A Ramble Inspired By Tragedy.

I don't know what I did to deserve the blessings that have poured out into my life like aged wine over filth. I don't understand how even in my brokenness I am somehow whole enough to choke through this life with even the smallest amount of joy. I don't know why I have taken part in and bore witness to restoration of relationships and people and faith. How anything I have ever said or done could have played a part in such things. I am so selfish and disconnected. Even in my most spiritual of moments I walk away and find myself centered back on myself, who is incapable of anything good. I don't understand the health and the happiness of my kids, my family. I don't deserve to grow these little souls that you have so entrusted me with. More often than not I don't know what to say or do other than tell them I love them, the same way you somehow manage to love me. I don't know why my marriage is working, thriving after the train wreck it once was and with a man who so blatantly turns his head away from you. I don't know why I live in a place where the sun is always shining and my biggest concern is what lives within my own head while people who live only a thousand miles away are pulling the broken empty bodies of their babies out of rubble. I am here tending to my kids dentist appointments and school paperwork while they work at trying to dig up the remnants a life that no longer exists. And I know why it happened. I know why babies die in the safety of their mothers wombs and widows are left to spiral into other worlds within their own minds in dingy hospitals. I know why the only way some man can function is if his gut and blood are full of vodka and why that woman's husband shot her in the presence of their little girl. I know we are broken and the earth itself is groaning in the misery of your absence. Sometimes I imagine what that must look like. I think about being doubled over in pain, that feeling of needing to vomit and knowing you would feel so much better if you did, but nothing ever coming up. The earth itself clutching its non existent stomach, tears rolling down its blank face begging to be relieved. And yet there is no relief. Some of us carry on, digging up our old shoes hoping they will carry us over into a new life where better shoes are waiting to be purchased. Others sit barefoot, stagnant atop the rubble holding those broken baby bodies until their own body lies broken underneath them. It will never happen to you until it happens to you, and I so hope that when it does you have something more to hold onto than the debris left after the storm.