given me. The thing is that the relationship that I had with my late friend transcended mere friendship and love. It was a connection that went to my very soul. All I can say is that as much as I love and appreciate my friends, I feel like I lost part of my soul. How do you get back your soul? He and his boyfriend had been perfect together. There love was so strong from the very beginning, but he was my soul mate. It was a love that transcended romance. He was more like a brother to me (and even that doesn’t describe the connection well enough), and I always felt that our souls were connected. I’m certain, I know the moment he died, because that night when he would have still been on his way home, I became violently ill and began vomiting. My head began to hurt worse than anything I’d experienced in a long time, and I had a sudden feeling of dread. That dread built throughout the following twenty-four hours or so before I got the news of his death. I have not felt whole since, and I haven’t felt the presence of God since that moment either. I’ve only felt abandonment.
All of you know that I am a man who has great faith in God, at least I hope you think that. These last two weeks have been so difficult. Why did God take my friend? Why would he let something so tragic happen to someone with such a beautiful soul? Some terrible things had happened in my friend’s life when he was younger. His parents disowned him for being gay, which had nothing to do with religion but pure homophobia. God brought wonderful people into his life and helped him through those difficulties. My friend had a difficult time understanding how such a great and loving God could allow tragedies to happen. Whether those tragedies were accidents or caused by someone hatred or cause by natural disasters, he wondered how God could let those things happen. I never had a very good answer for him. He had suffered in his life because of his family’s rejection, and I’ve never been able to understand how they could be so cruel.
These past two weeks, I’ve struggled with the same issues. I can’t help but wonder how God could allow him to die in an accident, while his hateful parents continued to live on. I admit that it has made me so angry at God. Being angry at God just compounded my sadness because I felt guilty for being angry at God and questioning the faith I have in Him to protect and provide for us. God took this beautiful man (and I don’t mean in just physical beauty, which he was, but also in his soul.) He was beautiful and so kind. God took him away from not only me, but the rest of the people who’d considered him part of their family: his boyfriend and other friends. For me, he was more than a friend. He was family. He was my confidante, and he was my confessor. He was the younger brother I never had. There are so many wicked and hateful people in this world that God could have taken, but he took someone who had the purest heart I have ever known.
One friend told me that I had to think of this as purely an accident, because horrible tragedies like this are not the hand of God. While I wish I could think that way, I was always told that God guides all things. God performs miracles every day, why couldn’t He have saved my friend? I’ve always believed that everything happens for a reason. If so, what could possibly be the reason behind this? Being angry or disappointed with God is a troubling subject for me. If God is such a loving God, how can He allow such pain? It reminds me of a scene from Steel Magnolias. I produced the play a couple of years ago as part of the drama club I was in charge of. It’s the most difficult scene in the whole play and one that I never did get through without tears in my eyes:
M’Lynn: [crying] I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.
[screaming]
M’Lynn: I’m fine! I can jog all the way to Texas and back, but my daughter can’t! She never could! Oh God! I am so mad I don’t know what to do! I wanna know why! I wanna know *why* Shelby’s life is over! I wanna know how that baby will *ever* know how wonderful his mother was! Will he *ever* know what she went through for him! Oh *God* I wanna know *why*? *Why*? Lord, I wish I could understand!
[in a firm tone]
M’Lynn: No! No! No! It’s not supposed to happen this way! I’m supposed to go first. I’ve always been ready to go first! I-I don’t think I can take this! I-I don’t think I can take this! I-I just wanna *hit* somebody ’til they feel as bad as I do! I just wanna hit something! I wanna hit it hard!
The scene of course is followed immediately by a humorous scene that breaks the tension. While I’ve always found this an emotional scene, it’s a very close description to how I feel.
