When clouds brought rain

And disaster came

Oh, my soul, oh, my soul

When waters rose

And hope had flown

Oh, my soul, oh, my soul

Oh, my soul

Ever faithful, ever true

You are known, you never let go

“Never Let Go” by the David Crowder Band

The grief of their wait while the washed away are searched for seems an unbearable burden.

Friends hanging out on a holiday weekend, letting our kids get in the water and play felt heavy, unfair, as somewhere a mother was waiting to know if her child survived rising and unpredictable waters. 

They splashed and screamed as we are sitting out in the early evening,  the sun dropped on the horizon and dark enveloped on a summer night. Laughter echoed across the yard. 

There was no escaping the darkness, only looking for light in the sky. 

We watched, waited on stars to appear. We began searching and studying, looking for satellites. We called them out as the brightness broke through the haze. Examining the paths, one popped up and glinted, flashed for moment, and then seemingly disappeared into the black ink. It too was engulfed by the darkness. 

It was so bright to our eyes but for a moment, then seemed nothing and it bends the mind to imagine it reflecting the Sun’s great light. The motion continued even though its path was obscured. Hazy skies and clouds rolled in as just across this great state of ours, families and friends, and friends of friends were frantically praying, searching and hoping for their own sweet children to emerge from the dark.

Sorrow like sea billows roll.

Ache and pain and hopelessness seemed to brim up over the banks of what a human heart can hold. This is not normal. This is what breaks people. This is not how it is supposed to happen.

Summer camps are for fun and sunshine and running wild not heartache and darkness and running scared to survive.

Responders waded into dark waters that steal strength and cloud the mind’s eye. They watched. They waited with the weight squeezing their hearts. They longed for hope to appear but there was only so much any one can bear. 

Rushing waters steal it all away.

Platitudes are crushed by desperation. Fundraisers and emergency supplies are not enough when she cannot be found and even when she is.

It is a reality that is not believable, unless you’ve borne it yourself, and that is not an experience anyone is seeking. 

The loss of my brother is the closest I can come to relating in reality—young, vibrant life suddenly gone in unforeseen circumstances.

The sharp and sudden cutoff feels like suffocation, fighting to breathe and move ahead. 

I think of my own children growing before my eyes, some now having their own kids and the thought of those precious ones… It is a sentence I cannot complete.

Parents and grandparents waiting on something bright to pierce the darkness. But they are instead just feeling their way around, lost, with vision clouded.

When you go through what they have gone through, the pain doesn’t leave. Somehow it becomes shared and, maybe just maybe through the sharing, the swelling burden lifts just enough to catch a breath. It is the only way to survive the agony.

I think of our Father watching his Son struggling to breathe. Neither sudden nor unexpected, the anticipated and dreaded cross bore down. There was no escape from the darkness that fell. There was only looking to the sky for light to survive, looking for hope beyond the grave.