There are some things that need to be written down. Moments of clarity in the midst of hurt and pain in this world. There are moments when it seems that understanding death, divorce, broken lives, deep hurts from words or deeds that have affected your life forever, will never be understood.

I was having some of those moments, when late at night a friend called to talk about a recent hurt she was experiencing. She was sludging through the muddy mess, trying to understand what had happened. We talked at length about why -- and if God was there why didn’t he answer the prayer of her heart? Why did it seem he had thrown us under the bus? We knew it wasn’t true. But right then at the time of the hurt, it seemed so true.
Both of us were hurting. For very different reasons. She, suffering from a most recent devastating break-up of a relationship she thought was straight from God. An answer to a life-long prayer. And now it was over. What had happened? And why?


There were moments of silence.  There were no answers.
Struggling with my own emotions that night, I wasn’t much of a help to her, except to know that the depth of pain sometimes is deeper than our understanding. We discussed all the why’s and what-fors. But came up silent at the end. There was no magic answer for either of us.

One thing did become clear as we talked out what we couldn’t fix in our lives. That those with hurt are the ONLY people others want to talk to when they are hurt. And how could we ever understand another living soul if we ourselves had never been devastated by life’s storms?

How could we earn the right to say to someone, “I know what you are going through?”

The conversation slowly came to a sense of knowing that we can’t always know why. She for her deepest feeling of rejection AGAIN, me for a lifelong trial with the same thing. A lifelong feeling of rejection that had taken up residence in our lives.

These emotions can’t just be thrown up in the air and hope they will go away. They have to be dealt with. And at the time neither of us wanted to quote Bible verses. We knew them. But for the moment, we needed to grieve.

And so we grieved, her for the loss of a relationship she had long prayed for and thought had finally arrived, me for a lifelong sense of rejection that never goes away, no matter how much I want it to.  We had both prayed for years about these struggles and we were in them again.


All the time we were talking, I was sitting in a rocking chair facing a big picture window looking out on the back yard behind our house on a cool early November evening. It was nearing midnight and this was my view from the window:  huge full moon high in the sky, long white streaks leaving jet lines crisscrossed across the moon’s path. Stars so explicitly bright they seemed to be hardly able to contain their brightness in the dark.

The trees had lost all their leaves so the branches created a beautiful view in front of the moon. All the while I see the ground white from the light of the moon. And then realization: the fact that God, though his majestic creation, was standing right there looking through the window. Displaying the works of his hands before my eyes.

As my friend and I talked out our frustrations it became very clear that God was there. Just looking, waiting, hoping that I would see his presence without  Him saying a single word.

How could I not, with the scene I had before me. My friend was talking and suddenly I interrupted her . . . “You are not going to believe this!” My excitement was overwhelming.

Across the sky, for the first time that I can remember I saw a falling star. A quick arc-like slide and then it disappeared.
She was excited too… suddenly our conversation became quieter. A sense of amazement began to fill us.
All that we had said, commiserated about, knew as truths we didn’t really want to face, became suddenly less powerful. I could hear it in her voice. 




One small star and a momentary second of brightness and then disappearing. We realized it was like our lives. Seen for a millisecond and gone.

Could we stay too long in our hurt places and miss what shining moment we might have?

We talked a bit more, but the conversation had gone full circle. We needed to be heard, and we were. The small interruption had lasted a nanosecond, but it had soaked into our souls somehow.

I had to wonder if that star fell just for my friend and I. One November night in the middle of deep hurt.