When I think about curses, I associate them with fantasy -- a fairytale, a witch's story, a voodoo religion. Or I think about humor and slang sayings: Curse it. Don't curse. I'm cursed for life.
However, because I am a Christian and believe the Bible to be a true story, I must then believe a curse, THE curse is real. We may not live in Storybrooke, but we do live with, live under a hefty curse.
I've never felt the weight of this curse -- God allowing sin to takes its full effect -- more than I have this year. I am suspicious that every January I will say the same. Each year that passes exposes me to more and more of its effects. The cumulative nature of the ire and ick makes life boggy and treacherous.
Unlike the curses of television, this curse is real and more horrible than imaginable. It doesn't go away with time or self-soothing or vacations. I can't escape the curse. You can't escape the curse.
Although I have already buried too many people at this point in my life, the death of my dear, dear friend last year rocked my world. I felt the loss in so many ways. Loss. Lost. Gone. A deep cavern without a bottom. The loss of Bethany feels like a nightmare. I feel the weight of the curse of death and all its ramifications.
This sin-stained curse is not a scary scene in a movie or an antagonist in a book. This is not the Evil Queen or Darth or Voldemort. It's death alive and well in our souls, minds, bodies. Death of the dying sort and death of corrupting sort and death of the molding variety. This curse is death both now and later.
It shows itself in a three young kids yearning for their mother for the rest of their lives.
Mothers burying children too soon.
Tumors in our brains, ovaries, breasts, and colons.
Viruses ravaging our body for 24 hours or 24 years.
Disease wrecking our nervous system.
Men addicted to pornogrophy.
Women beaten and bruised by lovers.
Hang nails and splinters.
Food allergies and noses that will never stop running.
Boys who shoot their fathers with a gun.
House fires that take lives and homes.
People who use words as weapons.
People who use religion as weapons.
Men who force sex upon women.
Wives and husbands who cheat.
Kids that disobey and tell lies.
Dry skin and oily hair and bad vision and varicose veins.
Kidnapped children.
People who kidnap children.
Girls who form cliques and gossip and exclude and isolate.
Single parents working two jobs.
Religious persecution.
Orphans who cannot find a forever family.
Stomach and bowels that refuse to function properly.
Diabetes that silently destroys a body.
Curved spines and aching joints
Walkers. canes. wheelchairs. knives. guns. alarm systems.
Drugs and alcohol worshipped as gods.
And these are just the people I know . . . er, a small sampling of the people I know.
The curse is found far and wide. Even if you don't believe in it, you can't escape it. But both like and so very unlike Once Upon a Time, there can be a happy ending. There can be some relief, some respite, some hope that this curse does not have the last laugh. This is not the end of the story. We have not reached "The End" quite yet.
I have sang with gumption this recent Christmas season: No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found. We know the curse lives far and wide and deep, yet Jesus Christ "redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13). By enduring the full, complete brunt of the curse, Jesus can offer us hope in the midst of sorrow -- beauty for ashes. This hope points to a time when wrongs will be thoroughly right, death will play its last act, and redemption will be in full bloom.
So, in my grief, my loneliness, my sadness, I know His living grace and love runs farther still, far as the curse is found . . . no matter what shape it takes.
