A Bipolar Afternoon

On Wednesday, of this week, my mother had tears welling in her eyes in excitement as she watched my nine-year old daughter win the silver medal in the district school board cross-country finals. Literally as her grand-daughter is running her race, my mother's father is being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and, less than an hour later, she again has tears welling in her eyes as she watched him pass away.

Grandpa was a good man and we will pay our respects to him during his funeral, so it is not my purpose here to eulogize him. Rather, I remark on the curiosity of timing.

I joked with my mother later in the day about the bipolarity of her afternoon. Rushing from the race course to the hospital. Barely an hour between watching her grand-daughter pass a hundred competitors and watching her father pass into eternity. Tears of joy immediately preceding tears of sorrow.

If we could plan the timing of events, we would never plan it that way. But we can't plan them. We don't know when we will experience great excitement nor do we know when we will experience great disappointment. And we may never understand the timing. I can't give a great theological explanation why my mother went through such an up-and-down roller-coaster on Wednesday. One might think it's just happenstance and that's enough of an explanation. But I believe in a sovereign God who is intimately involved in the details of my life and so 'happenstance' doesn't cut it for me.

I can't explain why things happened the way they did. And I find freedom in the fact that I don't need to figure out why things happen the way they do. Rather, believing in that sovereign God brings us to the place where we can trust that He has a plan for all these experiences. And His plan is a great one.

David, while hiding in a cave from a paranoid king who wanted to kill him, penned these words, "I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praise to you among the nations. For your steadfast love is great to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth!" (Psalm 57:9-11) It's not so much a question of figuring out why these things happen; it's more a question of figuring out what impact these things will have on me. Can we, like David, in the midst of elation and exhaustion, still worship the One who gives and takes away?