Reflections and Resurrection

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers and welcome to this Easter weekend of 2026. In 2024, Easter had already occurred and tomorrow, April 4th, will mark the two year anniversary of our MedFlight home from Ascension Sacred Heart in Panama City to Abbott Northwestern Courage Kenny in Minneapolis. It is beyond my ability to find words that can express the joy of that day and the anticipation and relief of returning to Minnesota. There were many challenges ahead, but we were home, praise God, we were home.

Usually when I reference “reflections” in the title, I will be writing about my own reflection on a memory or topic, but this past week, month really, Joy has been the one actively reflecting. You see, Joy literally has no memory of any of the days in March, 2024. Her memory starts around April 1st or 2nd and she remembers the trip home and admission to Abbott, but other than her brief near death memory shortly after the accident, she remembers nothing from the last days of February and all of March two years ago.

Last year, with the intensity of our home sale, packing, move, and unpacking from February into April, there was little time for reflection. But when this March rolled around, Joy became very introspective and curious about those lost days from 2024. I pulled all of the pictures into a dedicated folder and Joy would peruse the photos, checking dates, asking questions, and pondering what she saw and heard. While I was happy to try to help her fill in the blanks, I have to admit there were times when I just needed a break as intense feelings of PTSD washed over me. But thankfully for Joy, this exercise has appeared to be an additional step in her healing process rather than a re-traumatization.

In Joy’s deliberate approach, studying photos, correlating dates, asking questions of me and our children, she seemed to assess both the losses and many miracles of her hard fought recovery. And while this may seem counterintuitive, once again, I find in Henri Nouwen’s wise words, a validation of the benefit in Joy’s determined reflection and also a timely reference to Christ’s Passion when he writes:

How are we healed of our wounding memories? We are healed first of all by letting them be available, by leading them out of the corner of forgetfulness, and by remembering them as part of our life stories. What is forgotten is unavailable and what is unavailable cannot be healed…. By lifting our painful forgotten memories out of the egocentric, individualistic, private sphere, Jesus Christ heals our pains. He connects them with the pain of all humanity, a pain he took upon himself and transformed. To heal, then, does not primarily mean to take pains away but to reveal that our pains are part of a great pain, that our sorrows are part of a great sorrow, that our experience is part of the great experience of him who said, “But was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into the Glory of God?” (Luke 24:26, JB).

At the same time, bringing our suffering out into the open and into active memory can still stir new questions and leave us feeling potentially isolated or abandoned. Yet in other source of insight and comfort, and also timely for Easter, I find solace in the following from Allender and Longman’s “Cry of the Soul,” and I’ll close with this…

Suffering seems so pointless, meaningless. Rarely can we say honestly, without contrivance, “I see why God allowed this loss to occur.” More often, we are at a loss to comprehend loss. It is a double sorrow—not only do we experience despair, but the despair makes no sense. The cross cuts to the core of all suffering, all loss, all despair by invading it with the cry, “My God, my God.”

The cross paradoxically transforms all human sorrow from a horizontal loss to a vertical agony that compels us to ask God who He is. The Lord’s cry will never allow us to see human suffering as merely accidental or incidental to life. All loss is bound to God. Far more, Jesus’ cry of despair also transforms all human suffering as a promise. It is a down payment on hope. Jesus suffered, and so will we. But He has been there before us; He waits for us at the end of our sorrow. He has been perfected and resurrected through suffering; so will we.