By definition, you are "severe, and overwhelming shock, and grief."

You aren't the sadness when my plans change with friends, or the feeling I get when I eat the last chocolate.

You are the Hospital waiting room,

You're the news station,

lets us know, the worst has happened.

You're the heart that drops in the waiting room when we have received bad results, leaving us clenching onto the sides of our seat, sobbing, in the attempt to hold ourselves up.

You're the headline on the tv screen that stops us from our daily routines, gluing our eyes to the screen. You are the mug that drops as our eyes begin filling up with tears, and our mouths open with shock.

You are the back page of the newspaper filling our minds with endless lists of names of those who are no longer with us.

You are not just an inconvenience or a feeling of mere frustration, you are the storm that hits and leaves no survivors.

The nightmare scenario.

The Dear God, save this world and help us.

Or, the Why.

Why God, why.

Your news does not bring temporary pain to our busy routines, causing our days to be more difficult, only to eventually pass with time.

You change our routines, and you change our futures.

It's not just going to be a hard week or a bad day, its the complete and utter hopelessness as we realize nothing will be as it was.

You went to college with a plan, and a major, from being valedictorian to a college dropout.

Your spouse of twenty years left you.

Your child, your baby died.

You're sixteen years old, halfway through college, and you're pregnant.

You lost the job, the dream job.

You lost your house,

you lost your family.

You go into your doctor's office to get a regular checkup, and you're informed that you're sick. You don't have much longer to live, you have a life-altering disease, and your body has been taken over.

You devastate our lives, throwing our worlds completely upside down.

Where do we go from here, how do we fight this, what will our lives look like?

You are the feeling of staring at a blank wall that we feel as though we could stare at for hours, as all time is lost. Knowing that if we look away, reality will set in, and we won't know how to deal with it.

We don't want to hear that God has a plan, that everything will work out.

Because our lives feel like they are over, and all that is left is emptiness, shame, humiliation, depression, loss, grief, and never-ending pain.

We lost a child. We lost our homes. We lost our futures, and We lost our hope.

So you have a choice.

Turn away from God,

and allow devastation to ruin you.

Be filled with bitterness, and shame, and run, fully dependent on yourself, or someone else, until you realize you're running on a treadmill that doesn't actually go anywhere.

Or realize that though you may have given up on yourself, and that your world is over, who are you, that you depend on yourself?

And who was the One who created the Heavens and the Earth,

Who calms the heaviest storms, and raises dead men from their graves.

Who was the one whipped with stones and sharp glass, pierced with thorns in their skull, and stabbed with nails?

Because I don't see my name there, and I don't see yours.

Your life may be over, and your plans may never be the same. You might not get to do what you dreamed of doing, and you might have lost a part of your soul.

But your life is not over because Jesus died to know you.

He knows the devastation and pain we feel and says, "Today you will be with Me in Paradise."

The pain you feel now does not compare to the joy you will one day feel in Heaven.