MY PEACE I GIVE TO YOU

[The following is a reprint of my blog of February 25, 2012.]

My brother died when he was 12 years old…I was 10, my sister was 13. He died of a tumor on the brain and tubercular meningitis.

Paul was the center of our family…we each considered him “my best” friend and/or child, and we paid little, if any, attention to each other. None of us in our singular grief could understand God’s purpose in calling him home…at age 12 yet. But this was a long time ago, and families did not question God out loud then…or families in my neighborhood at any rate.

A very few years later, I was given an insight, a gift of understanding. In the short time since my brother’s death, my sister and I had become good friends…my father doted on us as did my mother. One day, in a blinding flash of the obvious, I had a mental image of my brother as a sort of May pole…as he was lifted up into heaven, the tie to my sister, the tie to my father, the tie to my mother, the tie to me drew us together. We had become a family unit.

That gave me peace, and I never questioned it.

In dealing with another grief recently, I realized that although that picture had given me peace, it did not answer why my brother had to die so young and in such a painful manner.

My thoughts immediately kicked into raceracerunrun…why?why?why?

Again I was given an insight: None of us have any way of knowing another’s God-path. Paul lived and died as he lived and died. I simply get to accept the peace I was given in the certainty that God was the giver, and it is, therefore, reasonable to assume that Paul was given the same peace…then in the midst of his illness and now.

Thank You.