Have you ever played the game hide-and-seek without people but with objects instead? I know we all have. For instance, you lost your keys and can’t find them anywhere and you start to panic. You search high and low for them but are still coming up short. You make a list in your head of the rooms located in your house: kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom, etc. You think to yourself, "Okay checked the kitchen and they aren’t in there, checked the living room and they aren’t in there." You think to yourself that you have probably checked every single place a pair of car keys could be hidden. But you still go through each of the rooms again and again. During this process, you sometimes find things you never even realized that were lost. Then you get side-tracked about what you found and start thinking about all the things you have that could get lost someday. Wow, that’s a lot of things. We are basically set up for loss when we start accumulating more and more things. So then what? Do we keep accumulating more and more things? Yes, we do.
What happens when the freak accident that turns someone’s house up into flames isn’t just another headline in the paper you are only reading in hopes of finishing a crossword? What happens when it’s your house up in flames?
This is what it feels like to lose someone you love.
You see people die all the time, whether you know them or not. You see death tear apart families and lives but you don’t understand because it hasn’t happened to you. Until out of the blue, someone you love is gone. And just like that, you find yourself outside the hospital on your knees with your face in your hands. "It’s not real," you tell yourself over and over again. It’s all just a dream. And in that moment, you think of all the material possession you have lost and eventually found. You think of all the time you spent looking for them because it was life or death. And then you get mad because you wasted your precious time looking for that. That time could have been spent with the person you just lost. Then you start weeping more because you’d give up all your material possessions to have that one person back. Possessions that meant the world to us when that person was here. The objects have no more meaning, so we beg and plead for God to bring our loved one back in exchange for these objects. We all do this, yet we know that it is impossible.
The fire is now engulfing you. You can do nothing but let the flames engulf you in hopes that it will soon die down. The fire never goes away. It’ll always be there, sometimes bigger than other days. This is a part of your life now. No matter how hard you try to put it out.
