All creation groans

Somehow, it’s almost June, and I’m sitting at my aunt and uncle’s White Bear Lake house, gazing out their wall-size picture windows at a thousand shades of Minnesota green. I love this house. My aunt has often called it their “tree house” because the neighborhood is so wooded with tall trees, and the house has so many windows, you feel like you’re tucked up among all the branches.

I lived here for a semester back in 2001, just before I started my first (and to date, only) real paying job. I had my college graduation party here. I’ve helped lug in a countless number of Christmas trees through the small front door, and squished with boatloads of relatives on the sectional sofa in the family room. In this house, I’ve watched my cousin paint, helped my sister pack for her honeymoon, stayed up all night with my aunt watching “Pride and Prejudice,” and stood around in the kitchen, talking and eating cereal, ‘til all hours of the night.

If there is anywhere on earth that might hold some of the peace of heaven, I would vote for this house as one of those places.

These past two days, though, being here with my Grandpa to celebrate my little brother’s college graduation this weekend, there is a different feeling here. Their house is scattered with what can only be described as the aftermath of a catastrophe. There are new handrails on all the staircases, the loveseat in the living room is raised up for easier access, new seats on the toilets do the same. The entire basement is frozen, mid-project, as if Vesuvius had erupted and buried all this activity underneath.

The catastrophe, for those who haven’t followed the saga, was my aunt’s accident last August. She slipped off her bike, over a ledge of the driveway, and hit her head on a tree in their yard, breaking her neck and injuring her spinal cord at the 5^th & 6^th vertebrae. Life as the Hansen’s knew it, stopped.

The sadness that hangs over the house now is almost more about what almost was than what actually is. What hangs over the house, spoken and unspoken, is the sense that things are not going to be the same again. But Carol is a walking miracle, seriously. She shouldn’t have feeling below her waist, or use of her arms. Instead, she can get around with a cane, can write (in what we all half-jokingly say is better handwriting than she had prior to the accident!), is, most importantly, still Carol. Even so, every day is a battle for Carol (and all of us) to both accept the way life is now and continue fervently praying and working toward a future in which things will be as they were before. Somehow, every day is about learning how to properly grieve what is gone, without wallowing, without wishing too much for the past, and at the same time, how to hold on tightly to promises that things will someday be right again. It’s a complicated terrain to navigate.

My grandfather is navigating it too, as my grandma sits at home in the Greeley nursing home, far gone with Alzheimer’s. My cousin, the painter, is also living in grief for not only his mom’s condition, but the loss of two friends (both 29 years old) in the past year – one girl to a car accident, and that girl’s fiancé, my cousin’s close friend, to death in his sleep three weeks ago.

There’s a sense as we all talk to each other that each of us is breathing very deliberately, picking words carefully, trying to understand how the God we serve and love allows such wrenching tests of faith. I don’t, we don’t, believe He causes these griefs, but we know He uses them to test and refine us. But Carol is tired of being an inspirational story. My cousin has every right to say to the Lord, “enough already!”

The only thing I can think to express is that however intensely we feel grief at death, at injury, at the wrongness of how things seem to go in our lives, to that same extent we are experiencing the fallenness of the world. Grief itself is an argument against the existence of grief. This is NOT how God created the world. This is NOT how things are supposed to be. That’s why our hearts rebel against accepting pain as reality – they were not made for it. We were not made for it.

So we live in the hope that one day, things will be right. Our grief now can turn our heads to the unimaginable beauty of that day, stir our hearts for it, and create in us a longing to be with a Creator who truly desires to see us made perfect in both body and spirit.