Sometimes people don t make it home safely. Sometimes people drown in boat accidents. Sometimes people are killed in car accidents, airplane crashes, train collisions. Women die of breast cancer. Men die of prostate cancer.
Youth die of drug overdoses.
Sometimes people, innocent people, children, our own loved ones, die in floods, hurricanes, tornadoes. In lived reality as theologians like to call it, sometimes Jesus doesn t calm the storm, or our hearts. Ched Myers describes an amateur video tape taken in 1991, after the U.S. bombing of Iraq, surveying civilian destruction. But I was particularly moved by one brief, silent moment in which an elderly Iraqi woman appeared, swathed in black, standing alone atop a small mountain of concrete rubble. Alternately she would bend down, pick up a piece of debris, and heave it aimlessly away, as if she knew her salvage efforts were futile but would not be deterred from this rite of grieving, this terrible labor of love.