I am struggling mightily this week. I was friends with Melanie Wise and her three children, who were killed in a horrific accident this week in Washington County. If you have not read about it, here is a link.

 

http://www.wkyt.com/home/headlines/7186126.html

 

Melanie and her husband, Curtis, were members of my Sunday School class. They had been coming for about one year, and we were just getting to know them really well. I had spent some time at their home a few weeks ago and watched Charlotte, the one-year old, take some of her first steps. 3 weeks ago at a Sunday School social event, Curtis held my infant son all night and talked about how much he loved infants. Melanie was a beautiful 31 year-old with a large, Christian family from Springfield. The two were high school sweethearts, and as far as I can tell, this was the quintessential All-American family. Curtis makes a good living, but he put his family first and could even have been described as a "Mr. Mom."

 

I cannot imagine the darkness that Curtis is in right now. His entire family has been wiped from the face of the Earth in the blink of an eye. I can't imagine what the drive back from work was like when he got the news. I can't imagine what the sight of three little coffins will be like, particularly ones that have to be closed because of their injuries. I can't imagine trying to return to a nice home with no one in it, with toys scattered about that noone will ever play with again.

 

Now, all of the Church folks are very well-meaning. They, like I, want desperately to help him but are helpless because there really isn't anything that can be done except be there for him, pray for him, and do all the little things that keep rolling on while life stands still for him. But it is starting to really anger me all the little phrases that pop out of their mouths that provide Curtis with absolutely no comfort right now. Discussion of "God's Will." Statements like "they're in a better place now." Absurdities like "all things happen for a reason" and "its all part of God's plan."

 

The worst one, though, the one that really inflames me, is "God doesn't give us more burden than we can bear." That one is an absolute crock, and its also a complete and utter misrepresentation of what Scripture says. It comes from I Cor. 10:13. The problem is - it doesn't say that. At all. In any fashion. What that scripture talks about, in ALL translations that I can find, is that the Lord will not allow us to be faced with too much "temptation" without leaving us with a way out of it.

 

"Temptation" is a lot different than "burdens." I don't think this scripture has anything to do with suggesting that we will not be crushed by tragedy greater than we can bear. I think we can be. Many of us have been. The other part of the misrepresented phrase that angers me is the suggestion that God somehow causes or gives us these tragedies. I don't think God has anything at all to do with these tragedies. God can stop them if He wants, yes; God is there to pull us out of darkness, after they happen, yes; but he has nothing to do with their occurrence.

 

I am really struggling with this incident. I know this happens everyday in the world, perhaps it is the first time something of this magnitude has occurred hitting so close to home for me. But I can't for the life of me get my grasp around what good can come from wiping out a beautiful young wife and her three innocent children. It is greatly testing my faith.

 

Any and all thoughts on the scripture are appreciated.

I can't help you with the scripture part of your post my friend.

 

 

All I can offer is my prayers and thoughts for Curtis and for you.

 

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. LN

I've always been told and believe to this day, things happen for a reason, which we often, don't understand.

 

A loss of life, is tragic and not only effects families, but friends, co-workers, neighbors, communities, churches, etc....at the same time, tomorrow is not promised to any of us. Often, bad things happen to those, who haven't had a life they can be proud of and also, it happens to absolutely wonderful people, who contribute to society, family values and have a Christian faith.

 

I lost my Mother, several years ago....A wonderful Christian woman, who anyone would be hard pressed, to find someone who didn't have a kind word to say about her. I too, went through "understanding and coping"....to be honest, I still struggle at times but I know, in my heart that "God has a plan", we may never know what it is, but nonetheless a plan.

 

Never doubt your faith Hearsay, but it is okay to mourn....:thumb:

My Mother always used to say the same exact thing, God would not give you more than you can handle. Nine years ago we found out that this isn't always true, my nephew was killed in a freaky car accident and I have watched my sister-in-law completely quit living. She and my brother have 2 additional children and she could not go on with raising them. She has turned to alcohol and drugs for comfort, cannot go back to church(due to having his service in our church), blames God in her own way, blames herself, etc...Our church family was there for us, nothing has helped her through this. I completely understand the hopelessness that he will go through and we can only pray for him. There is nothing else you can possibly do but stand by and be there for him when needed and pray.

