A Better Question for Bitter Times

If you’ve lived long enough in the big hard world under the big hard sun, you’ve experienced the crushing pain and unbearable weight of tragedy and loss. You’ve encountered shocking sorrow—jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching, life-changing news. The phone call that leaves you breathless on your knees feeling heartbroken, forsaken, and hopeless. And when this kind of trial comes your way, you invariably ask the same line of questions—

Why?

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What Already Was—Our Second Adoption Story

Waiting might be one of the most challenging things in life. No one likes waiting. Waiting is miserable and often agonizing. Waiting can be suffering. In his book Christ and Calamity, Harold Senkbeil writes, “We’re fearful in the face of tragedy and the unknown because we’ve never passed this way before; the terrain is unfamiliar, and the perils are formidable . . . We wonder what’s to become of us.” We all have plans that we grasp so stubbornly. We build our lives around our own version of what we think is best and will make us most happy. But we are not omniscient to to know what’s best, nor are we omnipotent to make our plans come true.

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Lessons from a Jarring Year

Pandemic. Revolution. Political polarization. And, oh the memes! With trace levels of dystopia, this year has been a cataclysm of catastrophe, chaos, conspiracy, and civil unrest. But aside from my unmet expectations, constant disappointments, and myriad frustrations, this year hasn’t been explicitly difficult or substantially challenging for me (some things were actually easier). However, there was this underlying uneasiness that persisted as a result of . . . well, change and abnormality.

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