Holding Tragedy and Redemption Together
by Rachel Bunn
I once heard a description that being unaware of spiritual warfare was like standing in your kitchen, oblivious to the fact that there’s sheer chaos happening on the floor above you, except for the almost imperceptible shudder of the ceiling light overhead. Tiny bits of ceiling dust float down into your hair as you just mindlessly wash a dish at the sink.
There was a week last year when I walked out of a tragically beautiful adoption and into a beautifully tragic funeral within six days of each other. Both for children. One rejoicing for a family joined together and one grieving for a family ripped apart.
It was a week where God lifted the veil back and exposed the reality of this universe. A week where you realize there’s so much more going on than just what’s on the to-do list, the trending posts, or who messed up your coffee order. It was a week where tragedy and redemption were held together.
Living in a Bigger Story
It is a gift when our Heavenly Father reminds us His story is bigger than us. God created the world perfect, complete, and good. Everything in it was created out of love. God made humans to live in His world, to fellowship with Him, and to bear His image. Adam and Eve were without blemish, want, or grief.
That perfect world was broken after humans chose to believe the lie that maybe God isn’t good and that we should take matters into our own hands. Tempted by Satan, Adam and Eve disobeyed God. The disobedience of Man ushered in sin, infecting everything in God’s good world. The earth, our bodies, and our relationship with God and others, are all broken as a result.
When God reminds us that the world is groaning under the sinfulness and suffering of people like you and me, we should pay attention. We should rightly be grieved by tragedy. We should lament that we live in a world where children need adoption and children die. God’s story is one of longing because we know that it shouldn’t be like this.
Praise God that He was not satisfied with His children being apart from Him and living in brokenness. God had a plan to rescue us to Himself, to redeem the world, and to one day fully restore it as perfect, complete, and good once more. And the only way to do this was for God to come to us. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became human, lived the perfect life we could never live, died the death we deserve, satisfying God’s just punishment for our sin, and then was raised to life three days later by the power of the Holy Spirit, conquering sin, death, and Satan. Jesus is the ultimate Redemption of the world. His righteousness and our salvation are a gracious, undeserved gift to us because of the Father’s great love for us. All we must do to earn this gift is believe that Jesus is who He says He is, that we are desperately sinful and need a Savior, and trust in Jesus’s great love for us.
While Jesus lived on Earth, He brought God’s kingdom to bear on a broken world. He perfectly loved the Father, and perfectly loved and cared for others by healing their sins and bodies. Jesus gave us glimpses of God’s restoration for the earth, our bodies, relationships, and souls. He calmed storms, gave sight to the blind, adopted abandoned sons and daughters, and forgave our sins. As believers, we now have the Holy Spirit indwelling in us who gives us power over sin and Satan. We do not have to believe the enemy’s lies! We have tasted and seen that the Lord is good!
One day, Jesus will return to fully and completely restore the world to its original glory. There will be no more devastation, pain, and grief. Those of us who love and follow Jesus are adopted into the family of God. We will one day live in perfect harmony with God and with each other, fully healed.
Already and Not Yet
In the meantime, we recognize that this story of redemption and restoration is already taking place in hearts and families even as we await eternity. We see it in the compassion we pour out as we bear the suffering of friends who grieve the death of their daughter. We see this in our joyful celebration of the adoption of a son into a family that is not his blood. We hold tragedy and redemption together only by the grace of God. Alone, we cannot continue holding these two truths. In our despair, we will never be able to understand or grasp how to do this. In our pride, we will blow past these revelations of God, ready to be rid of the discomfort and focus on our own desires. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit can we look up from ourselves and focus on the cross, the perfect story of tragedy and redemption. With our eyes fixed on Jesus, only then can we move toward others while holding grief and joy simultaneously.
If I look at myself, I am often blinded to the realities of a broken world and I miss the beautiful glimpses of restoration around me. I stay focused on trivial things because the hard things are just so messy and painful. Thanks be to God for moments that stop us in our tracks. May they take our breath away and move our souls to tragic and beautiful lament. As believers, we do not grieve without hope. Jesus redeems every moment of every day, and my prayer is that He lifts the veil over my eyes more and more.
Last year, after that week, there was a night when I lined up my own children’s rain boots, a mundane and normal act. But I thought of the cross and counted my blessings one by one. Friends, may we arrange rainboots, create to-do lists, and meditate on our Savior simultaneously more and more. Amen.