They say it is better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all. It is better to have experienced something great and lost it then to have never experienced it in the first place. Feeling something, sometime is better than feeling nothing, ever. Really? Is any of this true, or is ignorance truely bliss?Running...laughing...dancing. Scenes running through my head, her beautiful face playing the lead. Crooked little teeth...so skinny you could see through her. Dress hanging off of her boney shoulders. Scenes I want to delete.
Sometimes the best things in life are the memories that you want to forget. They ignite you. They awaken you. They spur you on. They inspire you to do whatever you can to keep them from replaying in another persons life. It is the scenes that scare you that you remember. The ones that make you cry that you replay over and over. They are the ones that keep you awake at night. They are the ones that make it hard to breathe. They are the ones that change the world. Good memories make you smile...bad memories make you change.
There she was. Scared. Alone in a sea of people. Lost in the crowd. Forgotten. A face I had seen a hundred times before...I wish I could see it just one more time.
Injustice destroys life. It takes what has been built and it knocks it down. If grace is when you don't deserve something good but you get it anyway, what is it called when you didn't deserve something bad, but you got it anyway? Ungrace? Anti-grace? Life?
Life...something that we all get for free and lose at a price.
So here we are, the reality of now, literally worlds apart. I am here wondering what could have been. She is there, glad it's over. Maybe she just had enough. Maybe God looked down on her and decided that He could no longer let the injustice win. Maybe she had enough poverty, enough sickness, enough pain. Maybe this was her grace.
We may miss her. We may wonder "why" and ask "what if", or think about what we didn't do that we think we should have. We may ask questions that we will never have answers to. We can cry. We can be sad. We can even be angry and confused. We can also remember the time we had with her. A moment here. A memory there. The privalege of the time that we did get with her. We didn't do anything special to get to know her, but we had the honor. Maybe that was some of our grace.
So...they say it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. It's not that easy, it doesn't really work that way, it's not that simple...don't believe me? Try it.
