And then, blessedly, you're alone and you can fall apart again. Scream. Cry. Hold your belly as if someone slashed a knife across it and you're trying to keep your insides from falling out. But you are holding everything in - because the storm has ripped you to pieces and you don't know how to put yourself back together again.
When you've been through a storm, you come out of it dead. Yes, the person you were before that storm is dead and gone and can't come back. In your mind's eye you can see that neon yellow dividing line, like Crime Scene tape, and on the other side is the person you were and on this side is the person you are now. Maybe you walk and talk the same, but inside lurks a stranger you haven't met yet. And you don't want to become a new you. You yell and scream for the old you to come back. The old naive you who thought that life would always be the same, with no tragedies, no changes.
But life has radically changed, as it always will. And you have to confront the deadness and the damage and the anger before you can even begin to put yourself back together again. You question and question and question, and no one has any answers for why that storm struck when it did. You certainly don't have any answers.
Job asks everyone "Why did this happen to me?" after he suddenly loses his entire family to death and also loses his property. Nobody has any answers that he can stomach. Weak, in profound shock, undoubtedly suffering from PTSD, and its nightmares and obsessive replays of trauma, cast into a dark, almost suicidal, night of the soul, he finally knows that the only person he can question about the tragedies that have destroyed his life is God. He says to God
"Therefore I will not restrain my mouth;
I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul....
When I say, 'My bed will comfort me,
my couch will ease my complaint,'
then you scare me with dreams,
and terrify me with visions,
so that I would choose strangling and death
rather than this body.
I loathe my life, I would not live forever.
Let me alone, for my days are a breath." (Job 7: 7-16.)
Job knows that as a suffering son, he has a right to call to God in prayer, and a right to receive an answer. He knows, as we know, that God's ways are so mysterious that we can never fully understand any answer that we're given on earth. But he knows he must call out.
God answers Job because Job acknowledges that he is weak, sick, and wounded. Like Job, we cannot connect at the deepest level with God until we cry to Him from the depths of our wounds, because only the wounded and sick know and acknowledge that they need God. Only the wounded and sick, aware of the weakness of their flesh, can be open to the healing, strengthening gifts that God will always pour over us when we ARE open, ready to hear Him. In His love, we can become transformed, made new.
Our wounded, merciful God, wounded in Jesus, understands all we endure. Our wounded Jesus gives us strength to embrace our wounds and our crosses as He embraced His. Once we accept our wounds and our crosses, knowing that we must embrace all life in trust, learn from all life, we are no longer passive victims.
A religious Sister who I know, on morphine for years for intractable nerve pain, and also dealing with severe scoliosis in need of surgery, and also needing a full knee replacement, says that God comes to her as One Who puts His left hand under her head and His right hand around her in a continuous embrace. She says "Don't ever let your suffering go to waste; unite it with Jesus' suffering on the cross. Throughout every day, I thank God for the strength He gives me and for His mercies, and He teaches me resilience. I love that word 'resilience!'"
Once we have given our weak, physically and emotionally traumatized flesh, our deep woundedness to God, we are able to receive His gifts to re-imagine who we can become. His gifts will help us to transcend the person we were before the storm! He inspires us daily to put ourselves back together as humbler, more compassionate people, people who are more self-confident because we have gone through a storm and survived, people who are more able to risk because there's nothing left to lose. People who trust Him more deeply than ever before because He has drawn close to us and hidden us safely in His wounds."By His wounds, we have been healed." (Isaiah 53: 5).