Written: October 2, 2025

I visited a friend today. She answered the door with a mostly naked, almost 1-year old baby on her hip. I cheered him on as he pushed his red wagon across the floor, nearly walking. I watched him crawl into the kitchen and babble “mama”. I got to rub his back saying goodbye, noticing the softness of his skin still. 

I love this baby. I’m grateful for this baby.

At home I begin chopping vegetables for dinner in my own kitchen, and I imagine the sound of a different baby – racing hands and feet in a breathy crawl toward me.  Would she have beat her sisters to the walking game? A different babble speaking my “name” in a voice that is unknown to me silently reaches my ears. Soft baby skin is at my fingertips and I think about picking that dark haired baby up off the floor to put her on my hip. 

My eyes are wet with tears, even the red onion I’m cutting is not fooled. 

Last night I attended a bible study that looked at the parable in Luke 14, the cost of following Jesus. Around the table we talk and eventually the conversation drifts exploring how the cost is great, but the reward is greater. One woman talks about all the answer to her prayers for her children. At one point she says, “God will always take care of us and those we love.”

Rage doesn’t fill my chest. Tears don’t fill my eyes. I don’t begrudge her, her joy, or God’s provision for her. I’m learning to delight in His mercy even as I wrestle, woundedly, with His untimely silence in August 2024 that echoes still in a house quiter than it should be. 

Faith is not naive for me – Jesus says we will pick up a cross to follow him. We are not exempt from suffering, but instead are promised it. In some ways, people of faith throughout history have, dare I say it, suffered greater losses than my own. 

I fight not for a bitter, hopeless faith either. It is God’s goodness and care that leads to repentance. He has a pattern of answering prayer and providing for His people. Shalom, full restoration, healing, goodness, love all belong to Him. 

I live in the mystery of the tension – when a child has been lost and yet somehow we find defiant, and sometimes miraculous, goodness in the world. Faith cannot look at her destroyed body with rose-colored glasses. Faith cannot deny a Father whose name is Love. 

Instead I must impossibly thread the needle between the two stories – bitterness and naivete. 

I cannot take away the miracles of old, the answered prayers of my friends. I cannot deny God’s merciful goodness, and yet, I cannot help but offer guttural cries of grief at the world’s suffering and wonder, why is hell allowed to continue it’s raging?

The middle of the needle is a mystery. 

“No man owns his own life, part of you is always in someone else’s hands. All you can do is hope it is mostly God’s hands you’re in.” – Jamie Fraser, “Tell the Bees that I am Gone” , Outlander

I think we’re often deceived, that our life is in our hands. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Life is what you make it. Long life can be gained by taking the vitamins and hot yoga.

I’m not denying responsibility.

But there is a point where our life is outside of our control. Figures of history would agree. Our neighbors would agree. The drunk driver takes the life of a single mother. A national leader wages a war that kills tens of thousands of innocent people. A woman’s attacker is let off on a technicality. A gunman open fires. A natural disaster wipes away a camp.

A microscopic virus takes the life of a dearly loved third-born daughter.

If it’s not His hands we find ourselves in, we are certainly hopeless.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:1-4