Dear Reader:

Making sense of life…now that’s a tall order isn’t it? I believe that is what I am most interested in discovering in our next world. I can hardly wait to show God my list of unexplained sorrows and heartaches and ask (like Lachlan and Jakie now do) “But why (God)…but why?“

Why would my father be taken away at the age of 31 leaving behind a young wife and three small children, why would my mother then lose her left hand to bone cancer, and  why would my younger brother die from a relatively rare genetic disorder just weeks before his college graduation? “But why…it just doesn’t make sense?”

These are the questions that aren’t answered in the world we live in…and spending our lives searching for these answers end in futility and  loss of purpose for our own lives.

Making sense of life…aren’t we mere mortals restricted in this quest by the world we are born into and live in until returning home?

Anne and I are switching Louise Penny detective books faster than we can find or order the next book. The author, Louise Penny, speaking through her likable and wise fictious Chief Inspector Armande Gamache, spouts more words of wisdom than I can hardly take in with just one reading.

It is what draws me back to the next book in the sequence…over and over. (My books are starting to look like my old history notebooks after taking notes for a solid hour in each history class. I used to underline words and sentences to go back and study again.)

Case in point: Excerpt from the second book:

One of the Chief Inspector’s young detectives in training (agent) is confused by a murder that just took place in the little town of Three Pines. It was a strange, bizarre death that required a lot of pre-planning. He complains to Gamache that it ‘didn’t make sense’ – why go to all that trouble when the person could have just shot her?

The wise Chief Inspector replies while staring down at the young agent seriously.

” You need to know this. Lesson number one.  Everything makes sense. Everything! We just don’t know how yet? You have to see through the murderer’s eyes. That’s the trick…you need to know that it seemed like a good idea, a reasonable action, to the person who did it. Believe me, not a single murderer ever thought: “Wow, this is stupid, but I’m going to do it anyway.” No..our job is to find the sense.” 

“How?“…asked the young agent.

“We listen” replied the Chief Inspector.

………………………………….

Ah…listen…my chosen word for 2017. What an important word it is. LISTEN. How much we can learn from the cessation of speaking and the influx of listening?

Once I have stopped with all the questioning about the incidents from my childhood that seemed so senseless at the time and even now…I have gradually found an acceptance of what happened with a promise that one day, in another time and place, God will explain the whole story to me…and it will finally make sense. Gamache is right…everything makes sense when seen through the right lenses.

But unlike Chief Inspector Gamache… it is not my role to try to find the sense in it now, while living on Earth,  (outside of it being a catalyst to the person I am becoming, with all these seemingly tragic events comprising the person God is guiding.)

I am not alone with my questioning, my “But why’s.” After all we all have our crosses to bear and I know, deep down, there is a reason for everything that happens in our lives. I, also know, that if we become too bogged down in the past…we will never live the fulfilled life God has given us to live in the present, in the moment.

So until tomorrow…Life does make sense…to God…and thank goodness for that. There is Someone who does knows the answers; we just have to keep the faith that they will be revealed to us when God is ready to do so. God’s time; not ours. And I hope then…I can smile and say!  “Oh, wow!” “How could I have been so blind to what was right in front of me…I see the answer so clearly now.”

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh