Loss is a part of life. Disappointment often marks our days. We wonder if there is more: more to the story, more to this life, more to come. We hope and honestly, the barest of hope is sometimes all we have left to hang on to.
Thanksgiving week our family unexpectedly lost a dear friend. What started out as a normal Tuesday morning in text conversation with my friend transitioned to afternoon pleas and cries lifted up to heaven on her behalf. The love of her life -literally since she was one-year old in the church nursery-was in an accident leaving behind her and her four beautiful children.
How do you grapple with this kind of loss?
Heaven only knows.
I cried out to God Thanksgiving week with so many vacillating emotions: hurt, anger, heartbreak—and somehow, even gratitude.
Because there, in the midst of so much pain, I watched my friend give thanks when her world was shattered Thanksgiving week. With arms raised in worship during the funeral, her life testified that she knew where hope was found.
Where can we find hope in the midst of life’s greatest tragedies?
One of the most beautiful things I have ever read on suffering is in C.S.Lewis’ masterpiece, The Great Divorce. He begins from the place of eternity, suggesting that we can’t begin to understand from our present state the answers to life.
Who is to say why the young woman becomes a widow? How do we know what God is up to when the child goes another day without bread? Where does the old man find respite as he loses his mind as well as his body?
On this side of heaven, we don’t have clear answers.
But then Lewis writes this beautiful line and, when I read it several years ago, I could not get it out of my head:
“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
What a glorious thought: Heaven will work backwards.
We don’t have to wait for heaven to make up for our loss. Glory is here now. Heaven is here presently working backwards. Eternity touches the present.
This is the hope we have: even that agony. That agony that grips your heart. That keeps you awake at night. That causes your spirit to despair.
He will work that agony into glory.
What is that for you?
Perhaps it is the loss of a dream. Or, maybe it is the anxiety that creeps upon your spirit every day. Whatever that agony is, heaven will work backwards to transform.
His redemption weaves back into our lives from the place of eternity. There is nothing that happens in our mortal life that cannot be transformed into glory. The cross of Christ changes everything.
When they nailed His hands, glory poured out of the agony. Victory defeated death.
Our driest deserts transform into pools of water in the light of eternity. Our darkest nights break with the light of dawn in the wake of eternity. We can shout “hallelujah” in the midst of mystery here on earth.
Because this we know: Heaven will work backwards.
Heaven Will Work Backwards
When I ranted and raved at God and had a hissy fit with the agony of my greatest loss, God listened and still loved me. I came to a settled-ness in my soul that He is God and I am not. It changed
everything.
Beautiful, Christine. I’m sorry for your friend’s loss, and for the Willard’s loss of their friend.