I’ve read that being angry with God is something that both believers and unbelievers wrestle with. When some extreme difficulty or tragedy happens in our lives, we naturally ask God the question — “Why?” I’ve asked that question a lot in the last two weeks. I was researching ways to deal with my doubts and anger and came across the following passage written by Dr. D. W. Ekstrand:
This response indicates two flaws in our thinking — first, even as believers, we all have the tendency to operate under the impression that life should be easy and pleasant (especially if GOD is our God), and that God should prevent tragedy, difficulty and pain from happening to us (Jn 11:37); so when He does not, we get angry or disappointed with Him (Jn 11:32). Second, when we do not seem to be able to reconcile the extent of God’s sovereignty, we lose confidence in His ability to control all of the circumstances we go through in life. When we lose faith in God’s sovereignty, it is actually because our frail human flesh is grappling with our own frustration and our own lack of control over events. All of us tend to live life in such a way that we can positively affect the outcome of situations… that everything will work out as we have planned; as such, we believe that we are the ones who ultimately determine our fate — when good things happen, we generally attribute it to our own efforts; so when things go bad we are quick to blame God, and get angry with Him for not preventing it. Deep down we believe we should be immune to unpleasant circumstances (flaw number one as noted above), especially if God loves us.
While I think this is a good answer to what I’ve been dealing with tragedy, he’s flawed when he says “when good things happen, we generally attribute it to our own efforts.” I don’t. I attribute it to God’s guiding hand. So if we give God the credit for what good happens in our life, why shouldn’t He also take blame for the tragedies. Why does God continue to have us go through pain and loss? When will good Christians and faithful believers be rewarded? Is it only in death? If feel like in the past seven or eight years I have been constantly beat down. Finally something good had happened in my life and career, and I was thankful for God’s guiding hand. Then suddenly, all of that joy and happiness was ripped away by the loss of my friend. While I am still thankful for my job, I have to wonder: is this God’s way of reminding me that I will never be fully happy? It seems like in my life for every ten failures, I have one success. Is it my destiny to be knocked down each time God helps me up?
Dr. Ekstrand went on to say:
Tragedies and suffering bring home the sobering truth that we are not in charge… that God is the One who ultimately determines what happens in our lives… that everything is either caused or allowed by God. Remember, He is God. We can complain, get angry, and blame God for what is happening, yet if we will trust Him and yield our bitterness and pain to Him, acknowledging the prideful sin of trying to force our own will over His, He can and will grant us His peace and strength to get us through any difficult situation (1 Cor 10:13). We can be angry with God for many reasons, so we all have to accept at some point that there are things we cannot control or even understand with our finite minds.
This has not been the most upbeat of my post on religion. Maybe it doesn’t even belong here, but this is where I think through my relationship with God and try to understand it. Right now, I’m having trouble understanding it and maybe some of you have better answer than I do. Quite frankly, I have no answers right now.
Queerty published an article the other day titled, “Jesus Had Two Dads: Guys Share What It’s Like To Be Gay And Religious.” I clicked on the article because I thought it would be be interesting. Instead I was disgusted and outraged. While the pictures like the one above with the text were posted on Whisper and many made excellent points in my opinion, the Queerty article chose to deride and belittle people because they held religious beliefs. To make the article even more detestable, the commenters were so bitchy and chose to make fun of gay people who had religious convictions. While a few tried to comment in the defense of religious gays, they were completely attached by other commenters. It’s one thing to not believe, but it’s another to call someone a fool because they do. I think everyone has their right to believe or not, but no one on either side has the right to belittle me because of what I choose to believe or not believe. I tried very hard when I was a teacher and teaching about other religions to get my students to not think of other religious beliefs as crazy, but to try to understand other religions and cultures. As gay men and women, we don’t like people judging us for our sexuality, so why should we allow for discrimination against those who are religious or have a different skin tone. People need to quit being so judgmental. If they would do that we would have a much better and far more happy world.
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.
1 Corinthians 15:51-58
In The Morning of Joy
When the trumpet shall sound,
And the dead shall arise,
And the splendors immortal
Shall envelop the skies;
When the Angel of Death
Shall no longer destroy,
And the dead shall awaken
In the morning of joy:
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy;
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy.
When the King shall appear
In His beauty on high,
And shall summon His children
To the courts of the sky;
Shall the cause of the Lord
Have been all your employ,
That your soul may be spotless
In the morning of joy?
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy;
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy.
O the bliss of that morn,
When our loved ones we meet!
