My lovely uncle passed away this week. Another lovely uncle has been given 2 years to live. And I mourn with their families. The thought of saying goodbye, the gaping hole in lives left behind…why, oh why?

A small, casual church in the mountain village extends a hand to our family in welcome and worship. A church family in another place. The pastor speaks of the “worth-ship” of God and His glory. He says something I have not considered before.

When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, God determined that we should not be tied to sin for eternity. He allowed our physical lives to become temporary so we would still live eternity in perfection. So death is not so much a punishment, but a release to the way we were created to live; eternally without sin.

Death is only the door that leads to being with our Creator.  Death, in itself,  is a gift to the one who dies as a child of God. But not us that remain without them. The true act of selflessness is to rejoice for my uncle who is right where he belongs; perfect and at the feet of his Lord. But we ache for the loss in our lives. We weep for the daughters and son and brothers and sisters and all the loved ones that are staring into the hole that is left behind.   My God, though, is so happy to see one of His sons is back home.

And us wounded ones who have lost parts of ourselves in the battle, who walk around with gaping, bleeding emptiness, who feel the longing for something we have lost but can never seem to find, who yearn for a home that always seems to elude us and a wholeness that is never quite ours, perhaps that aching is itself an answer from God?

That our craving for Him is a way of experiencing Him. And in our hungering for God, we are slowly healed by God . Ann Voskamp

www.aholyexperience.com/2010/07/letters-to-wounded-when-you-wonder.html

Someday we’ll understand. Someday the emptiness won’t be there. The hole will be filled. We will be made perfect.  It will be as it was intended. Walking with Him in the garden.