The Sadness that Belongs to the World

From the first part of Janet Frame's brilliant autobiography "To the Is-Land":

"I remember a gray day when I stood by the gate and listened to the wind in the telegraph wires.  I had my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness, or it seemed to come from outside, from the sound of the wind moaning in the wires. I looked up and down the white dusty road and saw no-one. The wind was blowing from place to place past us, and I was there, in between, listening. I felt a burden of sadness and loneliness as if something had happened or begun and I knew about it.  I don't think I had yet thought of myself as a person looking out at the world; until then, I felt I was the world. In listening to the wind and its sad song, I knew I was listening to a sadness that had no relation to me, which belonged to the world."

The sadness that belongs to the world.  I often used to wonder about it.  Why?  What had happened?

Janet Frame actually goes on to answer the question she raises - but I don't know if she herself made the connection.  She is still very young, and is talking of visits to and from the uncles and the aunts. She says:

"The aunts were still there, still talking of Up Central and Middlemarch (Middlemarch, Lottie) and Inchclutha; and the uncles with their shy Frame look and the particular set of the lips that said, 'Everything should be perfect. Why isn't it?'"

Everything should be perfect. Why isn't it?

With Ken's funeral coming up, I have been thinking about this.  When God wakes him from the sleep of death, everything will be perfect. And then our real lives here on the earth can begin.  At the moment it is all a struggle, ending in the defeat of death.   Then when God's Kingdom is ruling over the earth and that connection, so fatally broken in Eden, is restored, we will be living, not dying.

We don't even know yet what that is like. Or how wonderful it will be. I hope we will all find out though.

Julia - exPlanetExpat - arrives tomorrow for a stay.  She has had her share of sadness this year, with two deaths in the family.  We have known her (and her lovely rescue animals), I guess for about 35 years. 

I hope to be out on the field service this morning - and managed to do a bit yesterday afternoon.  Very strange weather yesterday. One minute the storm would be with us - lashing rain, wild seas - then it would calm down and there would be a wonderful light - so beautiful that I thought surely if the creation had not already told me of its Grand Creator, it would wake me up now!

So please, everyone, wake up while there is still time.