the questions.

this week has been one of the hardest weeks of perhaps my life. i've felt overwhelmed with grief for most of the week, overwhelmed with death and sickness, devoid of hope, and sometimes, just numb. we've been grieving the loss of three men who were all significant to us at j-house, mourning the sudden loss of a father for one of our nurses, and feeling scared and shocked over the news of the hospitalization of another resident who'd made it out of j-house into a drug rehab program. it seemed for a while like there was no way it was possible to get any more bad news.

with so much grief and pain in my heart and the hearts of my dear family at j-house, i've been too overwhelmed even really to cry.

and amidst it all, i continue to ask so many questions - questions about life, death, God, salvation, Jesus, heaven, hope, redemption... sometimes the questions just well up in me and feel so large and all-encompassing that i'm afraid they're going to become debilitating. but everyone keeps telling me to live into the questions. and so i try, sometimes because i have no choice but to keep living into them. i've been reading "letters to a young poet" by ranier maria rilke, which is full of wisdom. this is a passage that has resonated deep with me in this week:

"you are so yong, so before all beginning, and i want to beg you, as much as i can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. and the point is to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

live everything.

how thankful i am to be in community. and how blessed, amidst it all. i love what my roommate sarah said about living in community: being in community is like being in love - whenever you're away, despite what happens, your heart wants to be with them. so it's good to be together.