| This is a perfect story to tell on Valentine’s Day. Obviously, I’m a day late, but I only read about it yesterday myself. It has to do with love, but not as a fairy tale. It’s the story of Theodore Roosevelt. On Valentine’s Day, 1880, he and his fiance, Alice Hathaway Lee, announced their engagement. This was a joyous occasion. Their wedding was later that year and they spent the next few years happily married. Tragedy struck in 1884 on Valentine’s Day. Alice gave birth to their first child a few days before. Her health quickly deteriorated afterward. When Roosevelt made it back into town to be with her, he learned his mother was also gravely ill. He made it to see her, but she died soon thereafter. Within a few hours, Alice also died. He marked the day in his diary by drawing a big X and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.” I can’t imagine the pain of such an experience, whether it would’ve been on Valentine’s Day or any other day. The way I heard the story, this experience transformed Roosevelt. He concluded both his mother and wife died of illnesses related to overcrowding. His mission now was to address those situations in urban cities. We can read the rest of that story in our history books. We all endure tragedy in some form. When we do, important questions emerge. Their answers can only be certain through the lens of the pain of your experience. We like to think we know what we would do beforehand. But pain has a way of changing us. We won’t know how until we know. So, what becomes of our tragedies? How do we heal from them? What parts of our lives go back to normal? Which parts are never the same? And are we always supposed to “do something” with a tragedy? When drunk driving cut my sister’s life short, I decided to remind people to not drink and drive. It would be my way to honor her. Did I have to do that? Can we agree the last two years have been a collective tragedy? If so, what do we take from this experience? It feels like we’re approaching what we can call the end to the pandemic. What happens next? Surely this won’t be just something we lived through. How has the love of God helped us and shaped us through this time? Let’s connect this conversation to Ezra 1. What emotions do you think filled the people of God when they heard they could return home from exile? Did they understand what happened to them in the first place? What did they envision life would be like after the experience of exile? Your answers might help you understand your own experiences. It’s inspiring to consider stories like that of Theodore Roosevelt. He was able to take his pain and direct it toward a greater good. Is that what God calls us to do? If so, what might that look like for the church as we emerge from the trauma of the pandemic? Stay blessed…john |
John Fletcher
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