Some things in life are just … hard to figure.
Valentina Murillo, an 11-year-old girl out of Tijuana, needs life-saving surgery that only a children’s hospital in Philadelphia can provide.
Incredibly, she’s able to get there, and, after four months, is well enough to return home and begin life with her family again. Hospital staff are sorry to see her go – so sorry, they throw her a going-away party.
A few hours later, she’s strapped into her seat on a medical transport jet. Looking out the window, maybe, or exchanging a happy look with her mom as their craft surges up into the sky.
Less than a minute later, she’s dead. So are the five others on her flight. Many on the ground her jet slammed into at full speed are badly injured, or have lost their homes.
One happened to be driving on the street where the plane came down. Another was sitting in a booth at a neighborhood diner when a piece of wreckage hurtled through the restaurant window. A third was hurrying across a shopping mall parking lot. A fourth was just standing in the kitchen.
We kiss our loved ones goodbye at the door, wish them a happy day, urge them to be safe. We hardly even know what “safe” might mean. We don’t think of them cut to pieces in a diner, or struck down bending over the dishwasher. We don’t pray that a fireball won’t fall out of the sky on their car.
And we can’t imagine that a happy little girl could soar halfway across a hemisphere for miracle surgery, come through it with flying colors … then die in flames, flying home from the hospital.
Liz Keys also died in a plane crash last week. She was descending into Reagan International from Wichita, on a later flight than the one she meant to take. It was her 33rd birthday, and she wanted to get home to celebrate. But her business meeting ran a little long.
Spencer Lane, a 16-year-old figure skater, was sitting near her. He was excited – Spencer was always excited – and he’d had an especially fun trip to Nebraska. “I learned so much new information that I can apply to my everyday life, and met so many amazing people!” he texted his dad.
But Liz missed her birthday, and Spencer will never make use of that information, or those contacts. Like Asra Raza, 26, they didn’t make it home that night. Asra had a feeling time was precious, and thought she had enough work to keep her in Wichita for one more day, she wanted to get home to her husband.
“We need to do it,” she’d told him the day before, referring to a trip to Mecca they’d been talking about. “Because you never know when you’re going to die.”
“Landing in 20 minutes,” she texted, just before the crash.
Her father-in-law posted the news of her death on social media, later that night. “Hug your family,” he wrote. “We are devastated. Our faith in God is unshakable.”
And there, in the end, is the rub. We believe in God, or we don’t.
We celebrate the happy endings. We reason through the turns of the road that leave us mildly wounded … a little confused. We tell ourselves, “God is working in this,” and we square our shoulders and pray a little more earnestly. In days to come, we’ll share a thoughtful testimony on how the Lord eventually made things plain.
But come the moments that will never be plain. The moments we do not see Him working. The horrors we will never understand or ever fully come to terms with.
The finalities that shatter our soul in ways we don’t think we’ll survive. The fates we don’t know how to forgive God for.
In those moments, like Job, we wait for Explanations. He doesn’t give them. We hope desperately for the sudden twist that shows He was smiling all of the time, and that this isn’t – this couldn’t be – as bad as we think. But the moments turn to hours, and the hours to years.
And we’re left, finally, with this: He’s either God, or He’s not. We trust Him, or we don’t.
Someday, maybe, we will turn a corner on the streets of heaven and see a laughing girl named Valentina, alive with joy and wonder. Perhaps we will know her, from the snapshots they showed on the news this weekend. But by then, what put her on the news won’t matter at all.
The pain will be far in the past, and the questions will no longer need answers. All that will matter is that the God Who made us loves us, and we are together, forever with Him. We may wonder that we ever doubted Him.
But He won’t. He knows what we’re made of.
And that some moments, for each of us, are just … hard to figure.
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