Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash
There’s a photo in my living room of an 11-year-old me eating watermelon with my dad on the bank of the Guadalupe River. Tonight (Wednesday), I caught myself staring at it while I sat with my 6-year-old daughter on the couch. Summer fun and evening snuggles. Two such sacredly safe, ordinary things. One, the kind of thing families and young girls were doing at that same river last Thursday afternoon. The other, the kind of thing dozens of parents are wishing they could do one more time today.
This was just one of many such moments I’ve experienced this week. And I know you’ve had them too. Moments in which we’re confronted with the weight of a hundred tragedies. Another updated death toll. Another little girl’s photo. Another heartbreaking story. Another personal connection.
It’s felt tough to talk about with each other. When we try to, we just share updates we’ve heard because we don’t have words to express what we feel or to honor the magnitude of the loss. We feel this great grief, but in many ways it isn’t really ours, and we don’t know what to do with it. So we just return to the news cycle hoping it leads us to closure and relief.
I’m not sure where you’re at today, but I know where I and those I’ve talked to have been this week. It’s for the sake of reflection on those things that I want to pose and answer a couple of questions. Maybe it will help you too.
Why does a good and sovereign God allow things like this to happen?
I honestly don’t know. While the Bible helps us here, there’s no silver-bullet answer to this question. As I preached about on Sunday, there are things about God we can’t fully understand. And when we try to, it either leads us back to a more frustrated version of the same place. Or—much worse—it makes us cold, callused pseudo-theologians. “The secret things belong to the Lord” (Deuteronomy 29:29) and they’re best left in his hands.
But I do know this. God’s mind isn’t just bigger than ours. His heart is too. And his heart breaks over death and injustice.
Just as my mind and yours can’t comprehend the tragedies of this week, so too our hearts can’t possibly hold all of the grief these losses deserve. But God’s heart can. The God who gave his own precious tears for the grieving on earth (John 11:35) is holding onto every tear shed by a Central Texas loved one this week like a precious treasure (Psalm 56:8). He whose friends abandoned him in his moment of trial (Matthew 26:56) stays with each of his sheep in the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23:4). As Pastor Roman reminded us on Sunday, “He gathers the outcast. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:2-3).
God cares more about Kerrville than we do, and he cares better than we could. His heart is big enough to hold the unimaginable magnitude of grief this tragedy has and will produce.
What should we—Christians witnessing this from afar—do?
First and foremost, we should be sad. Our God’s grieved by this, and we should be too. Let your heart break.
If you know someone who has lost a loved-one, grieve with them.
But say no to trying to hold all the grief. You can’t. You couldn’t possibly dignify the loss enough. But God can, and he is, and—one day—he will once and for all.
Take breaks from the news cycle. Staying ever-plugged into the story isn’t going to bring you peace, answer your questions, or heal the broken-hearted. But God will. Take the grief of those affected to him in prayer. Take your questions to him in prayer. Lay it at his feet. Trust him with them.
Finally, I’ve talked to many of you who find it hard to shake the constant thoughts about Central Texas, or who are parents finding yourselves anxious about your own children. I want to offer you these words from Jesus: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34). God clothes the lilies, he feeds the sparrows, and—as we sing every Easter Sunday—“he holds the future.” In times like these, we wish we knew the complexities of inconceivable suffering, and we wish we knew the future. It feels unfair that we don’t. But we can rest in the knowledge that God does. And we can face the joys, privileges, and struggles of what God has entrusted to us today without taking them for granted.
