the unknowns

I was walking around the lakes again on Sunday and I passed a little boy who must have been about 7 or 8 with his Dad. The little boy had red hair and was wearing a Germany soccer jersey; I caught myself staring at him. Is this what Joshua would have been like? No, I thought to myself, he would have had dirty blond hair like Caroline, but of course, I have no idea. What would he have been like? Would he have been a happy baby, a good sleeper, a good eater, a red head, a soccer player? I wish I could know. All of the unknowns make it hard to reconcile that reality with the fact that God allows things like this to happen. Every day. Why would God allow a mother to never experience all of the "firsts" with a child? Why would God allow a mother to experience those firsts and then lose a child before he goes to high school, or college? Why do children lose their parents? It doesn't make sense to me. Even though in my head, I know the "right" answer: we live in a badly broken world where the children of God (all of us) do horrible things to one another and where disease does horrible things to us.
I can't help but think of my own relationship with Caroline, it is literally painful for me to see her in distress or in pain. On our way to Lake Charles this past weekend we were getting off the interstate for a quick pit-stop and Caroline started crying hysterically (which, for those of you who don't know her, she is not prone to do). It was all I could do to not pull off my seat belt and get into the back seat with her to comfort her and find out what was wrong. I imagine that is how God feels when he sees his children in pain or distressed. Does it take all the power of Heaven to keep him from coming down here to comfort us? To be sure, he gives us friends and family who are here physically to offer comfort and love when we face difficulties. But we can only offer one another so much, it sounds so cliche, but we truly all grieve in different ways and what might look like comfort or help or love to me might look like intrusiveness or a bother to you. From where I sit now I can see, even if only to a small degree, that God carried us through losing Joshua. And he continues to do so, but so often when you are in the midst of it, it doesn't feel like it - it takes getting two or three or twenty steps back to see it.
I think it goes back to how suffering overflows to us and along with that we get the comfort of Christ so that we can offer it to others. Paul doesn't say that God brought us the suffering so that we could comfort others, he just says that we will get suffering and likewise we will get comfort so that we can give it. Maybe that is how God can even stand to not be down here with us giving us comfort, he entrusts those he loves to do it in his name and on his behalf until he can give it to us in full.