With the songs of the ransomed
We each other shall greet,
Singing praise to the Lamb,
Thro’ eternity’s years,
With the past all forgotten
With its sorrows and tears
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy;
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy.
I woke up Friday morning with this song in my head. As I sang it to myself, tears rolled down my face. This song was sang at my grandmama’s funeral, and I often sang it when I was the song leader of my church. It brings me comfort, since I know that in that morning of joy, I will be reunited with my friend.
The above sculpture is called “Angel of Grief” and is an 1894 sculpture by William Wetmore Story which serves as the grave stone of the artist and his wife at the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. –Colossians 1:11-14
In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. It wasn’t until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November.
Thanksgiving Day has become an annual national holiday celebrated in Canada and the United States. It was originally celebrated as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year. Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. Several other places around the world observe similar celebrations. Thanksgiving has historical roots in religious and cultural traditions, and the day originally began as a celebration of a bountiful harvest. Today, however, as agriculture is no longer the main occupation of most Americans and Canadians, it has become a holiday reminding us of what we should be thankful for. Today, it is also largely a secular holiday, but its origins come from thanking God for the harvest.
I know that I have a lot to be thankful for, especially this year. I am thankful for the readers of this blog who offered tremendous amounts of love and support when I thought my world was crashing down on me. I think of each of you as true friends in my life. I may not know you personally, though there are a fair number who I do know well, I am extremely thankful and I do thank God for bringing you into my life. I am thankful for the love and support of my family and friends. I am also thankful for my new life. Though at times my faith may have wavered some, for the most part, I knew God had a plan for me. I just had to trust Him.
My trust and faith were rewarded with a new life, a new job, and new friends. I am thankful for the love and support that I was given during those hard months after I lost my job. I would name those who helped and how why helped, but I know I would forget someone, and it wouldn’t be fair. Some of you gave advice, some helped financially, others gave their friendship. I know that I did not get to where I am right now without a tremendous amount of help and I want to say, Thank You. I am so grateful for all that you did.
My faith is also stronger because of what I have been through. I put my whole faith in God and allowed him to guide me on the path He chose for me. For the first time in my life, I honestly feel like I am on the right path. It has been a long journey and one in which I got lost many times, but for the first time this path feels right. I am excited to be on this journey. It’s nowhere near finished, but it is just beginning.
In the above passage from the Bible, Paul is saying a prayer for the the Colossians. Paul wrote, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience.” In the trials of this year, I let God’s power carry me through and give me strength. I did my best to remain patient and let His will be done. I remember one day after church when I was speaking with my minister and I explained that something good would come along, and he said that he admired the way I was handling things because I was handling them better than he had in the same situation. I told him that I had faith that God would point me in the right direction. I knew that my faith would bring me through.
Now I am joyfully giving thanks to God, who has enabled me to share in His glory. I am thankful that God rescued me from the power of darkness, which I think in my situation was depression and doubt. However, my faith showed me the light. We should be thankful for all that God does for us, large or small. He has given us redemption, and He forgives us of our sins. This reminds me of the 23rd Psalm:
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” Luke 10:29-37 (NRSV)
I think everyone is aware of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s one of the most beloved parables in the Bible. Sadly though, there aren’t enough real Good Samaritans in life. I want to share a story of on particular Good Samaritan. I read this story and cried. She came from such an unlikely place, but she was an angel, a Godsend, and a Good Samaritan to those who needed her, especially when so many others passed them by.
It’s hard to convince people these days that one lonely person can budge the vast stone wheel of apathy. The truth, though, is the same as it ever was: One pair of willing hands might inspire thousands or millions to push. That’s the way the world is changed: hand by hand.
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
So much of the history of AIDS in America died with the people who lived it. What is left has often been shoved into the cabinet of Times Best Forgotten. Here, though, is a story from those days. It’s a story about what courage can do.
The red door
It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway.
