heartache

Another death.

This time a man of merely 37. Really very sudden, with the rapid spread of cancer to the brain.

I called by on his partner. They lived here in the village. Almost on our doorstep. And yet, in many ways, they might have been a million miles away. 'Church', I think, meant little to the two of them. Their world is one that barely ever intersects with that of Jesus Christ.

Except for times like this.

As I say, I called by on his partner in their home. They weren't married. Though given time they would have been. Which makes it all the harder for this woman in her loss. They loved each other dearly.

She's been married, mind. Married and divorced, with grown up son and daughter who have partners of their own.

And the young man who died, he had a child as well. A five year old boy, to a 'partner' from bygone days. Though I'm not that sure there was ever really all that much to the relationship the two of them shared.

Life gets fairly complex in the tangle of relationships the people of our world today so often have.

"Men...!" this woman here exclaimed as I was leaving her. I felt somehow included in a rather general diatribe I sensed was soon to come.

"I'll never love another man," she said. "One divorces me, the other dies on me."

It must be sore. Very sore.

I don't suppose she realised it, but she was really quoting the psalms. Well ... in a pretty loose translation sort of way. Don't pin your trust in men. Or women, for that matter.

I asked before I left if I might pray with her. It wasn't long and it wasn't exactly weighty, wordy or, indeed, 'conventional'.

But it touched her heart, I think. It struck a chord. As if some tiny line of contact was being made, connecting her with God. A moment of reconnecting.

I doubt she has time for 'the church'.

She'll not have anything much against 'the church', but I doubt if 'the church', or organised religion as it were - I doubt if 'the church' impinges on her world at all.

But she's really very open to the Lord. His friendship and his presence and his life. The purpose and the meaning that he brings and gives to life.

I don't ever see my role in life as being that of getting a person like her to 'the church'. Anything but!

It's more the daily challenge of my somehow bringing Jesus to such people in the complex, tangled jungle of relationships in which they live.

Making him real to a person like her. In the pain and the sorrow of grief. In the desperate void of despair when the one you have loved disappears.

And I've yet to meet his mother. How much more acute will be her grief.