The Tear Jar

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I find myself tonight in the median of two unrelated, cataclysmic events.  The sort that grabs your face, stares you in the eyes, and forces you to think differently than you had before. 

The first happened a week ago Tuesday.

I have a nephew.  He is that rare sort of man that is born with integrity, a strong sense of duty, and an inner core of courage.  He is the stuff of heroes.  This sounds like the crowing of a proud auntie.  I am not embellishing here.  Adam is one of the nicest kids I have ever had the privilege to know.  He is all I say he is and then some.  If you meet him someday you will be the better for it.

Adam followed in his grandfather’s steps and enlisted with the National Guard shortly before his high school graduation last May.  Five days after graduation, he was activated and in August was on a plane headed to Afghanistan to detonate explosives. 

I was honored to attend his send-off.  The civic center was filled with family members trying to be brave and succeeding mostly, with a few failing miserably.  The governor milled about the expansive room before the ceremony began, shaking hands and expressing his gratitude. 

A great sense of patriotism filled my chest as I felt the genuine gratitude for the service of these men and women who, like Adam, were heading into the unknown.  There were last minute hugs and promises for prayers and then we were separated.  Eleven men rounded out Adam’s squad and joined him in a hostile land on a dangerous mission.  Three of them came home this week.  One badly burned, but alive, and two who paid the ultimate price.  Sergeant 1st Class Darren Linde, a father of four, and Specialist Tyler Orgaard.  The younger soldier, Tyler, was Adam’s bunk mate. 

The details of that terrible day are not germane here.  The end result is the same with or without them.  Some died and some were spared.  Those alive are trying to grieve and keep moving forward.  But it is so very difficult.  I have spoken with Adam’s mother, my sister-in-law, a couple of times since then.  She and I try to make sense of it.  It is impossible.  I am sure so much the harder for those who are there still trying to carry out their orders and wrap their brains around the fact that of eleven men, three are no longer with them.

The second event happened Friday.  You already know what I am about to share.  Twenty precious children were gunned down in their classrooms.  Twenty babies rushed out the door first thing that morning – just like all the other mornings of their short academic careers -- and got onto buses or into cars with one mitten missing and no time to brush their teeth or eat a decent breakfast.  Snarled hair and half-zipped Dora backpacks left in a rush of flurried lateness… an ordinary morning that would end with all of heaven and earth weeping. 

The second grade teacher in my school stepped into my room moments after my students left for music in the afternoon.  She delivered the news that I had been insulated from all day.  I get no Facebook at school, no cell service, and no time to surf the web.  My fellow Americans had been grieving all day and I had no idea.  Her words left me chilled and shocked.  I was imagining the scenario from two vantage points; as a mother and as a teacher. 

My very skin reacted to the news.  Reeling and sickened I finished the day.  My semi-annual evaluation with the elementary principal was scheduled while my students were in music.  I sat down in his office in shock, my mind in disarray as I tried vainly to focus on his words.  I had to ask him several times to repeat himself.  Suddenly things like a good evaluation seemed pathetically unimportant.  My mind was in Connecticut, picturing babies in their last moments of life.  I could not comprehend any of it. I could not seem to stop myself from imagining the sheer terror that their last moments of life held for them.

Adam’s mother called me that night.  She knew it had to have been a hard day for me.  She also wanted to share details of the two very difficult funerals she had attended for the men in Adam’s squad.  We talked of school babies and the empty arms of mothers and fathers.  Our voices were choked and our emotions raw.  Her own arms ache for the son that is serving his country in a barren land far away, who is trying to process his own grief, who carries ninety pounds of gear on his back, and who vainly tries to sleep on the cold ground with no blanket for warmth.  She will not get to wrap him in her arms for several months yet.  That day will come for her.  I fully believe that and cling to that hope.  It will not for twenty sets of parents from Sandy Hook Elementary.

I saw an image on Facebook after that conversation.  It haunts me yet.  The parents of Specialist Orgaard are seated in folding chairs at the graveside.  They are bundled against the cold, but the frozen prairie surrounding them is desolate and snow covered.  In the photo, their shoulders are stooped and their heads bowed as they reach out to receive the folded flag offered them that had moments before covered the casket of their twenty-year-old son.  It is a stark image of parents who will never hold their son again; the flag an unacceptable substitute for living, breathing flesh and blood.

As that image worked its way into my heart and soul, I lost my composure.  The tears that I had held in check all afternoon and evening now refused to stay bottled up any longer.  The grief of a parent must surely be the most painful of all emotional suffering.  My children all live.  They are home now for the holidays.  Their bedrooms are filled again with grown up bodies and luggage and I am filled with gratitude that we are all together.  I am unable to identify with the loss of a child.  But the waves of torment and grief that surely washed over those parents on Friday as day turned to night and the world prepared for sleep, had to have felt like a torturous nightmare from which there is no awakening.  Empty beds and empty arms.  The missing mitten now found and held against faces and sobbed into with cries from places so deep that even sound hides.  The primal scream of a parent whose child has been ripped from their protective arms.

I hope they had people around them to hold them and scream with them.

The question from mankind now directed toward its Creator is one word in length… “Why?!    God, how could you let this happen?  Where WERE you?  Why innocent life?  Are you really that far removed from your creation?” 

A DJ on my favorite Christian radio station helped put this into perspective for me as I drove home from school on Friday in a fog of mental exhaustion and sadness.  He reminded me of a scripture I had completely forgotten. It is poignant and deeply moving.  The Psalmist David wrote this in his book, “You have collected all my tears in your bottle.  You have recorded each one in your book.” Psalms 56:8, (NLT).  Did you know that God is so broken by our heartache that he actually keeps record of every tear of sorrow that falls from our eyes?  I am staggered by that kind of empathetic love. 

Where was God, you ask? 

God was crying with us, from places so deep that even sound hides.  It is the devastating side effect of sin entering God’s perfect world.  Illness, both of the body and mind, were never a part of God’s original blueprint. 

Someday He will set everything right.  Until then…

We hold our babies just a little bit closer and bless the days that are mundane and riddled with frustration and we cannot find both mittens.   

Above all, we remember that Christmas is coming!  I do not mean merely the date of December 25^th.  I refer instead to the event that triggered a world celebration.  No other person born has the entire world celebrating in unison. 

Christmas is really a story of the Birth of Hope.  God became a helpless baby and grew up to defeat Evil and Death through his death and resurrection. 

So do not despair. 

Cry, yes.  Mourn and weep and ask the hard questions.  Be angry if you must.  God is not intimidated by our pain.  But allow the light of Hope, dim now but still flickering, to warm and strengthen you.

God’s Jar of Tears is much fuller than it was before Friday. 

I think a few of his are in there too...