Burks, now 55, was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room. “I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on him. It’d be: ‘Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ‘Can we draw again?’ “
She knew what it probably was, even though it was early enough in the epidemic for the disease to be called GRID — gay-related immune deficiency — instead of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). She had a gay cousin in Hawaii and had asked him about the stories of a gay plague after seeing a report on the news. He’d told her, “That’s just the leather guys in San Francisco. It’s not us. Don’t worry.” Still, in her concern for him, she’d read everything she could find about the disease over the previous months, hoping he was right.
Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.
“I walked out and [the nurses] said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ ” Burks recalled. “I said, ‘Well, yeah. He wants his mother.’ They laughed. They said, ‘Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s been here, and nobody’s coming.’ “
Unwilling to take no for an answer, Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was only able to speak for a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her.
“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.”
Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a hymn Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than a thousand people dying of AIDS over the course of the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones. Whether that was because of religious conviction or fear of the virus, Burks still doesn’t know.
Burks hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying man. “I didn’t know what to tell him other than, ‘Your mom’s not coming. She won’t even answer the phone,’ ” she said. There was nothing to tell him but the truth.
“I went back in his room,” she said, “and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? What was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’ “
Burks said it was probably the first time he’d been touched by a person not wearing two pairs of gloves since he arrived at the hospital. She pulled a chair to his bedside, and talked to him, and held his hand. She bathed his face with a cloth, and told him she was there. “I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breath on earth,” she said.
She hasn’t talked much about that day until recently. People always ask her why she wasn’t afraid. “I have no idea,” she said. “The thought of being afraid never occurred to me until after I was already deep into the AIDS crisis. I just asked God, ‘If this is what you want me to do, just please don’t let me or my daughter get it.’ And He didn’t.”
‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours’
Ruth Coker Burks’ family came to Garland County in 1826. She was born in Hot Springs, and was a childhood friend of Bill Clinton’s. While Clinton was in the White House, she said, they wrote back and forth, with Burks filling him in on all the hometown gossip from time to time.
Since at least the late 1880s, Burks’ kin have been buried in Files Cemetery, a half-acre of red dirt on top of a hill above Central Avenue in Hot Springs. Drivers using Files Road as a cut-through to avoid the traffic on Central zip past the graveyard without even seeing it. If you stand in the right spot among the old, mossy tombstones in the winter, you can see a sliver of Lake Hamilton, glimmering like a cut sapphire through a gap in the trees.
When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”
“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”
Files Cemetery is where Burks buried the ashes of the man she’d seen die, after a second call to his mother confirmed she wanted nothing to do with him, even in death. “No one wanted him,” she said, “and I told him in those long 13 hours that I would take him to my beautiful little cemetery, where my daddy and grandparents were buried, and they would watch out over him.”
Burks had to contract with a funeral home in Pine Bluff for the cremation. It was the closest funeral home she could find that would even touch the body. She said she paid for the cremation out of her savings.
The ashes were returned to her in a cardboard box. She went to a friend at Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs, who gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn. Then she went to Files Cemetery and used a pair of posthole diggers to excavate a hole in the middle of her father’s grave.
“I knew that Daddy would love that about me,” she said, “and I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever needed to find him.” She put the urn in the hole and covered it over. She prayed over the grave, and it was done.
Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury over 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.
“My daughter would go with me,” Burks said. “She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”
She believes the number was 43, but she isn’t sure. Somewhere in her attic, in a box, among the dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead, filled with the appointments, setbacks and medications of people 30 years gone, there is a list of names.
Burks said she always made a last effort to reach out to families before she put the urns in the ground. “I tried every time,” she said. “They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like I was a demon on the phone and they had to get me off — prayed while they were on the phone. Just crazy. Just ridiculous.”
She learned to say the funerals herself, after being rebuffed by preachers and priests too many times. Even so, she said she never doubted what she was doing. “It never made me question my faith at all,” she said. “I knew that what I was doing was right, and I knew that I was doing what God asked me. It wasn’t a voice from the sky. I knew deep in my soul.”
Elephant
After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’… I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.”
Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would. Somewhere, she said, she has a large coffee can full of 30 year-old pens. Once pharmacy clerks learned she was working with AIDS patients, she said, many of them would insist she keep the pen after signing a check. “They didn’t want it in their building,” she said. “They would come out with a can of Lysol and spray me out the door.”
