Why the Sky Is Blue by Susan Meissner Read Free Book Online

my father and that same home the same way.
    Not that there was anything wrong with medicating ourselves with books, but I think knowing it made it seem less a weakness and more like a comfort.
    My mother always read more than one book at a time. There were usually five or six on her bedside table or on the coffee table in the living room. Each one was bookmarked, most of the time with coupons for things we didn’t use, like cat food, baby powder, and denture cleaner. The books were never about the same thing. One book might be a biography; another, about the Civil War; another, a classic by Dickens or one of the Bronte sisters; and another, the current bestseller. She usually had a Bible nearby, also bookmarked, but never with a coupon. And there was never more than one bookmark in any of her Bibles.
    Mom is the only person I know who reads the Bible cover to cover. She never decides to read Romans or start a study of Ecclesiastes. She always reads it from page one in Genesis to the last page in the Revelation of John. Sometimes reading it takes her six months; sometimes, a year; sometimes, two years. I wouldn’t call my mother a religious person, though I know others do. She has what I call a simple faith in a God who is both powerful and personal. Apparently my dad had the same kind of uncomplicated faith.
    She told me once that of all the books she has ever read, she has found the Bible to be the most spectacular book ever written. I suppose she approaches it like it is great literature, in addition to being the Creator’s inspired word, and that’s why she has always read it from beginning to end. It surprised me, then, to learn that when she was grieving for my father, she read only the Psalms. She told me this when I was eleven.
    “I wasn’t actually reading them,” she said when I asked her why. “I was praying them.”
    I told her I didn’t understand what she meant.
    She told me that because she was so sad, she couldn’t pray her usual way but felt a crushing need to pour out her heart to God. She told me she had to keep talking to him so that she wouldn’t start to blame him for what happened. So she read the Psalms for a whole year, and they were her prayers.
    I remember asking her if it worked. “You never blamed God for what happened?” I said when she asked me what I meant by “worked.”
    She considered my question for a moment, no doubt weighing its significance to my blossoming understanding of God.
    “I know God could have stopped it from happening,” she said. “He could have kept Daddy safe that day, like he had all the other days of the war. But it was war. We knew he was in danger. The world is not a safe place, Claire; only heaven is. This is not heaven. And we cannot expect it to be like it.”
    Then she told me something that I found utterly remarkable.
    “If God had come to me before I met your daddy and told me I was going to marry a wonderful man who would love me completely, that we would have two precious, beautiful children, that I would experience unequaled joy, but that this good man would be taken from me after only eight years, I would have told him I still want to meet that man; I still want to marry him.”
    “Why?” I had asked.
    “Because,” she said, drawing me close. “When I look at you and Matthew, I know I would have wanted God to change nothing.”
    I was amazed at her insight and awed by her love for Matthew and me.
    “But you were so sad when Daddy died.”
    “I missed him so much, Claire,” she said. “And I still do. And it’s okay for us to miss him.”
    “But don’t you wonder why God let it happen?” I asked.
    Again, I can remember her taking her time choosing what she would say next. I would remember her next words always.
    “For a long time I did want to know why,” she finally said. “It seemed to me I deserved an answer. Your daddy was a good man and a good father. And he loved God. But deep down, I knew that sometimes God’s reasons for