Colors Deep and Blinding

You have plowed deep furrows on my back.

I am drenched in the waters of affliction.

How small, sometimes, our own troubles turn out to be. My own valleys shrink to the size of runoff ditches in comparison with chasms as wide and rough as the Grand Canyon.

Life in this world is huge and impossibly strong and unfathomable sometimes. It can be beautiful, but it can take the breath in another way, leaving my eyes swollen and my heart moving slow and heavy as a sledgehammer and my throat tight. This world pulses with reds of joy and of pain deeper than any red I have known; it thrums with white ache as unstoppable as moon-tides. It dizzies with blue cold, darkening the deeper it takes you. It blinds you with piercing sunlight, hot and searing. It bruises all flesh with purple marks.

My friends just lost a child. Another child. They now have seven small saints in glory, seven faces that were only visible to us in the magic window we call ultrasound for a very short time.

Sorrow isn't the right sort of word for this. Grief may be. Great loss returning again, retching pain, tearing of life from life, hope hidden for the moment, weariness and doubt. Grief is wracking them in body, soul, mind, home and heart. And I see the mess of color on this canvas, and wonder why. I feel the very edge of their confusion and pain, the sense of being ignored or miscared for, of being told no so harshly, yet again. What is God doing here?

One day, we trust, we will see this picture from another perspective, and the wild mingling of sharp colors and the dark lines like furrows across it will make sense and even be beautiful. But I'm not sure how to see that now. The red is too strong and the furrows are too deep. I have no words to smooth or salve or synthesize it all, only words to cry to heaven for that peace which passes understanding.

Hosanna: thank you, Lord, for this child. Cover also these other helpless children with Your wings.