Struggling.

A girl I know killed herself Tuesday night. 

My bank account is empty, and though I should start substitute teaching soon(my application will be approved Monday night), it will be a few weeks before the check shows up in my mailbox.  And because my clearances have yet to come in, it throws yet another wrench in the whole thing.

I’m behind on homework, for a degree I’m still not convinced that I want. 

And I’m left with the existential question…what is the point?

Perhaps this is one of the problems with humanity; we believe everything should have meaning.  We want death to have meaning, and suffering, and all these unexplainable hurts we suffer daily–we want it all to mean something, to know that even though we have suffered, it has not been in vain.  We want things to make sense, even if that sense is somehow metaphysical, that our suffering in the long-term view of the world will somehow fit in with a perfect plot.

I know, somehow, God is supposed to fit in here.  And I do believe that; I believe that God was just as present when my friend killed herself as He was when another friend was killed in an accident or another died of cancer…as He was present when Rachel walked out of an accident that should have killed her, as He was present when I had an allergic reaction to anesthetic and stopped breathing, as He is present now. I cannot find it within myself to dare to assume that God only knows what He is doing when He does what I want…what I think is best…like preventing a friend from suicide, or preventing a car accident, or cancer cells.   

But I am human, and I want meaning beyond vague God talk and philosophical words that mean little in the end.  I want stone tablets to fall in my front yard and tell me the end of the story and how this all fits in.  I want to know, now, the plot and the characters, to know what part I am playing, and to know how it all works out.

Perhaps I would be bored, though, if I knew all the answers already.  And I have lived enough in my twenty-four-and-a-half-or-so- years to know that so very often, the thing I thought was the worst thing that could ever possibly happen turns out to be the best, and sometimes God gives us what we want and then takes it away, in order to show us what we need.

But I’d still like a job.