'Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost

We are faced with tragedy. We don't understand. We cannot understand.

We can do a couple of things. We can pray, mourn, and hope. Or we can blame.

Blame can feel good. To point a finger at everyone and everything with any connection to the event. Within hours of the tragedy, my twitter feed was full of people sending petitions to Obama for more gun control, petitioning for armed guards at every school, and calling for a stricter policy regarding those people with mental illness.

It takes an out of control situation and puts it back into a controlled box.

When faced with chaos and confusion, we desperately try to find solutions. This is part of our nature as rational beings. And like all of the varied aspects of our rationality, it can be used well. It can also be used poorly.

What happened yesterday was an unmitigated, undeniable, unimaginable tragedy. So many hearts were broken. Shattered. Lives were changed forever.

We cannot understand.

We cannot understand why God lets these things happen.

In our desperation, we blame.

But blame is just words. Ugly, sometimes hateful, words.

Prayer, mourning, and hope... those look toward healing and eternal beauty.

Our faith that God has let these things happen for reasons beyond our understanding... that is what makes this bearable. Hear me out.

If there were no God, these things would be simply tragic. There would be no reason, unknown or known. This would be all there was. There would be no answer to the question, in Heaven or on earth. If humanity were the whole story, there would be no hope for good coming from evil.

With a beneficent, albeit mysterious God, we can hope that there is a reason. God is not pleased when humanity acts in such evil ways. But He alone can bring good out of such things.

That line from Tennyson keeps coming to mind:

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

This statement seems straightforward enough when all you have known is love. In the joy and happiness of love, it seems obvious that loss - that impossible, far-off, hypothetical state - would be made bearable by the past love.

When you lose, though... things change. In our smallness and weakness, we might wish that that person had never entered our lives. Whether taken by death or by estrangement, separation from someone who was part of your heart is unbearably painful.

And there is that fact: the greater the love, the greater the loss.

With God, though, that loss is not permanent. Love can remain through loss because there is something beyond loss.

We have to believe - we have to hope - that God has taken His precious children to His heart and will hold them close. 

That is what will get us through this.

My thoughts and prayers are with all of those affected - directly and indirectly - by yesterday's tragedy.

Pray. Mourn. But Hope.

Because Love Himself has conquered death.