Dear friend

I've been thinking a lot about our conversation and wondering if I could have had a better response, wishing that I knew more theology or could speak better about who god is or what our lives are about or why these things happen. I'm no C.S. Lewis and honestly have no aspirations to be and my guess is that you don't want deep book-ish theology right now. But I want to offer you something, even if it's just my own mutterings to myself.

Your situation, it's really really shitty.

And I'm not sure why the shit hit the fan now and not five years ago, and I'm really not sure why it's happening to you rather than your college roommate or anyone for that matter. I don't have the Why's figured out and I'm not sure if I will in my lifetime - the pursuit drives me a little batty and makes me wonder if god is a little monstrous. I don't think god is monstrous.

Last spring, I heard a man address a crowd of soon-to-be grad school graduates. The man was dying of cancer, a battle he'd been waging for a few years which I had witnessed only from afar. That morning, the toll of the battle was apparent. His wife assisted him to his seat at the front of the hall - he was too weak to stand for his address - and his wife was even prepared to read his remarks should he not have the strength to finish. I can't tell you the details of his address - his sermon, really - not for lack of paying attention. I was truly captivated in the beauty of the moment because he talked about that passage in 2 Corinthians, where Paul talks about being hard-pressed but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. How there is a treasure in all of this brokenness, that there is life in this death, that there is hope that we will not be abandoned, we will not be destroyed. And here was this man before me, too weak to stand, barely able to make it through the morning, battered and bruised from the years of cancer - here was that jar of clay, in the flesh, fragile, vulnerable, broken - proclaiming a hope that can face even the darkest days, that can face even death.

I don't know what all that means - again, I'm a little weak on my systematics. But the little I do know seems to indicate that Jesus of the gospels is on the side of the broken, the poor, the people on the edge. And the gospels seem to tell the story of someone willing to wade into all of this shittiness, someone who rolls up his sleeves, gets his hands dirty. Someone who will sit and have a glass of wine with you and let you spew your heart out. There is no wand that waves away the horrible awful pain of grief, of sadness, of anger. I'm not sure how to untangle the mess of despair, of loneliness, of uncertainty. I'm really not even sure if I can tell you how life will emerge from death, especially this particular wound. Who knows how it will heal?

It is my hope - beyond all hope - that comfort will find you, that hope will breathe into your soul, that compassion will wrap its way around your heart.

And in the meantime, you will not be destroyed, you will not be abandoned.

And in the meantime, this is shitty.