The Hole in the World
Friday, May 9, 2014 at 6:00AM There’s a hole in the world tonight.
There’s a cloud of fear and sorrow.
It’s this Eagles’ song that played in my mind the night my husband died. There was a deep hole where he had been, and that hole will be forever unfilled, at least in this life.
He left a young son to grow through his teen years without a father, and, believe me, every boy needs a dad. My youngest son has an empty spot, a hole, where a dad should be, and he will always feel it. I know this because my husband had a hole, too, left by his own father, who died when he was a child. He always longed for something he could not have.
But the hole in the world is bigger than the empty spot left when a son loses his dad, although there’s nothing quite like the death of someone you need and love to reveal the all-encompassing hole—the big hole made up of all the smaller holes and more. Everything is quite wrong and nothing is quite right.
We want to believe our story starts with “once upon a time” and ends with “they lived happily ever after,” but deep down, we know that none of this world’s true stories are fairy tales. We know that even as we struggle to gain, we are never quite maintaining. As we struggle for stability, things change and not for the better. We build buffers against the unexpected, but they’re never built as solidly as we imagine, and we are always living one disaster away from losing everything.
Storms come, and fires and earthquakes and floods and debilitating diseases. People make mistakes that cause all kinds of hurt to others, never mind the hurt caused by purposeful cruelty. Worst of all, death is inevitable, for ourselves and for everyone we love. So we live before our last appointment in anticipation of future losses and in sorrow over past ones.
Have you thought about why Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died? He planned to raise him. “I go,” he said, “to awaken him.” Yet he was “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” when he saw Mary and the others weeping. He wept, I suppose, in sympathy for them, yet he knew their bereavement would be short-lived. In just moments, they would be celebrating like never before. Do you think he wept because he knew that however brief their sorrow this time round, and however joyful the reunion, Lazarus would die again? Their sorrow would return, inescapably, over and over for the rest of their lives. Did Jesus weep because of the hole in the world?
Like Lazarus and his friends—and Jesus, too—we do have hope for the future. The one who raised Lazarus has already defeated death, and one day we will have our own resurrection. One day creation will have it’s redemption and everything wrong will be made right. No more hole, not because the world is patched, but because it is made new.
But in the meantime, life is pain. We struggle; we lose. We sorrow, not like those who have no hope, but we still sorrow. We don’t have to tiptoe around the hole in the world, as if owning up to how wrong things are would be admitting defeat. Jesus, the one who defeated death, wept in the face of it. We can’t do better than Jesus.
This is an edited version of a post from 2007.
Reader Comments (2)
Heartbreaking, and so hopeful. I'm glad you re-posted it.
This is one of the most moving pieces I've ever read Becky. How wonderful it will be when there are no more holes in our hearts and our world. Only that which is perfectly whole and sweet and good which will last forever.