Meaning and
Purpose
Two more terms related to loss that keep floating around in
my head are meaning and purpose.
I hear two voices speaking when these terms come up in my
consciousness. One voice is that of a
friend who shared with me last year that she had given up her faith after a
significant loss earlier in life. She
stated it something like this – “I could no longer believe in a good God since
He had taken my loved one away from me.”
In this view, I sense that meaning and purpose disappear with the
dismissal of belief in God.
The other voice is that of the well-intentioned believer,
who so desperately wants to believe that since God is God, everything that
happens somehow has a purpose and our job is to simply respond to these
circumstances correctly. This belief
often goes along with a certain view of God’s sovereignty – there is a purpose
in my loss because God caused it (or at least allowed it) to happen in some act
of volition. These folks say things
like: “God had a reason in mind and
therefore Daniel’s time was up,” or “Daniel was ready, so God took him,” or
blah, blah, blah.
Both voices seem to be stuck in the same place – cause and
effect. God either screws up by causing
death or, God is in control and chooses everyone’s death time, so we just need
to somehow find peace in that.
The further I journey down my path of loss, the more I believe that both these voices are based on faulty, though perhaps very understandable logic. We humans very much need a god who is in control and therefore can be held responsible and accountable, whether that be blaming him and choosing to no longer believe or, blaming Him but choosing to believe that our loss must somehow be a good thing.
At this point, it seems to me that I need a third option, the
same one that I have written about earlier.
In effect, I don’t know what to believe and I would rather not commit
myself – this third option is mystery.
It is and will remain a mystery to me why Daniel died – tragedies
occur when people do bad or evil things (Hitler killing Jews, etc.), or do
stupid things (people take risks and suffer the consequences), or nature simply
happens (deer jump out in front of cars).
I cannot fathom this mystery of Daniel’s death because I
“see through a glass dimly” as long as I live on earth.
Finding meaning or purpose in this tragedy is perhaps not a
question about what role God played in it as much as it is a question about how
I will choose to respond when I happen to be struck with a loss.
The meaning in Daniel’s death is not literally “what does it
mean?”
Instead, the question is:
“what does losing my son mean in my life, in the relationships I have,
in the way that I choose to live going forward, in the posture that I take
toward others, in the spirit and values that I live by?”
Likewise, my hang-up with “purpose” is that many seem to
want to find a reason for Daniel’s death in a similar manner to the question of
meaning.
Right now, I choose to not believe that there has to be a
reason why Daniel died, other than the fact that he sustained injuries that he
could not recover from as the result of an accident that was random and tragic. Why do we as humans demand there be a more
complex reason for every tragedy?
At the same time, I deeply desire to find a new focus or
purpose as a result of Daniel dying. I
want to live more fully, more passionately, more graciously, with more abandon
because of this experience.
I want purpose to come out
of tragedy whether or not I ever perceive the purpose in the tragedy.
Lord: hear my prayer.
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