Lost, sad, confused...

So much has happened in the past week. Huge things in my dear friends' lives. Its hard to know how to be a friend when tragedy hits. When do you talk? When do you listen? What do you do?

A friend's dad died very suddenly last Thursday. It was totally a shock. He was a normal Dad and Grandpa one day and gone the next. I just cry at the thought of having my Dad just suddenly being gone from my grasp, my call, my life. I don't know how to comfort her. She used to get emails from him daily at work. Funny little things, maybe with pictures of her daughter or the last family gathering. Today she emailed me and said she was sad, because she'd never see one in her inbox again. So I just emailed back and forth with her for a while. A sorry, sorry substitute but it was all I could do.

Yesterday I got home to a voicemail from another friend saying to call her back. She has been having tests done on her little boy (he's just about 2 years old). When she didn't leave a status update in the message, but just said call me back I knew there was bad news. The second MRI he had showed he'd regressed in his progress and confirmed that the problem might be degenerative. Who knows what this means for him, but it won't be good, that's for sure. It was not the news they were praying for. Now its more blood tests and more investigation into a diagnosis, and apparently these kind of problems only rarely are treatable. I asked her how she was, knowing she was just crushed, but I had to ask to let her know I care how she's personally making it through. She just said "not good". I didn't know what to do! How do you help when the situation is just so sad and beyond you. You can't give trite little answers. Their pain can't be trivialized. Its huge, its life altering. I just asked if I could pray for her on the phone. I couldn't keep from crying through the prayer. All I could ask for was peace for them, this is truly peace that is beyond our comprehension.

So many big things, tragedies, have happened in this last year to my dear friends. They have been my family in so many ways for the last 8 years or so of my life. Its odd because I was directed to read this book that discussed heaven and hope in this last year. I had no idea why I needed to read it, but I felt God was prepping me for something. That unknown something scared me. Now I have some perspective and I see why I needed to read it. I feel God's just been telling me lately to just "be here now". Think only about today and what he's leading me to do in this moment. Each day I've thought this, he's put big conversations and encounters with people in front of me.

I don't really have a conclusion to all these thoughts. But I just had to put them down somewhere. I feel I'm in the midst of the battle. Pray.