Take What You Can Carry

by Gian Sardar

In the last decade, most of her friends—even those who’d not gone to war—had let the concept of God be beaten away in torrents of Vietnamese rain, burned in the jungles, or obliterated in a blast that claimed a village. A world of such atrocities could not be under the jurisdiction of a compassionate God, and who wanted to believe in an uncompassionate God?

“Loss keeps going, you know? It doesn’t just stop with what was taken from you. It grabs new things all the time. You think you’re up against missing the memories, all that happened, but Christ if you don’t miss all that didn’t happen even more.”