Hearsay-I've thought all morning about your posting. My thoughts and prayers to you & this family. Some scriptures that has helped me during tragedies:

Isaiah 55:8-11 NIV

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Matthew 5:4 NIV

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

Matthew 11:28 NIV

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

2 Corinthians 1: 3-5 NIV

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into or lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

HereSay, there are no words to help, no magic pill, no reason for this to happen, no other person can do anything. All we have is our faith and we if lose that, then all the people who have died in wars, on 9-11, in Colorado, in Virginia, in other accidents, then it means nothing. Each person who remains on earth after losing someone is left to be a reminder, to carry on, to do good. If thay person had just went a different way, didn't join the Army, stayed home today...But they did.

 

Pray for this family and others...we will. Ask God for this help. Ask that he would give you and others the right words.

 

John 11 33:35...When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who also were weeping, he was deeply moved.

 

Psalms 34:18 The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in Spirit.

 

Isaiah 41:10 Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God, I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will hold you with my victorious right hand.

 

As I read your post it really hurt me, I just wish I could help him. And after all these posts I've read on here and other sites this one tears my heart.

I subscribed to a monthly devotional called "Our Journey" if anyone is familiar with it and I recently got my first issue, which is April 2007. And there is a series of related articles about God's faithfulness, and in one the question was asked about Jesus, "Would I rather have Him or what He provides?" It really stuck with me and I've been thinking a lot about that, and I can't help but think of these articles as I look at this thread. I'm going to post them below, it's a little long, but I think it's worth reading.

 

 

The faithfulness of God is celebrated throughout the Bible, especially in the Psalms. In fact, when the word faithfulness appears in the Psalms, it’s always God’s faithfulness which is in view. It is one of the psalmist’s favorite reasons for praising Him (36:5; 71:22; 86:15; 100:5; 138:2).

 

And why not praise Him for it? When you think of all the wonderful promises He has made and realize that because of His perfect faithfulness He will perfectly keep each and every one – how amazing! Who wouldn’t want to give their lives to such a God as this? Who would not choose Him to be their God?

 

But then Job enters into this uncluttered theological world and the picture drastically changes. Job the Righteous, who should be heir to all these promises of God and more, inherits instead unspeakable suffering. This suffering man, sitting in the ashes, forces us to wrestle with the shape of God’s faithfulness. Job causes me to wonder, Just who is this God I thought I chose?

 

In his book Awed to Heaven, Rooted to Earth, Walter Brueggemann prays, “You are not the God we would have chosen.” The troubling truth of that prayer resonates in my heart. Because, the truth is, most often we would have chosen (and indeed do choose) a god other than Job’s troubling God. We would rather not learn the hard lessons the hard way. We would rather not have to worship in the wilderness, where He continually calls us to find and be found by Him. Before we can start, we must face up to this truth about ourselves.

 

The god we think we need is faithful in ways we understand and expect, and he expresses faithfulness in the ways we choose. The good news is, there is such a god. In fact, there are many of them – constructed of small snippets of Bible verses, glued together with human reason and need. These gods always move in predictable ways, according to the given formula. Their faithfulness always feels good. It almost always ends in bankable results. That’s the good news.

 

The bad news is, none of them represents the God of the Bible.

 

...

 

As we take up our journey on this difficult road with Job, we discover that God refuses most often to act in simple, easily understood ways that coincide with our definition of what His faithfulness should look like.

 

We plead and yet the cancer rate among Christians remains the same as it is for those outside the faith. But doesn’t Psalm 103:3 say He heals all our diseases?

 

We beg for financial help, for Philippians 4:19 promises, “God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” But when the much-anticipated check doesn’t appear, we think we must not have had enough faith.

 

These are the kinds of difficult questions that troubled Job. Either God was not being faithful to His promises (unthinkable!), or else Job didn’t understand all that His faithfulness meant. Job was poised on the edge of a stunning new understanding of God.

 

To Job’s friends, God’s faithfulness always looked like doing, answering, healing – ultimately providing. In return for their works-righteousness, God was obliged to respond faithfully.

 

But Job (whom God himself declared righteous) suffered every sort of pain and loss. A thousand years before the Man of Sorrows, Job became acquainted with our grief. In return for his righteousness, Job received suffering. Where was God’s faithfulness?

 

In Job’s world, God was perceived to be a judging, condemning God. He expressed faithfulness by crushing the enemies of the faithful. In Job’s world, God was a question-answering God. He was seen to be faithful by providing wisdom. But the God Job met at the end of his painful journey expressed His faithfulness in a way that no one could have ever imagined. He didn’t answer questions, or crush Job’s enemies; He moved from the throne of chapter 1 and became present. He showed up!

