If you’re aren’t fond of honesty, you might want to pass right over this post.  Honestly. I won’t be offended in the least. Mainly because I’m sure I’ll never know if you read it or not, but more to the point because sometimes the words inside my head just need to get out, so I can examine them more closely. I have no real idea where this blog post is going today. All I know is what is in my head is slowly driving me crazy with the thoughts.

I learned this week as if for the first time, that “it” isn’t supposed to happen to me, but also “it” isn’t supposed to happen to my friends either.

I learned husbands aren’t supposed to die. At least not before their wife. Especially not when they leave behind a wife, and three young children.

I’ve learned, again as if for the first time, that sometimes I don’t agree with God and how His perfect will operates. Sometimes I want to tell Him what is best and what He can and should do.

Sometimes I want to rail, and shake my fist at heaven, demanding an answer to my sobbing whys.

In my angst, I want to shout that He’s not fair! That He doesn’t understand the suffering. I tend to forget that He was “well-acquainted with our sufferings”, and that “He learned obedience through the things He suffered.”

I want to scream that God doesn’t understand. But the reality is, I’m the one who doesn’t understand. I don’t understand how He works. How His plan is fulfilled through crazy humans like me. I don’t understand how it can be “good” for a man to die before he’s reached the age of 40.

Life begins at 40. Does that mean his life had not yet begun? I know that’s just a stupid saying, but it begs the question anyway.

I don’t understand why we have to have stupid things like death and epilepsy.

They’re both really, really stupid, you know?

But then my heart is drawn back to THE Truth. I don’t have to understand. I don’t have to be able to answer all the questions. I don’t even have to have all the questions, or even ask them.

I have but to trust. Trust the One who knows all, the end from the beginning.  The One who made all things, who holds all things together.

Even my heart. Even my friend, whose heart is shattered more than mine. Who is walking through “the valley of the shadow of death” with her three young children by her side, without her mate, without their Daddy.

I have to entrust my heart, and her to our Father’s keeping. Knowing He alone has the answers, but also He alone has all the comfort she will ever need.

To the memory of Brad Hale, April 15, 1975-September 18, 2014