Death and new life

Day 5 of lent and I've headed back out into the wilderness down the fire track I've been exploring. I remember, when I was younger there was another track that came off the main track only a few hundred metres from the gate. I used to walk this track all the time but now it seems to have disappeared. I had a careful look for it today and found it. Ever since the fire new growth had been springing up on that track and it was grown over, but you could still make out a path.
I decided to give it a go and see just how far I could ride along this track. I made it about a few hundred metres along the track before it started to feel like I was in the middle of nowhere with no place to go. Instead of getting worried about the track and how I was going to find my way, I took some time to notice and appreciate my surroundings since I was now deeper into the scrub away from the main track.
The scrub here isn't as dense as it used to be. I remember trees and bushes so think the sun could hardly break through. Now 12 years on (from the fire) and in the middle of a drought, the bushlands here have not recovered as well as they could have. This time instead of noticing the new life I noticed more of the trees and bushes that were left as skeletons and hadn't recovered. There was so much evidence here of death that interestingly I did not recognize when I first pedaled in on day 1. It's interesting how we look past the death to see the new life right away because we don't 'do' death very well, we'd rather go straight to resurrection moments and forget that which led to it.
I began reflecting on this some more in the context of what some of mine and Verity's friends are going through at the moment. A few of our closest friends are suffering this tension of holding the reality of a death in the family along with the expectation of a new birth. One couple lost their uncle to cancer just last week, they are also expecting their first child in a few weeks. Other couple are dealing with the loss of a parent. His mum died of cancer last week. His dad died just a few years ago. They are expecting their first baby in a few months.
How do you journey with such tragedy in the context of expectation of new life? How do you find the appropriate spaces for grief and for celebration in their own right? It's interesting, death and new life, it's part of everone's reality and some time or another. It's also Christocentrically at the core of our theology. Having said that, it also seems to be that part of the Christian faith we deny the most. Why don't we do the suffering, grieving, death stuff very well? We generally don't journey with it or acknowledge it well at all, it's too painful. Yet it is there and the scares are always left as a reminder even in the presence of new life.
I eventually emerged from the track I struggled to follow through the fire and drought burdened scrub. It actually brought me out of the track that leads to the grapevines. Now I was back on the main track and I new my way home. My vision was clearer now. My legs were a bit sore so I look down and noticed my legs were covered in scratches and black ash. A reminder of the journey through new life still emerging from a once dead and desolate wilderness.

Shalom
Mark