 

Job confessed he couldn’t see God in 9:11. But, once again, let’s move to his great conclusion in 42:5, “I had heard of you…,” stammers Job, “but now my eyes see you.”

 

The God of Job showed His faithfulness by showing up. Sound familiar? He’s the one whose faithfulness is more a matter of presence than provision.

 

....

 

Everyone who came close to Jesus was disappointed by His disturbing revelation of what the faithfulness of God was like. There were those who wanted Jesus to judge and condemn, like the scribes and Pharisees in John 8, who hounded Jesus for a judgment against the woman caught in adultery (see also Matthew 7:1; Luke 12:14; John 8:15, 12:47). The disturbing faithfulness of Jesus does not look like condemnation. Instead, He showed up (was incarnate) to save!

 

Others wanted healing, and certainly Jesus healed them by the thousands. But faithfulness for Jesus didn’t necessarily always look like healing. In John 11, after hearing of the illness of one of His closest friends, Jesus appears to linger far from Lazarus for two more frustrating days. As a result, he dies.

 

Martha and Mary appear with the same disappointed words: “If only you had been here, he would not have died.” If only You had fixed things, healed him, answered our prayers the way we wanted them answered. But, like His father, Jesus had come to show us that God is faithful to us in ways we could never have dreamed.

 

Before Jesus moves on to the tomb of His friend, something miraculous happens – an event most of us wouldn’t regard as a miracle. But it may be the most miraculous miracle of the whole story. Jesus wept.

 

He showed up and entered fully and painfully into the suffering of His friends. Moments later, He would provide the resurrection miracle none of them could have even imagined asking Him for. But Lazarus would eventually die once more, wouldn’t he? Death would remain a reality. What Jesus changed forever was the image of the face of faithfulness. Not menacing, nor judgmental; not with anger in its eyes, but rather a tear.

 

Jesus gave form to faithfulness. He was present in their suffering and ours. Present in their loneliness and ours. Acquainted with all their grief and ours. This was a faithfulness no one expected, so deeply personal, so fully satisfying. Jesus didn’t always “faithfully” give them answers or healing or judgments, but He always gave them Himself.

 

...

 

Who is God for you? What should his faithfulness look like? Is He the predictable, theological Entity, frozen on the throne? Or could He possibly, unimaginably, be the God we meet in Job, the God we see in Jesus, who descends from the throne room where He has been dealing with the accusations of Satan. He shows up, having been moved there by Job’s tears and ours.

 

Who is Jesus for you? How is faithfulness written on His face? Is He merely the caricature of man-made Christianity, or might He be the very image of the God whose disturbing faithfulness to us looks like Incarnation? Could it be that He came not to wave the magic wand and make the cancer go away, but to enter into our sufferings? Could it possibly be true that the best show of His faithfulness is not the healing or the unexpected financial help, but the unthinkable truth that God has chosen to be with us through it all? Could it be that the miracle is not His provision, but His presence?

 

Ask yourself, how did God speak of His faithfulness? What are the words He most often used in both the Old and New Testaments to describe what it would look like?

 

Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:6; Hebrews 13:5)

 

The dwelling of God is with men and women, and he will live with them (Revelation 21:3; Exodus 25:8)

 

But still, author Walter Brueggemann was right when he wrote, “He is not the God we would have chosen.” But neither could we have dreamed up nor imagined such a God; a God, the immediacy of whose presence is incarnate in us by His indwelling Spirit. A God who is committed to completing this act of indwelling us, of living in and through us.

 

It is His deepest desire. It is the greatest of all His wordless miracles and yet we are unsatisfied with Him and want more. He is not the God any of us would have chosen but, as Brueggemann marvelously concludes, He is the God who has chosen us.

I can't help you with scripture Hearsay (on the occasions I make it to my church I am usually welcomed with hugs normally given to a long lost relative) but I am going to a funeral this weekend of my former asst county attorney's wife. She had a riding mower turn over on her Monday and died Thursday. She leaves an 7 year old and a wonderful husband behind. I don't know what I will say to him. She just ran a marathon last week from Campton to Jackson and was so full of life.

