Tragedy.

Tragedy

Tragedy has been on my mind lately. It has taken human form and it has become a person in my mind. Neither male or female, it has taken form and shape and I watch it as it wonders.

I watch it walk around, sneaking up on the innocent, the arrogant, the prideful, the loveliest of all lovelies, and it strikes. The thing about tragedy, is when it strikes, it's strikes your very heart.

I don't care how strong of a person you are, tragedy will break you. Even the strongest rock in the world can't help but crumble when it's very core, it's stability is struck.

No one like tragedy. Tragedy brings nothing but scream, moans, and sharp shooting pains. Tragedy takes you to the center of who you are.

No matter how hard tragedy strikes, no matter the depths of its impact, I believe good can be found.

The heart. It strikes that heart of yours and it shows your true colors. It stirs up the bitterness, the anger, the pain and down falls of being human.

It's challenges everything you have stated you believed in. It tests that foundation of yours, it tells you what it's really made of.

Tragedy calls you out. Tragedy makes you see the truth. Every. Single. Time.

It makes you face the wickedness that lives in you. It makes you face it.

You'll never fall harder or faster than when tragedy hits.

Want to know who you really are? The ends and the outs of yourself? Invite tragedy in. It will show you.

I think of the story of Job and how he reacted when tragedy struck him. When it struck him again, again, and again.

Job questioned God. Job mourned, he cried, he asked why, but never once did he turn his back on him. Never once did he curse His name because Jobs foundation had God in  it. It was the solid ground in which he laid and wept on. He laid and wept and then was able to stand back up again.

As I've been thinking about tragedy, I couldn't help but think of something I said to a friend not too long ago, who texted me when she was feeling low.

Sometimes I surprise myself with the things that come out of me. They tend to come from the deepest, most tender part of me. A part of me that stays protected, so that it can always be soft and gentle.

In the midst of my friends low moment, these words came flowing out of my fingers into the text message box, "Even though it hurts, pain takes us to the very core of ourselves. It allows us into a place in ourselves we don't always want to go or always see. But it's in that pit, in that dark cold place that Gods love comes over us like a blanket and he says, ' I just want to love you. Right here, let me love you here.'"

I haven't been able to stop thinking about that after I sent that to her. How he just wants to love me, right in the middle of my wicked brokenness, he just wants to love me.

We ask God multiple times why he would bring tragedy upon us. Why he would take us to the lowest pit, why he allowed the fall.

I can't help but believe he allows it because that's where his love is the strongest. That's where the intensity of it is felt. It is there, in that pit of loneliness that we feel it and know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in this world that we could ever do that would make His love change.

Absolutely nothing.