5 Is Too Many

When I was young, maybe six or seven, I started having recurring nightmares. In these, I was in a room, trying to pick up an inordinate amount of items; sometimes sleeping bags or playing cards--cards were the worst. No matter how many cards I picked up, more would appear. When it was sleeping bags, they’d slip out of my arms and I couldn’t move through the room because there were so many. I was never buried in the room, just stuck and overwhelmed by so many of the same things that I would never be able to pick up.

Two weeks ago, I stood in a hallway, trying to focus on five signs, five names--but it was too many. I couldn’t see all of them at once. Everytime I tried, I could only focus on one, or sometimes two names. Immediately, guiltily, I’d try to add another name into the scene, and then I’d lose one, or two. Five was too many for me to hold in my vision. So I took a picture and felt that I held nothing.

Now, in real life, there are empty spaces instead of things that keep appearing. Holes that need to be filled. They keep opening, exposing the loss as time reveals again and again how one--no, five--lives intertwined with many others. It feels like a burial to fill each gap, a death again to appoint another to take each person’s role, to fill in the gaps that continue to appear as the seasons and the days march obsessively on, careless for those grieving.

But… the blueberry muffins need to be made, the floors need to be cleaned, and someone has to teach those three year olds. The grave filler is practicality.

If I can’t see five, forty-one thousand is unimaginable*. No place left for holes to appear--the bottom of the room has fallen out. Instead of being overwhelmed with things, I am overwhelmed by the empty space. The grave filler is put out of business--practicality has no place left in Turkey or Syria. Only survival remains to work.

I can’t hold five lives in my line of sight. I can’t count forty-one thousand lives without the room filling up with cards, slipping, sliding, tripping me in the anxiety of frictionless loss. Nothing will stick or hold except for the reality of death. And who can hold death? You need God.

You can’t just have a god, because then you wouldn’t know how much he could hold. What if you choose the wrong god and five or forty-one thousand is too many for him? What if one was too many? “What if he can’t hold me?” you wonder.

Nothing has driven me to the need of God more than the last 3 weeks. I need to know there is one God who has control. I need to know there is one God who can somehow be in the midst of our crises in Arkansas and in the midst of disaster in West Asia. I need to know that He created and sees forty-one thousand and five lives and does not drop any of them, who continues to stand in the room where He is not overwhelmed. I need to know that He is the rock which can never be pitted with graves and that our lives are not too many.

*On February 6th, 2023 two earthquakes, 7.5 and 7.8 magnitudes, occurred in southern

Turkey, close to the Syrian border. Almost a year later, the death count stands at 59,259 souls.

written by Elizabeth Dilts