She’d soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”
Burks said the financial help they gave patients — from burial expenses to medications to rent for those unable to work — couldn’t have happened without the support of the gay clubs around the state, particularly Little Rock’s Discovery. “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money,” she said. “That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”
Norman Jones is the owner of Discovery. Opened in 1979, the club once served a primarily gay clientele, though now the crowd is often mixed. He’s old enough to remember the fear of the early days of the epidemic. In 1988, Jones helped found the charity group Helping People with AIDS, with which Burks worked. The group is still around, helping those with the disease. “She worked with us for several years there,” Jones said. “She went out and did home visits, and she’d work determining who would qualify for the money.”
Jones said that as AIDS moved into Arkansas, he and the club’s employees decided to do something to help. “The impersonators and the bartenders that worked at the club and I decided that we’d start doing once-a-year benefits to start a fund called Helping People with AIDS,” he said. “We started raising money every year and we still do so today, over 25 years later.” Jones said the money generated by the fund, as well as a percentage of the club’s sales, have helped the AIDS Foundation and other groups assisting those with the disease.
After AIDS came to Arkansas, Jones said, he started to see the changes almost immediately. Even a rumor that someone had HIV could make their friends shun them. “We had so many people who were affected by it when it first hit that it was like, wham!” he said. “It was like you were being thrown up against a brick wall. Everyone said, ‘Don’t touch them. Don’t talk to them.’ ” Even something as slight as losing a few pounds was enough to make people afraid to associate with a person, Jones said. The fear was rampant. “It made everyone feel aware that something was happening out there,” he said. “We didn’t know what was happening, but there was a fear of it.”
Burks’ stories from that time border on nightmarish, with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she’d befriended while fighting the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.
There was the man whose family insisted he be baptized in a creek in October, three days before he died, to wash away the sin of being gay; whose mother pressed a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips pleading, “Roger, eat. Please eat, Roger. Please, please, please” until Burks gently took the spoon and bowl from her; who died at 6-foot-6 and 75 pounds; whose aunts came to his parents’ house after the funeral in plastic suits and yellow gloves to double-bag his clothes and scrub everything, even the ceiling fan, with bleach.
She recalled the odd sensation of sitting with dying people while they filled out their own death certificate, because Burks knew she wouldn’t be able to call on their families for the required information. “We’d sit and fill it out together,” she said. “Can you imagine filling out your death certificate before you die? But I didn’t have that information. I wouldn’t have their mother’s maiden name or this, that or the other. So I’d get a pizza and we’d have pizza and fill out the death certificate.”
She remembered the Little Rock man who “had so much fluid on his lungs that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t talk, and he would gag when he was trying to talk. His mother, we had called and called and called. … He wanted to talk to his mother and wanted me to try again. I got the answering machine, and I just handed the phone to him. He cried and gagged. It was excruciating listening to him ask his mother if she’d come to the hospital. She never came. The day before the funeral, she called and asked if she could come to the funeral. He’s buried in [Files] cemetery.”
She recalled the mother who called Burks up and demanded to know how much longer it would be before her son died. ” ‘I just want to know, when is he going to die?’ ” Burks recalled the woman asking. “‘We have to get on with our lives, and he’s holding up our lives. We can’t go on with our lives until he dies. He’s ruined our lives, and we don’t want people up here to know [he has AIDS], so how long do you think he’s going to stay here?’ Like it was a punishment to her.
Billy, however, is the one who hit her hardest, and the one she remembers most clearly of all. He was one of the youngest she ever cared for, a female impersonator in his early 20s. He was beautiful, she said, perfect and fine-boned. She still has one of Billy’s dresses in her closet up in Rogers: a tiny, flame-red designer number, intricate as an orchid. It was Billy’s mother, she said, who called up to ask how much longer it would be before they could get on with their lives.
As Billy’s health declined, Burks accompanied him to the mall in Little Rock to quit his job at a store there. Afterward, she said, he wept, Burks holding the frail young man as shoppers streamed around them. “He broke down just sobbing in the middle of the mall,” she said. “I just stood there and held him until he quit sobbing. People were looking and pointing and all that, but I couldn’t care less.”
