On the wrongness of death and brokenness

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18
I look around and I wonder, where do I begin? Where do I begin to make sense of brokenness? Of Children gone to soon and life snuffed out and pain and hurt and gut-wrenching sorrow? Where does one begin? 
Should I start at the beginning? I stand before the tree holding knowledge of all things, of life and death...before man KNEW. I stand before the tree and I gaze up at the succulent fruit. I wonder what those days were like, walking with God in the garden of perfection. Before mankind tasted the fruit of life and death, normal was perfect and perfect was normal. No tears. No pain. No losing. Only walking with God, hand in hand...perfect intimacy with the One who created all.
But then man tasted. Man bought into the knowing, the terrible understanding of life broken. Man disobeyed, and for it he paid a price unfathomable. Sickness. Ugliness. povertyhungermanslaughterweaknesswarbirthdefectscaraccidentsthieveryslandertears. Death. 
Some days, I can't see past this lens of brokenness. I look at poverty, at war, at senseless dying and I cannot see beyond. I am bound by this terrible understanding of brokenness. I am held captive by the talons of sin. 
Is this desperate landscape of brokenness all we have the capacity to see? If so, why does it feel so wrong? I cannot help but think of these words from C.S. Lewis: "If we find within ourselves a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."

If this lens does not seem to fit right, it must not be the right lens. Praise be to God...for He has purchased with His blood a way for us to return to perfection. Few in this world live with the lens of perfection He paid for. Even those of us who have been given this staggering gift of grace sometimes throw our Heaven-tinted glasses to the side and don instead our sin-glasses. 

Today, put on your Heaven glasses. Remember that this world is temporary. Embrace the desperation for renewal, the sorrow of brokenness...acknowledge that this is not the way things are supposed to be. Babies are not supposed to die because they are hungry. Daddies are not supposed to die while sons and daughters are still being fathered. Cancer is not supposed to eat healthy bodies. Beautiful teenage girls are not supposed to be stolen from life before they waltz at the prom. 

As you wrap your hands and your mind and your whole being around the wrongness of it all, remember that "the things that are seen are transient." The wrongness is temporary. The rightness? Forever. Walking hand in hand with God of creation? Forever. The damnation of pain, suffering, death? Eternal. 

It hurts. But it hurts a whole lot more when I choose the sin-glasses, when I forget that the garden-beginning is not the end. With the heaven glasses on, this I'm-going-to-die-this-hurts-so-much pain can become "a light and momentary affliction." With the heaven glasses on, the terrible image of my dad gasping his last breath becomes a beautiful snapshot of his birth into eternity.

Sin glasses? Death. Heaven glasses? Eternity birthday.

Today, even as I mourn things-gone-terribly-wrong, I will don my heaven glasses and choose to see all through the eyes of eternity.