I just don't understand

so many things in this life at various times have caused me to pull myself up short and say I just dont understand that. From which point you can just shrug it off or delve deep and try to see the reasoning, oft times to no avail.

I'll be honest there is so much craptastic going on in my life at the moment that some days I just wake up and immediately think "hell which ways are the balls gonna fly from today" but I haven't drowned or been knocked out yet so all is usually good. Then sometimes something beyond one's own life happens and makes you stop and gasp at lifes enormous inequalities and suffering.

This week in our local paper there have been listed perhaps 10 obituaries so far (I've always read the matched, hatched, and dispatched columns as my mother always called them) of these let me summarise just three

1. 24 yr old mother of four died due to complications of child birth

2. 14 yr old girl died in ER (I have heard she had flu like symptoms)

3. 30 yr old mother of two

I have to admit we are only at Thursday night, I'm having a little trouble getting my head round those bare facts. There is something so painfully wrong when someone dies before their pre-concieved allotted three score years and ten. I sometimes have a problem with God, especially when it comes to justifying these types of stats. And please don't ask me to pray after the event I'd kinda like to know where the big man was when all these were going down, not after the fact.

For me the saddest part of that too long list above is that number three is too close to home. She is the daughter of one of my managers at work, she died suddenly and leaves behind a small daughter and five month old son and when I attend the funeral home tomorrow I have no idea what words of comfort I can offer a mother in that situation. "I'm so sorry" how pathetic is that! "My heart breaks for you" it feels like it does, because I really cannot get my head round what she must be going through today and in the days ahead, but I know in truth I have not one iota of comprehension of how much her heart is broken and the pain which she is experiencing now her life has been ripped apart. What are the emotions for burying your own child, what are the words you tell the small child left behind with no mother. I hope that just being there gives some comfort, that there will be hope, sunshine and laughter in the months and years ahead but I don't understand where you find the words to help that happen.

I remember when my daddy died I believed at that moment I saw and felt the peace that passeth all understanding, right now I'd really like the understanding that passeth all peace.