Speaking of which...
The more I think about it, the more I realize that my grandma Shirley lost her purpose in life when my grandpa Bob passed away in 2018. For over fifty years, my grandma's whole purpose in life was to take care of my grandpa, especially after his debilitating aneurysm. She loved every second they spent together, and she was by my grandpa's side through hellfire and back, always serving him with a smile. In return, he served her in the best ways he knew how, up until the very. After surviving numerous (and I mean numerous) health scares and conditions, he passed away at home. Leaving my grandma a widow.
Grandma Shirley loves all of us. She adores her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren. She loved attending my older cousins' weddings in 2019 and earlier in 2021. She still looks forward to spending one last Thanksgiving and Christmas with all thirty or so of her children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren. She still goes outside everyday to watch my aunt, uncles, and cousins take care of the livestock and tend to the harvest. She still cooks homemade meals for herself and her loved ones. She still attends every Sunday church service excitedly. But, at eighty-one years old with cancer all over her body, and her husband of 55 years with the Lord, she is ready, and eager, to go be with my grandpa.
My usual knee-jerk reaction would be to get angry at God and demand a miracle. But, I must be learning and growing somehow, because when I first learned about my grandma's cancer and in the days after that, I did not get all that angry at God, or demand a miracle. Instead, I've grieved, and have begun the arduous journey of accepting the fact that my grandma Shirley will soon pass away. She lost her purpose in life when her other half died in 2018. As a result, she too, will soon be gone.
That is the ultimate reason why I'm starting to give up the questions pertaining to God, suffering, existence, and everything else, and am starting to move more towards questions like, "Now what?" instead of, "Why, God?"
I will never be able to figure out why God has allowed things like cancer and covid and Cystic Fibrosis ravage this world. I will never be able to prove or disprove the existence of God, or the afterlife, or anything else like that. Until I learn about it from God Himself (assuming I'll someday stand before God in the afterlife and have the gull to ask Him all of these "why" questions), it's becoming more and more apparent that asking questions like, "Why does God heal some but not others?" is kind of a waste of time. It's a question that leads to nowhere. It's a question without an answer.
My grandma Shirley seems to be steps ahead of me in her faith. To my knowledge, she hasn't asked many "Why, God?" questions, and hasn't asked too many "Now what?" questions either, especially since the discovery of her widespread cancer. Instead, my grandma seems to just be at peace with God and the situation she's in. In her mind, nothing on earth really matters anymore. As far as the family can tell, she's not troubled by the pandemic, or the growing shortage of workers and supplies, or the gossip that happens in every small town, or even by her cancer, or any of that. She's just at peace and living in the moment, ready and waiting for that day to come. Oh, if only I had a fraction of that peace she now has.
