Bjcorbin's Blog

As I stood in the cold morning rain, I stared at the charred remains of what had, only hours before, been the home of a precious young family.  My heart broke at the news that their three year old daughter hadn’t made it and there was no way to suppress tears, as friends and neighbors placed little stuffed animals and flowers on the lawn.  I thought of my own children and remembered each of them at three years of age.  I could barely contain the thought of losing any one of them.  They say that it is better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved at all; and while I believe that is true, I wondered if I could be grateful with only three years of loving a child.  My arms ached at the thought of never being able to hold them again.  I can’t imagine anything more painful than the loss of a child and I couldn’t conjure any idea of what might bring relief or even comfort to this family.  As I often do when things are bigger than I can understand, I found myself praying that God would somehow bring the comfort that none of us could hope to offer them. 

Sadly, some who’d come to view the devastation began to murmur; they seemed to want to talk about what should have been or what might have been; and I found myself deeply grieved by this.   I guess I couldn’t understand how anyone who wasn’t there could presume to know.  Didn’t they think that everyone involved did what they knew to do?  Even if everything wasn’t handled perfectly, how does such a dialogue help this hurting family go on?  I know that if it were me, I’d be second guessing myself on everything I did and didn’t do.  But in the final analysis, such thoughts only serve as a torment.  I caught myself wondering why people seem to need to speak, when they really have no answers.  I suppose that it is really that we are trying to convince ourselves that something like this would never happen to us; that we are somehow more sensible or more heroic than those who have fallen victim to such a thing.  Indeed, it is a terrifying thought that life could somehow conspire to take what is most precious to us and to turn our world upside down in an instant.  But the reality is that such things do happen everyday and that they happen to people (like us) who never saw them coming.  None of us is promised tomorrow and I find myself praying that this knowledge would somehow change the way I live today.

Yesterday, I heard that her name was Isabelle and somehow that made it more personal for me.  It seems that little Isabelle Jade was like a shooting star; that her light burned brightly as she passed across the horizon of this world, but that she disappeared into the heavens before any of us were ready.  As much as we may grieve at the thought of what she never got a chance to experience in this life, we can also be grateful for that same thing.  She lived a life full of loving arms and smiling faces; and now she will never have to face the many pains, disappointments and hardships that are an integral part of every journey through this world.  Whatever love she experienced on this earth pales in comparison to the love she’s experiencing today, as she has returned to the arms of “Perfect Love”.  Our grief is not so much for little Isabelle, but for all those she left behind.  I pray that when the season of grieving is over, the joyful memories of the years spent with Isabelle would be enough to eclipse the painful thoughts of what might have been.