For so many of us, our lives skim the surface.  We’re busy with the day to day, caught up in the rhythms of normalcy and (depressives, philosophers and poets excluded) we don’t ponder what lies beneath.


And then, without warning, the world cracks open and we or someone we know slips into the chasm of what cannot be, what should not be, but is.


Before June 27, 2010 I lived in a world where no one could burn my house down, where my house couldn’t burn, period.


In my world you could get cancer as a child, someone could embezzle all your family’s money and you might need to quit school to help out, a parent could take his own life, another could die far too young after a long, excruciating illness and, despite a million prayers for health and wholeness, you could have a child with a multiplicity of challenges and needs.  All of these things have happened to Paul and to me.


There is a tension in suffering.  There is a stress in its very existence, even if it’s not my own cup of sorrow.  When something terrible happens to someone I know, for a moment, this terrible thing becomes possible in my world too.  And that’s scary.  For a time the veil is rent and we see the fragility of life, we face our mortality and – worse yet – the vulnerability of our loved ones.


When something terrible happens, perhaps it’s more like part of a continent breaks away and those affected are bobbing on a little island of tragedy  In suffering it can be so easy to feel adrift in your circumstances.


The things we say and what we do for those in need should be a bridge to keep them connected, but too often we say things, to cover our own discomfort and to distance ourselves from the pain and then it’s only about us and not the person in need.