Once, a few weeks before Billy died — he weighed only 55 pounds, the lightest she ever saw, light as a feather, so light that she was able to lift his body from the bed with just her forearms — Burks had taken Billy to an appointment in Little Rock. Afterward, they were driving around aimlessly, trying to get his spirits up. She often felt like crying in those days, she said, but she couldn’t let herself. She had to be strong for them.
“He was so depressed. It was horrible,” she said. “We were driving by the zoo, and somebody was riding an elephant. He goes: ‘You know, I’ve never ridden an elephant.’ I said: ‘Well, we’ll fix that.’ ” And she turned the car around. Somewhere, in the boxes that hold all her terrible memories, there’s a picture of the two of them up on the back of the elephant, Ruth Coker Burks in her heels and dress, Billy with a rare smile.
Two or more
When it was too much, she said, she’d go fishing. And it wasn’t all terrible. While Burks got to see the worst of people, she said, she was also privileged to see people at their best, caring for their partners and friends with selflessness, dignity and grace. She said that’s why she’s been so happy to see gay marriage legalized all over the country.
“I watched these men take care of their companions, and watch them die,” she said. “I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion? I don’t know a lot of straight people that would do that.”
Sometimes, she would listen to the confessions of the dying. “Whatever they wanted to tell their God, I would help them tell their God,” she said. “I figured, if the religious people weren’t going to do it, someone has to. If God wanted me to do this, then surely I can say: Yes, you’re going to heaven. … The Bible says that if you’re two or more, and you ask God for forgiveness, He will forgive you. There were two of us, so that was the best I could do.”
In all the years she worked with AIDS patients, she said, she never wore gloves unless the patients had broken skin. It was touching them, she believes, that kept those she cared for alive longer than others. By the 1990s, experts in the field were beginning to take note.
“My [HIV] patients lived two years longer than the national average,” Burks said. “They would send people from all over the world to the National Institutes of Health, they would send them to the CDC, and they would send them to me. They sent them to me so they could see what I was doing that helped them live. I think it was because I loved them. They were like my children, even though I was burying people my age.”
Burks helped care for Raymond Harwood, a Hot Springs resident who died in 1994 at age 42. His father, Jim Harwood, said Burks met Raymond through an outreach program sponsored by the local Catholic Church. Jim recalled Burks as a very caring person. “She was absolutely sweet,” Harwood said. “One of the kindest, sweetest people I’ve ever known.”
God, Harwood said, has a hand in everything, so He had a hand in bringing Burks into their lives. Harwood said he was surprised to hear from Burks that some parents abandoned their children when they were diagnosed with AIDS.
“I wasn’t brought up that way,” Harwood said. “Are you going to desert your son? I don’t care what he did. He could have gone out and murdered people. He’s still your son. You may not like what he does, but you love him.”
Back to God
Ruth Coker Burks had a stroke five years ago, early enough in her life that she can’t help but believe that the stress of the bad old days had something to do with it. After the stroke, she had to relearn everything: to talk, to feed herself, to read and write. It’s probably a miracle she’s not buried in Files Cemetery herself.
After better drugs, education, understanding and treatment made her work obsolete, she moved to Florida for several years, where she worked as a funeral director and a fishing guide. When Bill Clinton was elected president, she served as a White House consultant on AIDS education.
A few years ago, she moved to Rogers to be closer to her grandchildren. In 2013, she went to bat for three foster children who were removed from the elementary school at nearby Pea Ridge after administrators heard that one of them might be HIV positive. Burks said she couldn’t believe she was still dealing with the same, knee-jerk fears in the 21st century.
The work she and others did in the 1980s and 1990s has mostly been forgotten, partly because so many of those she knew back then have died. She’s not the only one who did that work, but she’s one of the few who survived. And so she has become the keeper of memory.
She was surprised in recent months when a producer with the oral history project StoryCorps reached out to her, asking her to tell her story on tape. Part of that interview was eventually broadcast on National Public Radio. She talked to the BBC this week, and other requests for interviews keep coming. She honestly seems a little shocked that anyone cares after all these years.