 

But when my brother died in 03 or when anything bad happens, I try to remember how lucky I was for what I received from that person. What I mean is I was lucky to have been born to begin with and to have had all the things so many don't get to ever experience. To cope with my brother's death, I never think of him not experiencing the present but of all the memories, good and bad, of the past. In other words, I continue my relationship with him by not trying to wonder what would be different or what I could have done to have been a better brother. Instead, I select what I want and think I could not have had a brother at all. Or he could have died at birth or earlier and that he made it the years he did really makes me a lucky person to have had him so long.

 

He needs to speak to Luther and Rosemary Smith. They lost two children on the same day in the early 90s and she was on the "Today" show a couple of years of ago with her book "Children of the Dome". They will make him feel better and you too. They have been through it. I don't have their number but they live in Beattyville. If you want, PM me and I will find it somewhere if you are interested.

 

I have read many of your posts. You are better than most of us because of your deep faith. Don't lose it when you need it the most.

Thank you, atticus, I am not better than anyone but I sure am glad for my faith.

 

I just got back from the visitation. It was excruciating. Curtis was just a shell of a human being, he was utterly inconsolable. I have never walked through such a painful event in my life. I have never seen anyone so crushed. Truly, there is none but God Almighty who can pull a man from such depths, because there is no person alive with the human strength to see him through this.

 

The children are all in a single coffin.

 

Hundreds, possibly even thousands, of people will have been there before the night was over. It took an hour and a half just to get into the church.

 

I thought I would be better today, but now I am worse. His next door neighbor, a friend of mine and fellow Sunday School member, said she was asked to go in to the Wise household to retrieve an item or two. She said the kids breakfast plates and sippy cups are still on the kitchen table where they were left before school in a rush Wednesday morning, along with the butter and syrup . . .

I know its hard...I know your friends on here want to comfort all of the people you know. Feel free to share as long as you can. Sounds like a great community that is showing their support. I can't imagine...

Hearsay, I am at a loss for words. I will pray that somehow God will give this friend of yours the strength that he will needs.

More than you know, I wish I had an answer that would be meaningful for you, Heresay. I have none. As one who has suffered a tragic loss, I can say that my experience has taught me that all of those "feel good" explanations are meaningless and baseless. I have found God, assuming He exists, to be both silent and absent. Nothing more.

 

The statement used in the title of this thread is, to me, trite. It certainly is not true. The other popular "comfort sayings" are, I believe, no more helpful than is an aspirin for a broken back- or broken heart.

 

I hope your friend, Curtis, finds comfort and answers. I strongly suspect he will find neither.

 

This is not a pleasant post but it is honest.

26 years ago this Mother's Day my first brother died and 6 years ago my second brother died. We were crushed and I will tell you that that feeling is still as strong today as it was 26 years ago. People mean well when they say those things and I think they say them becaues they truly don't know what to say. One woman came to our house and she sat next to my mother and said this, "I have no idea what you are going through but know that I am here for you". What a comfort that statement was to my mother.

 

I had a discussion with my priest about this very thing a few weeks ago and he said this, "people do not want you to quote the Bible to them and nor should you at this sad time in their life, you need to listen and be there for them". I think that sometimes we feel the need to tell people how much time it will take for them to heal, how long they will feel sad, and we also feel the need to share every horrible thing that has ever happened to us with them. What we can't realize is that we have not a clue what is going on inside their heart and we can't tell them how to feel.

 

My thoughts and prayers are with this man and my prayers are with you at this time. I wish there were some simple words that would help you but we all know there isn't. Your faith is strong and please know that there are a lot of us on this site that will be here for you.

 

May God welcome that beautiful mother and her beautiful children into his loving arms and may he comfort and bless her husband and their family and friends.

I am not a very wordy person. Music helps in time of grief. "Hold Fast" by Mercy Me has helped me during a time like this.

I've always been told and believe to this day, things happen for a reason, which we often, don't understand.

 

A loss of life, is tragic and not only effects families, but friends, co-workers, neighbors, communities, churches, etc....at the same time, tomorrow is not promised to any of us. Often, bad things happen to those, who haven't had a life they can be proud of and also, it happens to absolutely wonderful people, who contribute to society, family values and have a Christian faith.

 

I lost my Mother, several years ago....A wonderful Christian woman, who anyone would be hard pressed, to find someone who didn't have a kind word to say about her. I too, went through "understanding and coping"....to be honest, I still struggle at times but I know, in my heart that "God has a plan", we may never know what it is, but nonetheless a plan.

 

Never doubt your faith Hearsay, but it is okay to mourn....:thumb:

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And I believe that Scripture shows us this with Jesus' reaction to Lazarus death..............Jesus wept.