Is insanity the insistence on meaning?

Somewhere, I read a line in a book or a poem that goes, "Insanity is the insistence on meaning."
I've don't remember the context of the line, so I can't say what the author meant by it.
But it struck a chord with me - maybe never so much as this week.

Life changes fast. If you've been living a sheltered life and didn't realize that before, certainly you understand it now - from terrorists setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon to an exploding factory that nearly levels an entire town in Texas.

One minute you're about to finish running what you thought would be one of the toughest challenges of your life, and the next you find out just what "tough" really means.

Or maybe you're sitting down to dinner with the family, just another quiet day in rural Texas, when you hear a noise and the ground starts to shake and the walls start to come apart and your world collapses - literally - around you.

The world is a scary place. It is a fact of life that none of us are as safe as we think we are.

You know that. You have your stories. Maybe you know mine.

One year ago  early on the morning of April 21, I saw my wife off to the airport, settled back to watch some TV because I couldn't go back to sleep, and was completely unaware that life, as I had known it, was coming to an end.

I remember watching a policeman walking through my back yard, meeting him as knocked on my bedroom window, hearing him tell me I needed to get to UAB Emergency as quickly as I could because there had been an accident ...

This day, one year later, was supposed to be a magical date for me. Everyone said in a year, everything would be fine.
They were wrong.

A year ago, I was worried about getting my kids summer internships that would be meaningful. MG and I were making plans for vacation, things to do before the next school year started. There were bills to pay and expenses to plan for and sports and friends and family concerns.

It was what we knew as "life."

All those things are still part of our lives.  But we've added new worries: doctors and physical therapists and when to schedule the next surgery; trying to find chairs that MG can be comfortable sitting up in, even if just for a little while; searching for a car that MG might be comfortable in for trips that take longer than 30 minutes; rethinking what to do on vacation, because the long walks where we explored new cities or mountains or beaches are now out of the question.

This is the new 'normal' for us, and yes, it's enough to drive you crazy. I'm considered a pretty emotionally stable person. People who don't know me as well as my wife does say I'm laid back, that I don't get too high or too low.
Yet this last year has been, at times, rather insane. I think of things for us to do and then realize we can't. I say things - "normal" things - to MG like, "what have you been doing?" and then instantly regret it, because what she has been doing is so limited, compared to the old days when that question might have brought forth a hundred different answers because every day could be so different.

Yes, a person can go crazy trying to figure out "why" this happened, or focusing on "what if" because a split second in time would have changed everything, or believing there is good that can come from even the worst circumstances and then worrying about somehow missing the "good" completely because you were focused on the wrong thing.

Meaning? I absolutely believe - know in my very soul - that life has purpose. But my faith is not one of arrogance. Sometimes I think it's born of necessity, because the alternative seems too terrible to face.

 We live in a world of good and evil, and sometimes I think the only thing we can be sure of is that some days we see more of one than the other.
And through this last year - through this last week - we've seen good overcoming evil. We see the people who run to danger to help others; we've seen friends put their own lives on hold to care; we've witnessed people standing up in support of total strangers; we've watched people reach out across great distances because something inside them compels them to bring comfort where they can.

We've seen, I believe, a glimpse of Eden, of life the way we were "meant" to live.
Oh, the pain, the loss, the suffering, the injustice and unfairness doesn't go away. The Scripture I read teaches me that we live in a fallen world and that nature itself is groaning, longing to be restored to the way it was created. And like the very earth we live on, we humans long for perfection too. Weeks like this past one, years like this last one, the glimpses I get of earthly perfection only make me long for that perfect place even more.

So, yes, I'm Homesick for Eden. I yearn to return to that place I've never known. Deep is the need to go back to the Garden, to a place where I'm convinced we were created to live, a place that, deep down, we instinctively know is Home.