What goes around doesn't always come around soon enough...

It feels so wrong to be posting this. That only a few days after posting such a lighthearted story about my own family that I could be writing a post lamenting the tragedy in another. This morning the pastor from my church died. He had Stage IV colon cancer. He was young, his wife is young, they have three young boys. Their youngest is around 4 and I'm left wondering how much he will remember of his father. I hope that he will remember a lot. I hope that what he does not remember of him, we will be able to fill in. That we will all remember him. He was kind, so very smart, and seemed to have a special talent for getting people hyped about the goodness and joy that we experience and how to share it. He and his wife are some of the friendliest, most gracious and caring people I have ever had the honor of meeting. It sounds cliche, to be sure, but I swear to you it's true. They are better people than I could ever imagine being.

I watched his sons grow up, I remember his oldest boy as a baby, coming home from Brazil on a mission trip that my husband went on when we were in High School. The next time I saw him, he was nowhere near a baby and he had two younger brothers. I marveled at how a few short years changed things. I marvel now at how a single day can change things. It is incredibly unreal to me that I will never agin see him walking down the hall, that he will never again ask me how I've been and I will know without a doubt that he cares about my response. He was the sort of person that made you want to do things with your life just so that you could make him smile, but you knew that if you didn't he would think nothing less of you.

I try to believe that people get what they deserve; what goes around comes around. For this awesome family, this couldn't be further from the truth. His wife certainly does not deserve to be a widow, to raise their children a single mother. His parents certainly do not deserve to lose another child. His boys deserve to grow up knowing their father, learning by example to be the sort of man he was. And my pastor? He deserved to see his boys become men, to grow old and grey with his wife, to tell his grandchildren stories about his own parents when they passed. It seems to me that karma has come up short today. That the joyfulness and serenity this family so sorely earned somehow got lost on the way, tied up in red tape and arrived too late. My pastor was not the sort of man who would want anyone to be angry with God at his passing. And yet I can't help but be so confused by this. The why is suffocating. Why, WHY? My only hope is that karma will pull through, that because what they earned was so tragically late, that it will be ten, hundreds, thousands-fold.

Cancer Sucks.