The setting is a small hospital in Ethiopia. One with dirty floors and old blankets on beds, the kind that smell like moth balls. It is obvious there is limited supplies. Bloody rags are a common sight. The aroma of strong alcohol and body Oder mixes and wafts through the hallways.
My friend and I have just arrived to pickup one of the orphan children we were working with this month. The girl had Measles and was finally recovering. When we got there we set out to find a bathroom after a long bumpy car ride.
As soon as we walked out the back door of the hospital neither of us were prepared for what came next.
The spirit of intense grief stopped us and we froze.
Four women sat in front of us reeling in pain. I mean like wailing and sobbing and no control of their body movements kind of pain.
Not knowing what else to do we began to pray. Praying that the Lord would be in the pain, in the agony.
As we were praying more and more people began walking by us yelling and crying. A few women had to be carried as they screamed and flailed about.
I began to cry resorting to sobs not knowing how to react to the pain like a dark black cloud covering everyone within a surrounding distance.
As the people began to walk by us we moved to the side and to our right the doors opened and out came the body on a stretcher.
It seemed to be the body of a young teenage boy or girl. The sheet was draped over showing nothing yet it was unnerving knowing there was a real person underneath. One who had laughed, cried, and lived everyday life. One who had dreams, desires, and passions just like you and I. & whose life has ended altogether to soon.
People grasped at the body and between wheezes shouted phrases looking up at the sky.
They rolled the body away to the corner of the yard behind the hospital and the people trailed behind like battered soldiers. Transparent vessels of the most intense pain I have ever seen.
It seemed like pain had come alive in each of them and was racing to every part of the body, until they had no control over themselves anymore. Pain had taken over.
They left the body in the grass for about an hour and pain made people face plant in the earth and shake their fists at the sky. Shrieks of the women shouting “my baby, my baby” overpowered any other sound until it was all one could hear.
They came with the coffin and carried the body away. The pain moved with the body and eventually left the premises leaving an air of destruction from the tornado it had created.
As things simmered down my friend and I found it hard to return to life as we had known it.
Quite literally it was difficult to function. The thoughts began to race through my head. What if that was “my baby”? what if that was me?
Yet the thing I was thinking about most was a phrase from a movie I had watched a few days prior.
In the movie there is a moment where one character is talking about pain, he says, “That’s the thing about pain, is that it demands to be felt.”
That very set of words replayed over and over in my head after watching that horrific scene.
As I thought more I began to think about the nature of pain. How it ravages the body, how it leaves destruction, how it humbles.
I thought of Jesus himself sweating blood in grief. And the Father’s heart when He watched His son die for people who did not deserve it.
And I realized something.
Our God is as real and raw as the most extreme pain.
He felt it. He knows it. He lived it.
Pain demands to be felt. And feel it we must. And there is comfort through all of it knowing my God is not one of rainbows and butterflies, but one of blood and screams of agony upon the cross.
I picture the people I witnessed and Jesus upon the cross side by side.
Both experiencing the most brutal pain, both shrieking, both given over to letting pain be felt.
Pain demands to be felt & felt it He did.
& you know the craziest part?
My God chose that pain.
So that we may live.
Joy comes in the morning. And in the destruction that pain leaves lies the most fertile of soil for life to begin again.
The cross was a bloody brutal mess, yet a few days later. the stone was rolled away
Sometimes it takes a funeral to make you feel alive.
And not just sometimes but all the time it takes the death of the lamb for us to live on forever.
Praise be to our Lord Jesus Christ who was and is and always will be. Amen.
