Mourning someone you don't know

I'm feeling a bit lost these days about something. You see, this teenage girl at our church just died. She had been sick for a couple of years with a brain tumor. I never met her but Ryan and I prayed for her alot. I don't know what I was expecting. Our church has always been full of these stories about miraculous healings. Once someone even said the church had an annointing to heal cancer. So I guess I expected that she would be healed. After all, people survive cancer all the time.

In fact one of my best-friends, Sandy, is a 10 year survivor. I talked to her about it to get an insight from someone who's been through it. She said that she has struggled with guilt from being a "survivor." She knew a lady in the hospital when she was undergoing treatments that had the same thing. This lady had a 6 year-old child and didn't make it. Why her? So I ask, "why Courtney?" This teenage kid with so many years that should have been ahead of her. I don't know.

As a parent I always think, "what if that was my kid?" Who cares if it were me, but what if it was Isaac? Here I barely get to know him and then I'd never see him become a man or have kids of his own. How unfair that would be! How pointless! How tragic! How can anyone endure it?... Why do parents torcher themselves with questions like these?

So Sunday we're in church and the preachers wife is telling a story of this time of healing and I felt angry. I struggled listening to this story knowing that for one person that healing never came. I cried and felt mad at God. Why the child in that story and not the one in this other. How, why? Arghhh!!!

Then later during a worship song God gave me an answer. I had it all flipped around in my thinking. Those that know Him, and pass on to be with Him, aren't on the losing side. Especially after years of struggle and pain. They enter into rest and peace while we, the living, have to continue on in the struggle and pain of life. Those that have gone on before us look down and pity us. It shouldn't be the other way around, even though it is. We are left here to work while their job on Earth is done.

That said, I still struggle with the passing of this young girl. My heart goes out to her friends, family, and especially her parents. That loss would be unbearable for me. Thankfully they and I have a God who can bear all these things. We also have His Son who has borne more pain and suffering than any of us will ever know. May everyone reading this find that kind of strength and comfort.