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I hate sickness.

I really, really despise it. I am not very familiar with sickness or with death. But a recent onslaught of these things in the people around me, people that I love and care about, has caused something to consistently ebb in my heart over the last few days. These things -- sickness, death -- they're just so wrong. There's something in me that is so profoundly disturbed when I witness the aftermath left by death, when I see faithful friends struggle and pass away, when I watch an old man struggle to walk across the lobby of a hotel.

That was today -- the old man walking across the lobby of the hotel where I work. Yesterday I heard the front doors swoosh open and looked up to see a painfully thin man standing in the middle of the lobby, leaning against a walker. I asked him if I could help him, he repeated back something I couldn't understand. Today, again, I heard the front doors swish open, and there he was -- standing in the same spot and breathing hard as he rested on his walker. "How are you today?" I asked. "Trying," he said breathlessly as he continued to amble across the lobby toward his room.

There's something so profoundly wrong with the process that leads human beings into death. It's so unjust, so wrong, so unfair, so incomprehensible to me.

I guess it's right to feel that way. Me and Dre were listening to a podcast this week that talked about how sickness and death were never meant to be part of the plan. These things were never God's intention for us. And yes, we have been freed because of the work of Christ -- but we still live and struggle in the time "in between" when His domain over death has not yet reached its full fulfillment.

Right now, I reeeally don't feel great or happy or satisfied with this "in between". Right now, all I can muster up is a terrible feeling of helplessness in my knowledge that sickness and death are some of the starkest realities of our lives. I know that God heals -- but I don't know when, how, why, or why not. I don't know how people can pray so hard, serve so faithfully, believe so fervently -- and it doesn't really seem to make a difference. I do know, though, that ultimately I will choose to love and serve God. But still, to be honest...dang. It just sucks.