Don't Look Away Too Quickly

Foster and I got some bad news yesterday. His left eye has to come out.

Gross, right? Perhaps he can wear a pirate eye patch.

It's hard to look at Foster now, with his funky eye. It may be difficult to look at him after the surgery. Looking at things that are not pretty, even repulsive, is not what we want to do. Avoiding the ugly is normal.

However, sometimes we need to look at the hard stuff. While we don't want to needlessly be macabre and dwell on the negative, there is a place for contemplating the difficult. It's Good Friday, the day Jesus died an extremely difficult and ugly death. Often we want to race by this gruesome time and focus on Easter, the day Jesus conquered death. And that is the most important. But what Jesus did when he died an innocent man is hard to understand. It deserves our contemplation because it was no small thing. He paid a huge price that he could have avoided. But he did it for us, out of a love we can't understand.

It's easy to turn the channel from tragedies. It's easy to avoid looking at the face of someone who you know is going through something difficult. Reaching out and touching someone else's pain is not something we naturally do.

There is value in suffering, even though it seems like a contradiction. We can't always understand the why and how of it, but it's true.

Foster's surgery will not be something to celebrate. But after it's over, his pain will be gone. Jesus went through a terrible death so our eternal pains can be gone, if we just reach toward him.