The disturbing details triggered the man to jump up in court and lunge at the alleged killer of the five-year-old. Soon after, he was detained by deputies and placed in handcuffs in the hallway.
“I’ll never get to see her graduate from high school or be married or anything. He took that from us. It will never be right without her. She was all of our lives – and that’s gone,” said the grandfather.
“It’s going to be hard Christmas and Thanksgiving,” said an aunt.
The heartbreaking scene unfolded one year ago yesterday, November 7 in a Vancouver, Washington courtroom, a story picked up by FOX5 KVVU-TV out of Las Vegas.
‘You go through anger, rage, confusion – you just don’t know what to think,’ said an uncle.
He’s right.
The tumbled, twisted emotions you experience are “like a kaleidoscope” (p.31) write Bob Baugher, Ph.D. and Lew Cox, Victim Advocate, in their book “Coping with Traumatic Death: Homicide” subtitled “A book to help you in your time of need.”
Broken, that’s what you are and that’s what a kaleidoscope is: broken glass.
If you’ve ever lost anything so precious as an irreplaceable loved one, that’s what you are: broken.
Never, not really, not fully, ever, to be whole again.
And yet, ironically, it is that very brokenness from which unbelievable – certainly unbelievable during the tears of the crisis – beauty can one day come.
The elements of the word kaleidoscope – a child’s toy – are three, the ancient Greek roots being ‘skopeo – to look or examine’; ‘eidos, the shape of what’s being seen’; and ‘kalos, which means beauty.’
A kaleidoscope then is a rotated tube containing various shards of shattered glass which tube, twisted, forms patterns enabling the one looking, examining, to see shapes of exquisite beauty.
Like life, only if twisted.
Like life, only if broken.
What beauty can be had from brokenness.
Wow! Beauty from brokenness. Thank you, David!
Beauty from brokenness or is it wishful thinking? A kaleidoscope is not made of shards of broken glass, but carefully assembled small bits of precisely shaped and colored glass. The broken body of a five year old will never be twisted into something of great beauty. Only the Spirit of God can support and enable us to find beauty again in spite of the tragedy not through it. Perhaps that is why God pleads with us to not kill.
Not wishful thinking or the following authors – and their experiences from which they write – are wrong.
Ann Voskamp, “The Broken Way” of whom Liz Curtis Higgs writes, “Most of us want to run away from our brokenness. Ann Voskamp runs right into it, sharing the shattered pieces of her own life to help us acknowledge the shards we may be sifting through. Ann helps us see God’s good purpose in all of it, and how He guides us, not around the pain, but through it. Beautifully written, ‘The Broken Way’ offers a generous measure of hope, filled with Ann’s tender honesty and God’s powerful truth.”
Paul W. Brand, “Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants”.
“His work with leprosy patients in India and the United States convinced Dr. Paul Brand that pain truly is one of God’s great gifts to us. In this inspiring story of his fifty-year career as a healer, Dr. Brand probes the mystery of pain and reveals its importance. As an indicator that lets us know something is wrong, pain has a value that becomes clearest in its absence.”
The Bible – where it’s hard to find (are there any?) individuals or whole colonies of people whose lives and destinies were not in fact shaped and polished by what they went through.
While we may argue the rather fine point that kaleidoscopes are not made of shards of broken glass, in fact, twisted pieces of iron and brass wire, even lace; fragments of glass, including glitter have been used for fine effect. A wide variety of materials.
That being said, I like your observation of “precisely shaped and colored glass” being the central ingredient.
That’s my point, and the authors mentioned, precisely.
Precisely shaped are we through pain.
Yes, through pain.
Precisely.
So said Cecil Osborne in his book “How to be a Whole Person.”
“No one takes a significant step of growth or achieves a measurable change in personality except as the result of a sharp stab of a crisis or the dull throb of frustration.”