She talks of those days like an old soldier, tears only touching her eyes when she speaks of Billy, or her father’s grave, or how she sometimes wonders if her choice to help AIDS patients as a young woman, and the ostracism that brought, may have kept her from being everything she could have been. Still, she clearly sees those years as the time when she had a mission, maybe even one ordained by a higher power. Too, she said, she loved and believes she was loved by the people whose lives she touched — every one. Even as they were dying, they showed her what bravery is, and brought joy into her life. “They were good days,” she said, “because I was blessed with handing these people back to God.”
She hasn’t been back to Files Cemetery since her stroke. While she made sure it was kept up back when she lived in Hot Springs, it appeared to have been let go a bit when the reporter visited in late December, some of the tombstones pushed over and broken, the snag of a dead oak left to rot among the graves. Even without knowing the story of the place, it might have been downright spooky if not for the constant stream of traffic cruising by at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.
Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in the cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead that lie there.
“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”
Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing. — 1 Thessalonians 5:11
My thoughts and prayers are with those in Paris. Such a senseless tragedy is shocking but becomes more and more frequent in here terror filled times. When a nation faces tragedy, how can it cope? And how do we work through the grief individually when we suddenly lose a loved one? There is hope for the future. You can find comfort and assurance!
We all desire to have a secure, predictable and peaceful world. But when tragedy strikes, we awaken to new realities. The terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night no doubt shocked all of us. We suddenly realize our world’s—and our own—vulnerability. The Paris attacks killed 129, wounded 352, with 99 people in critical condition.
Most of us have lost loved ones at some time in our lives, whether through tragic accidents, disease or violence. How can we cope with such loss? Those who have lost loved ones need comforting. They need hope and reassurance. As Scripture says: “Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). If you know someone who needs reassurance, give comfort. Let that person know you care. Give a hug or place a phone call. Provide help as you are able. When a loved one hurts, we suffer with that loved one. The Apostle Paul wrote that “there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26).
We can identify with those who suffer because we, most likely, have also suffered at one time or another in our own lives. We can empathize with their pain and with their loss. You can help others by giving comfort in times of tragedy. Our tears can demonstrate a deep concern for our friends and the victims of tragedy. God is the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. When we share our sorrow with our Father in Heaven, He gives comfort. Several of the Psalms express King David’s sorrow as he shared his intimate feelings in prayer. You, too, can pray using the Psalms. David cried out in prayer to his God: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; do not be silent at my tears; for I am a stranger with You, a sojourner, as all my fathers were” (Psalm 39:12). God answers prayer. David begins the very next Psalm exclaiming, “I waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined to me, and heard my cry” (Psalm 40:1). God will hear our cry as well. Notice this encouraging promise: “Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him” (Psalm 126:5-6).
When we are honest with our feelings, and share them with God in Heaven, He promises to comfort us. Some of us struggle with the problem of evil in the world. We do not understand how an all-powerful God, who is love, can allow such evil in the world. God’s long-term plan of salvation takes this into account. There is a real devil who is out to destroy all humanity, and he uses human instruments to perpetrate death and destruction. Satan the Devil is out to thwart God’s plan. But he has failed—and will yet utterly fail.
How do you cope with tragedies? Pray with your whole heart. Scripture shows us that we are saved by His life: “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life” (Romans 5:10). We need to seek our Savior with all our heart. In emphasizing the Ten Commandments, the Apostle Paul wrote: “Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed” (Romans 13:10-11).
We need to give comfort to others in time of tragedy. We should contribute to their physical, spiritual and emotional needs. We ought to pray for the victims and their families, because we know our prayers can make a difference. “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” (James 5:16). Are you praying for the victims of terrorist attacks and other tragedies?
Not only do we comfort others and pray for others, but we ourselves can find comfort and assurance from our Father in Heaven who is called “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3). Paul reminds us that we can take comfort in Scripture, and that we should give this comfort to others. The truth of the Bible can bring comfort in times of tragedy. We all need this inspiring, hope-filled truth.
Joe
