Waves

I remember going to the beach as a little girl and drawing pictures in the sand with a stick. The best sand to draw on was the sand that was washed smooth by the waves. It was really the only sand that anything would show up on. But it was also the sand that would inevitably be swept clean by a wave. No matter how carefully and beautifully I would draw, nothing of the image would remain after 2 or three waves. The sand drawing was, by its nature, impermanent. That is how Chloe's short life is starting to feel. Time and the sheer magnitude of the universe feel like a mighty ocean that is incessantly sweeping over Chloe's memory and I'm the little girl with the stick frantically writing and writing, trying to keep something on the sand that reminds the world that once upon a time there was a beautiful girl named Chloe.
I often wonder at the strange juxtaposition of how irreplaceable she is to me against how "commonplace" her life was in relation to all of humanity. There is nothing that really differentiates her life and death from the millions of others that have come and gone. And it makes the mind of God that much more inscrutable to me. Of how much consequence was this little girl to One who sees billions and billions of lives written on the sands of time and washed away? How many mothers sat on a rock in Japan and wailed in anguish over the baby that they lost in the tsunami? And will He return to us mothers who have lost our dear little ones all those moments that are gone? How will he, in the Kingdom, replace the nights of rocking and singing lullabies to my baby? Does He really bother with such trivialities as giving me back moments to brush Chloe's curls, kiss the crook in her nose, just hold her and feel her little heart beat? Does He know how much of a loss it is to me that I will never again smell her sweet smell? All I can do is hope and believe that the One who appears so beautiful and true in worship and is all justice and mercy is keeping record of all the wrongs done to His children and can do nothing but make it right. I go back to the now tattered quote I hung above Chloe's hospital bed:

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)