What do you do when your heart and your brain don’t agree? How do you reconcile something you KNOW to be true but don’t FEEL to be true? I think that has been one of the hardest parts of this grief journey. No matter the outcome of any trial - in this situation the death of George Mason, my sweet son - God is good. God is always good. But sometimes, like in the death of someone you love, it doesn’t feel like he is good. It feels like he should’ve (and could’ve) healed my son, because that would have been the good and decent thing to do. It feels like I should be carrying around an 11 month old little boy and preparing my home for its second little walker. It feels like there shouldn’t have had to be tears and sorrow these last months. But what I know to be true about my God doesn’t fit with my feelings of anger and disappointment. God is good. There is no doubt about that in scripture. He is good because he is perfect. He is good because he is never changing. And yet, I have a broken heart and an empty nursery... those two things don’t seem to reconcile with one another.
I probably won’t ever be able to truly reconcile God’s goodness and my son’s death. I imagine that it’s one of those things that won’t have a complete answer until Jesus returns and the world is made new. That’s part of this journey. Wrestling with God’s goodness despite my son’s death. I have told myself countless times that God is who he is regardless of my feelings on the matter in any particular instant. He doesn’t change but my feelings do. Emotions and feelings, they ebb and flow like waves on the beach. The water rushes in and pushes sand into the beach and then almost instantly retracts into the vast ocean, taking with it some of the very same sand it just deposited. God warns us not to build our house on sand and I think it’s not a large leap to assume we can’t build our faith on emotion either. Until God makes this world whole and right, my son’s death is going to seem awful and often unfair. Thankfully, even though my head and my heart don’t always agree, the truth about my Lord is always true and never changing. When I’m feeling blue or {frustrated, angry, disappointed, sad, etc} I can run into the words of my Father and be comforted.
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" Matthew 7:11
“And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." Mark 10:18