A love song for a church suffering

A church (Front Street Baptist Church) in my hometown is dealing with a tragedy that would rock any of us to our core. A group went on an outing to Tennessee. Six of them will never come home because the bus they rode crashed. A truck driver and a passenger in another vehicle will also never come home. Eight people dead. Still many others injured. A congregation and a small town grieving. 

Such a tragedy reveals how interconnected and intertwined we are because so many feel the suffering, many of whom may not know personally a single soul involved in the accident, but feel the loss regardless. It hurts. We see our neighbors grieving and empathy fires a response in our own hearts. It is not our loss, but it is our loss.

I passed Front Street Baptist nearly every evening when I was in college, back home for the summer. I ran collegiate cross country and to get my miles in I looped around the perimeter of my town, more or less, every night. Front Street Baptist Church was about halfway for me, so I would stop there and slurp some water from an outdoor spigot. It was a dose of holy water in he ungodly heat and humidity that refreshed, renewed, and restored me for the second half of the journey. Many times, I ran with a friend, Franklin Ivey, who grew up in the church--he was the one who showed me the spigot. Even though, beyond the Iveys, I did not know anyone who went there (I did find out just this week that another friend, Billy Houghton, grew up there, too), I felt an attachment to that church because it cared for me even though it had no idea I existed. 

That is a power that every faith community holds--by their simple presence they impact lives and care for souls. As with me, that may well be through completely unconscious involvement, but for many, many others, a congregation becomes a source of nourishment and nurture as human beings seek to find their way through a world gone a bit crazy consciously as those souls take seats in the pews, engage in work and worship, and seek to find God with them. They find a fellowship of welcome, grace, and mercy. 

Then tragedy comes.

We are created. We are fallible. We are incomplete. Things happen over which we have no control, did not seek, and certainly do not want. 

A congregation of people seeking to be with God find themselves struck by pain they never imagined. They suffer. They hurt existentially. 

Where is God?

Right there.

Suffering is part of being created, even unthinkable suffering. God knows that. In Christ, we we discover how deeply God knows that, for in Christ, God enters the abyss of pain that comes. Christ entered the abyss of lepers, human beings cursed to live as if dead. Christ entered the abyss of the outcast, acknowledging the full humanity, the full reality of their being children beloved by God, even of those the world felt perfectly correct in rejecting out of hand (e.g., Samaritans of any sort). Christ entered the abyss of grief, weeping alongside Mary and Martha as they mourn their brother, Lazarus. Christ entered the abyss of nonsensical, existential pain in his own death, rejected, despised, and murdered by the very people who just a moment ago pledged their love for him. God knows our suffering. 

And God does not leave us there. 

God embraces the suffering with healing and hope. That is the promise of resurrection. No end is final. No hope hopeless. No despair all-consuming. 

Not even death.

My prayer is that Front Street Baptist Church will feel the embrace of the community in which it stands. I know others have already moved to respond with love, presence, and prayer. I ask that we expand that circle of love. if we breathe, we know what it is to suffer. Then we know how deeply these people hurt. Send compassion to them through prayer. If you are able, speak to them words of comfort, presence, and care. If you are able, help them with acts of engagement, entering their pain. 

God is with each word spoken.

God is in each act done.

God breathes through each prayer offered.

Tragedy can only go so far, can only touch us so much, but love can transcend and transform all else into life. 

God is.

Therefore, so is love.