By the Rivers of Babylon

This New Year’s Eve we got word that our nephew’s little boy Sawyer, not yet 4 years old, had been taken from us in a car crash.

As the world in general celebrated, we wept. While others were light-hearted, our hearts felt, and feel, like stone. Numbness, pain, denial, grief, and questioning. . . always questioning.

Questions with answers we do not understand, some with answers we know but which do not satisfy, others with answers we feel we will never find.

Oh, surely. Speak to us of God’s promises, tell us “death will never again have the last word.”  We know these things. We need to believe them. But at the moment, we can barely hear anything beyond our tears and the beating of our own hearts. And wondering why our hearts still beat when his is silent.

Everything seems so wrong. And it is wrong. We were not meant to say goodbye. We were not created so that we could experience such loss. At these times we begin to grasp that we are pilgrims, that this world is not our home. It cannot be our home. We were not made to live in a world where such loss is even possible.

And as the world around us celebrates, for some reason the words of Psalm 137 begin pulsing through my spirit.

By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion.

At times like these, we remember the world we lost, the world that included Sawyer. and beyond that, an ancestral longing for Eden, where death is the stranger.

But we live here. And here, the unknowing throng greets us with “Happy New Year!” Is it? Most of the old year seemed so much happier.