For me, Chandler’s birth held a special significance, as her mother is my cousin, Bethany, and the first in our family to bear a member of the next generation. For months, I anticipated the arrival of her baby girl, and I celebrated this new life with her, even as I recognize that it arrived at a period in our family that had seemed difficult, dry, and even dead. While many dear family and friends surrounded Bethany and Chandler at the birth, Bethany’s father only heard the baby’s cries hours later from a recording they played for him through the phone stationed publicly down the hall from the prison cell where he had spent the last 10 months. In that moment, I imagine he felt a bittersweet blend of emotion as he rejoiced in the life whose arrival he could not witness.
Fast forward nearly a year, and Chandler is growing into a beautiful, lively toddler. She babbles happily to anyone who will listen, and she took her first steps several weeks ago. As the only baby in the family, she receives limitless affection and, of course, all the hand-me-down clothing. While most of the family dotes on her whenever they wish, her grandfather only sees her on select Saturdays, after Bethany has spent the night in a rural hotel in order to arrive at the prison when visiting hours begin. Spending time with Chandler has been among the highlights of his 22-month sentence, which will fortunately end soon, but it is also a reminder of how much he has missed and of what transition awaits upon his return home. In such moments of mixed blessing and despair, one has to wonder—How is God at work?
While I recognize that my family’s pain is real and has stemmed from a genuinely challenging situation, I also believe it to be rooted in a more universal state of pain. Indeed, this pain belongs to the entire human race—to my cousin Bethany and to her father, to the sick and the dying, to the world’s slaves and refugees, to all who mourn and weep. It is the pain that propels people to live in solidarity with one another through their brokenness.
Just as this deepest level of human pain is not confined to a single time or place, neither is the God who responds to it with gracious healing. God is transcendent and powerful, yet God still entered into the reality of human suffering in vulnerable form as a witness to our pain. Far from disaffected, Jesus stood alongside Mary and Martha at their brother’s tomb, and in a moment both woeful and tender, he too wept (John 11:35). With this expression of grief, Jesus reminds us that God is at work, even in the areas of our lives that feel most broken—in hospital rooms and prison cells, in the heartache of a spoiled relationship, in the passage of a loved one, in the fear and uncertainty of what’s to come.
As humans, we continuously face this pull between the brokenness of the world around us and the hope that God is at work within it. Death and life give way to one another as spring blooms prepare to push dry leaves from the branches and a baby’s birth follows the end of an elder’s life. In a single moment, our deepest fears may exist alongside our expectant trust in God’s universal presence. The challenge is in reconciling these emotions, in learning to surrender to the discomfort of our brokenness, and in being gentle with ourselves as we remember that healing and hope are rarely simple.
