It doesn’t take much searching to find heartache amongst us. It feels like every morning we wake up to another news story that breaks us, scares us, and makes us pull our babies closer.

Usually, these stories are far from our front porches. But every now and then, they hit closer to home, and you watch a community reshape and adjust to make room for unfathomable grief.

Will and Bailee Byler, a couple from my small community, passed away last weekend hours after their wedding ceremony at a family ranch in Uvalde, Texas. The newlyweds left their reception in a helicopter, one that would fly into the side of a hill shortly after killing both the couple and the pilot. But this is not a story about death.

The past few days I’ve watched a community pay beautiful tribute by decorating the town square, where the family owns a boutique, with flowers and memorials.

But it was a viral post on Facebook written by the groom’s aunt, Reesa Byler Ueckert, less than 24-hours after the accident that has been especially moving.

Ueckert writes:

At Uvalde today I walked out to the site of Will & Bailee’s wedding ceremony and saw that they had left a portion of the beautiful flowers, in fact the circle where Will & Bailee recited their vows they wrote to each other and where they were pronounced husband and wife. This is also the circle where Will stood and I was able to see the unspeakable joy on Will’s face as he saw his bride for the first time. There was also an area to the left where the most important thing of their lives was declared to everyone present, and that was that God was, and would always be in the center of their marriage. They braided three cords together to complete a cross formation that represented Will, Bailee and God. 

This is why we can rejoice in the fact that Will & Bailee are in heaven, free of pain or heartache and celebrating their eternal life with Christ. 

To anyone that is not sure that if something were to happen to them today and that they would be with Jesus please let me or anyone in the Byler family tell you about the risen Savior that we serve and how to have a peace that passes all understanding because our God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life – John 3:16″

Her words have now been shared over 8,000 times.

Man, we can’t make sense of this other than to whisper, Come, Lord Jesus. Hearts are heavy and tender and we’re asking questions we will never know the answers to on this side of Heaven. 

But a family so heavily impacted by the darkness of this world has reminded us that even in the ugliness of tragedy, we still have hope.

We will never know the whys of this world, but what an incredible answer this family has for the what now.

Rejoice. Rejoice for the gift of eternal life.