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

doing things or not doing things are as deep as his character. Being supplied with a reason when maybe I wouldn’t have been able to understand it might have made it worse for me.”
    She drew me even closer and cuddled me so that my head rested in the special place between her neck and chin. “Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.”
    I never looked at the sky the same way after that. There would be many times over the course of my life when I would wonder what in the world God was up to. Sometimes I would look at the abused, neglected, and unloved children that found their way to my aunt and uncle’s house and wonder if God saw their pain, why he did nothing. I asked my uncle this once, and he said, “Why, Claire, he’s brought them here to us,” like it was the easiest thing in the world to see.
    But I knew there were many other kids who had no safe place to go to escape suffering. It didn’t seem fair, and I knew what I really wanted was a heaven on earth, where no one suffered at all. Ever. But after that day, whenever I wrestled with why people suffered, I always thought of my mother and the sky, and I learned to comfort myself with the knowledge that when the question is complex, the answer is too. I learned to be at peace with a sky that is blue for no given reason at all.
    In the coming months people would assume this was the question that troubled me most: Why? Why had God let this happen to me? Well-meaning friends would feel compelled to say, “We know God has a reason for everything,” or “God must have a wonderful purpose for allowing this to happen.” And while I didn’t doubt their sincerity, I did wonder if they had stopped to think before they spoke. Obviously they had never stopped to consider if God had a wonderful and good reason for making the sky blue instead of red.
    I wasn’t overly perplexed by the “why.” What awoke me in the middle of the night, disrupted my thoughts when I tried to read a bedtime story to Spence, and haunted my quiet moments alone in the house was the “what.”
    What was to become of my marriage, my family, and me when this was over? What would I be like at the end of the journey? What would I see in the mirror a year, two years, ten years from now? What did I want to see? Those were the questions for which there did not seem to be any answers.

 
    8
     
    The next few days felt like I was preparing for a long trip, like I was organizing my affairs for a long journey, and time was of the essence. For the first time since I got home from the hospital, I began to set my alarm so I would be up before the kids, up even before Dan. The first ten minutes of my day I spent hugging the toilet in the master bathroom until the morning sickness subsided. It was how I oriented myself to the reality of each new day. The morning sickness daily reminded me of what was in store for me, and after I threw up and showered, I read the Psalms. I even set my alarm on Saturday, so that I would be through with the morning bathroom routine before anyone else was awake.
    The kids were thrilled to have me back in their morning routine, and Spence told me—after the first day—that he didn’t even mind that I made peanut butter and jelly for his lunch when he told me back in August that he was tired of it. I began taking Katie, Spencer, plus Nick and Becky’s twin boys to school again in the mornings. Becky insisted she bring them home since that had been our previous arrangement. I started to pay the bills again and do the grocery shopping and run errands.
    Dan was pensive about my “jumping back into things,” as he liked to call it. He made me promise to call Patty and get her opinion on my resuming day-to-day