I picked up a card from the pile next to the guest book yesterday and was immediately struck by the image on the front: the sun hanging over the ocean, an intense orange glow reflecting on the waves and the clouds. But was it setting or rising? Considering that I was in line at a viewing, the obvious answer was that it was setting. But it was impossible to tell just from the picture, and it occurred to me that perhaps it was deliberately ambiguous.
Yes, the life of a 19-year old young man had ended far too soon—he was a former student of mine, just starting his second year of college, and I’ve known his family for 14 years—but at the same time, it was also time for beginnings. It was the beginning of a new phase of life for the rest of his family—a life that suddenly now has one less family member around. It was also the beginning of Kyle’s life in eternity with God.
I’m beginning to wonder if our lives here on Earth are not so much ongoing and smoothly continuous things, but whether they are sharply divided into segments by these abrupt events. I look back in my own life, and I can precisely identify, in most cases down to the date, events that marked the end of one phase and the beginning of the next. Events that affected me so deeply and significantly that in each phase I felt like an almost entirely different person.
It’s a little like wandering through a house where each room has a completely different atmosphere and feel and design scheme. You walk through the doorway from one room to the next and it’s like you’ve been transplanted instead to a different universe. Except in life, the doors are all one-way—once you pass through into the next room, the ones you’ve left behind are closed to you forever. I can distinctly remember having the feeling within a day or two after several of these upheavals that the life I had been living up to the moment that my world shifted suddenly seemed like some surreal dream and that I had awoken to find that the remaining shreds of that dream were quickly evaporating like the last bits of mist after sunrise on an August morning.
As I stood in line to visit with Kyle’s family and give them my condolences and best wishes and prayers, I thought about how his passing would be one of those defining, shattering moments in their lives, and it was not difficult for me to imagine what it might be like to have one of my own children torn from my life without warning. Granted, the reality would probably be nothing like my imagination, but I’ve had enough similar experiences with separation and death to be able to empathize.
The one thing that has held true in my life all the way along is that no matter how devastating the loss, no matter how radically different my life seems after crossing that doorway into the next room, I’ve always managed to find God at the center of it, directing my path, moving me forward, helping me cope with the change and above all else never failing to love me unconditionally. There are certainly times I don’t feel His presence or look for him—there have been far too many times that I’ve run from Him instead—but He’s always been faithful and has never ultimately let me down.
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