Coming to Grips with Tragedy

As many of you know by now, the town of Onida suffered a tragic loss on New Year’s Day. A young man, only twenty-years old, died of a self-inflicted gunshot.

It’s a loss for the entire community, of course, but especially for the family. I cannot even begin to understand how they might be feeling right now. I doubt if anyone can, unless you’ve experienced such a thing yourself. It’s something that’s really unimaginable.

There are a lot of things about this situation I don’t know. I am going to tell you a few things I do know, though.

For one thing, I know that God does not hold the way this young man’s life ended against him. You may have heard that some people believe God cannot forgive a suicide. I don’t believe that for a minute. In the first place, God can forgive anything. It is not for us to put limits on God’s ability to forgive. In the second place, God understands us better than we understand ourselves. God knows what this young man was going through, and God knows what drove him to do what he did. God knows, and God understands, and God is not going to condemn him for it.

God does not approve of suicide, of course, but I believe God’s reaction is one of sadness rather than anger. God had a plan for this young man’s life, just as God has a plan for all of our lives. God did not want this young man to end his life prematurely, before he had done all that God had planned for him. God is sad that it happened, but God is not angry at him for it.

God is not angry at anyone else for it, either. The natural thing, especially for his family and friends, is to blame yourself. You think, "Why did we not see this coming? Why did we not do something about it? Maybe if we’d done this or done that, or said this or said that, this would not have happened?"

The reason people did not see it coming is that we are all imperfect human beings. Perhaps there are things that some people see now, in retrospect, were clues that this might happen, I don’t know. It’s always easier to see things after the fact. That does not mean that you should have seen them coming in advance, or even that you could have. Most of us, no matter how depressed or upset someone seems, do not even think about them taking their life. It’s not something that comes to our minds. The chances are, there was no reason before the fact that anyone would have thought this would happen. There is no reason for anyone to blame themselves for it.

A lot of people, in thinking about this situation, are probably asking, "Why?" As we said in church last week, "why" is a question that comes up a lot in the Bible. Job asked it repeatedly. So did the author of Ecclesiastes. Even Jesus asked it: "My God, why have you forsaken me?" The problem is that, even though lots of people in the Bible ask "why", they rarely get their question answered.

So, while we will naturally ask why, as a community we also need to ask "What can we do to help?" What can we do to support this family at such a tragic time? This is why God put us into communities: so we can help each other. We need to pray, of course, but we also need to come together around this family. We need to be there for them. We need to give them all the love and support we can. We need to let them know that, as awful as this is, they do not have to go through it alone. They have lots of people who care about them and who want to help them through this time.

And we need to give them that love and support for a long time. We need to be there for them for a long time. This is not something from which it’s possible to heal in a few days, or a few weeks, or a few months. This is something that will affect them the rest of their lives. It’s something they will never forget. We need to let them know we have not forgotten, either. We need to be there for them next week, and next month, and this summer, and on and on and on.

We may never understand things like this, but we know that God is there in them. God cries with us, and God mourns with us. God is still there for us, and God still loves us. God wants us to be there for each other and to love each other, too. Let’s be there for this family in the days and weeks and months ahead.