It made the national news. A school shooting in our town of Bend, Oregon. A 16-year-old took the lives of three children and a teacher in the Special Ed classroom at Silver Rail Elementary School before he was shot and killed.

Most of this blog was written a couple weeks earlier. My brother-in-law had sent a TED Talk link. The speaker, Nora McInerny, lost a child to miscarriage, her dad to cancer, and then her husband, Aaron, to cancer all within a short period.

I started capturing a few thoughts in writing after listening to her presentation. McInerny spoke about the unhelpful things people said after some time had passed. Things like, “When is she going to move on?”

Her response to that was:

The person grieving doesn’t move on from such a loss. Instead, they move forward.

This broken planet

We live on a broken planet, and God wasn’t the one who broke it.

There will be school shootings, and cancer, and human trafficking, and war, and dictators who inflict havoc on their own citizens.

God didn’t create us as puppets, but as reasoning, imagining, decision-making humans. He gave us free will.

Unfortunately, someone else’s freedom to choose can drastically affect our own lives. (Our pastor’s message a week ago Sunday touched on this very topic—how people’s decisions can impact so many others. And what do we do with that?)

Take this 16-year-old boy who decided to pick up a gun, pull the trigger, and take the lives of four people, carrying enough ammunition to snuff out many more lives had he not been stopped.

What caused him to make such a senseless and devastating choice? I don’t know if any of us—maybe not even his family—will ever be able to figure that out.

But this is the world we live in.

There are no guarantees for tomorrow.

Parents sent their children off to school one morning last week, and some of those children didn’t return home. Many of them did, but perhaps with significant trauma that has the power to affect them negatively for a long time to come.

And then there’s the deep grief and trauma inflicted on the families of the victims, on the teachers and staff, the first responders, the ER medical team, and the dad with the conceal carry permit who stopped the shooter and saved lives. Many of these people saw something or heard something they can never unsee or unhear.

Living forward

Nora McInerny in her TED Talk tells about being remarried, and how life is really, really good …

… but I haven’t moved on. And I hate that phrase so much. Because what it says is that Aaron’s life and death and love are just moments that I can leave behind me and I probably should.

Six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, I hope no one says of the people closely linked to our hometown’s tragedy, “When are they going to move on?”

Because grieving takes time. And it can be messy. And there is no formula with five steps after which you say, “Good. Now you can forget about it and get on with your life.”

My husband Dan’s first wife and my first husband both died of cancer. For us, the heavy sorrow has been tempered. I love that when our deceased spouses’ names come up in conversation with a family member, it’s not awkward at all. Dan and I, as a still-newlywed couple (even though it’s been six years), will never forget the stories and the memories of the people we were married to for so long.

Instead, we brought their remembrances and accounts with us as we live forward, as we open our hearts to new people, and make new memories, and add new chapters to our stories.

A promise

Although there are no guarantees how our tomorrows on this earth will play out, there is this promise—words spoken by Jesus:

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.

– John 16:33

How’s that for reassurance? We’re guaranteed trouble and loss and heartbreak while we live on this broken planet.

But we can opt for the peace of Christ, especially when life starts spinning out, when we don’t understand because it’s un-understandable, when our hopes are dashed into fragments and scattered across the floor.

It seems I’ve always known in my head that God is my comfort and strength, especially during times of loss and sorrow. But now, I know in my heart and in my bones—because I’ve lived it—that God is my comfort, my strength, and everything I need to move and breathe and live forward.