Day Twenty-Eight

What She Wore: bright green long-sleeve tee; blue jeans with sparkles on the pocket; tennis shoes.

Ok, I'd like to act like yesterday's post never happened--major blonde moment there! Oh well, I'll probably recover.

I feel like my life is moving in fast-forward, and this posting every day thing doesn't help. I would like to share something today, though. You know how some bloggers are kind of famous? You know the ones that a lot of people read? Well, Billie is one of those bloggers. She had two twins born extremely premature. She documented their NICU stay on her blog and their subsequent growth. They are now three years old (I think). Both of her daughters developed cerebral palsy as a result of brain bleeds. One has mild CP and the other moderate. I found her blog not long after Charlie was born and I check it regularly. It's filled with detailed information about the girls, their issues, their doctors, their therapies, etc. I consider it a major resource.

Recently, Billie was asked by another super-blogger to participate in a round-table discussion about grief. She had not, however, experienced a literal death. Her grief is not unlike mine--she grieves for the children that might have been--the children with perfect health. I'm not going to talk about that again, though--at least not today. I'm just going to comment on one little thing.

Many of the people who talked about grief mentioned a certain phrase that they hate hearing: Everything happens for a reason. I feel compelled to comment on this phrase--I've used it and heard it, and I think it bears a little examining. Why would someone hate this phrase so much? I think, because it places blame in a round-about way. If everything happens for a reason, does that mean that someone is to blame for what happened to my child? Or to Billie's? What about the little girl who died while Charlie was in hospital? What was the reason for that tragedy? I think the word "reason" over-simplifies things. I think that people mean to say that we can't explain God's ways, but the way it's phrased doesn't make sense. Is God trying to teach someone a lesson? Me? My child? I just don't think God works that way; I don't think God is in the business of standing on a cloud, orchestrating "lessons" for each of us. I prefer to think of the whole thing as bigger than that--beyond my comprehension. I like to think of it as those pictures people make in stadiums--where each person is holding up a card of a different color. Mine may be white and Charlie's may be blue. I don't know why we each got the color that we did, but I know that it all makes sense from up above (lets just hope it's not like this).

I think my husband puts it in a way that makes a little more sense to me. Charlie is perfect. He is just the way God intended for his purposes--not anyone else's. Perfect. Doesn't get much better than that, does it?