Two in a row

In my devotional book I read at night, there were two good passages in a row (I peeked ahead at the one for tomorrow), so I thought I would share them:

The refusal to love is the only unbearable thing.  -Madeline L'Engle

Sometimes it seems that this grief we are experiencing is the only unbearable thing.
   But think-if we had no one we loved enough to mourn for, how flat, how terrible, our lives would be.
  And this particular person...what would our life have been without this one whom we loved so much? Was it worth the pain we are experiencing to have had this loved one for the time that we did?
   Yes, but-
   Of course. This grief is not to be dismissed by some attempted appeal to reason. Not now. Not ever. But it may help from time to time to look on the underside of this pain-as one lifts a leaf to look at the silvery underside-and note what riches we have had in the life of this one whose death we mourn.
   Sometime down the road-and when that will be is as variable as the people who mourn-the grief will be on the underside and the sense of blessing and gratitude will be the bright surface, luminous and green.

Sometimes the pain is overwhelming, I will try to surround myself with the memory of love.


Second one:

I wouldn't mind dying young...I've had a full life already.   -Mary Hickman


We who have lost loved ones through sudden accidents find ourselves scouring our memories for portents. Were there are clues, any indicators, that something terrible like the might happen? If we can find them, perhaps they inject a measure of meaning into a life thrown into chaos. On some subconscious level did our loved one know?
   My daughter made that statement, casually, during the months preceding her sudden death at sixteen in a horseback-riding accident. "Mary!" I said. "One world at a time."
   After she died I remembered her words. Had she known better than I? And what is going on, that it may be possible to have some vague foreknowledge of an event like that?
  If that is possible, what other unfathomable mysteries exist in a universe of which we may know only the smallest fragment?
  These "signs and wonders" do not mitigate the sorrow of loss, but they may give us hope that on some level a Transcendent Scheme is at work and knows what it's doing.

I will keep my mind open to all possibilities of knowledge and faith.

(Had to look up portents: sign or warning that something, especially something momentous or calamitous, is likely to happen)