The death of a child (3)
Disease and death are so ugly and brutal. Maybe a terminal ward where everyone is a little child has an added pathos. Because I believe that every little child anywhere in the world is a servant of God I find consolation in knowing that however things appear there's more in it than meets the eye and when the world is better we'll clap our hands over our mouths in enlightened astonishment.
Like everyone else it guts me to see them suffer and die.
The raging fever is real, the gasping for air is real, the incubators, straps, tubes, leads, needles, pumps, drips—they're all real. The silent screaming, the wide-open mouths and the tiny toothless gums, the jerking, twisting, the shrill crying or the silent panting—all real.
There's no point in denying the reality of all that!
But what if what we see is not all there is?
What if there's more (not less!) to what we see than what we see?
Would you not want to be able to believe that there was more?
One day outside Jerusalem there was a young man hanging on the public gallows. The spit, the sweat, the blood, the jeers, the taunts, the treachery, the hypocrisy, the race hatred—all real. The thirst, the loneliness, the sense of abandonment, the grief of a mother and friends, the injustice, the evil—all real.
But there was more!
In all that—not simply after it—in and through all that there was more.
There wasn't less than that! There was more!
There is more in the disease and death of a child!
They speak to us profound truths at a profound cost!
And what do they say?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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