I could almost believe the negatives to all of my questions if it weren't for one thing that I knew beyond a doubt. God loved me and knowing that wrote in the corresponding answers and opened up my understanding.
The offenses and tribulations that come in the course of a person's life are not God's fault. Mankind made a choice to rebel from perfection over six thousand years before with a bite out of the fruit of a tree that was forbidden to eat from.
The reproach of sin and all the suffering caused was mankind's fault and not God's, but God's love showed through in that He hadn't just left us to perish in our sin. He had made a way through the sacrificial slaying of His perfect Son in order to make a way for us to once again enter into harmony and experience the perfection of what was lost in the Garden of Eden.
God didn't need to do that, but He had and it testified of His great love for mankind in doing so. Serena's faith had been a sure thing as evidenced by how she had defined her life in her belief in her Savior. Instead of her life just being over without hope of more she was even now experiencing eternity in the loving rest prepared for her by God in a body eternal that no storm could ever tear apart.
As bad as the loss of her was to those of us still living, God had just gained another soul for all of eternity. To accept such an insight meant to accept the same in regards to my own wife and the lives of my two daughters taken from me before the age of accountability.
I knew where my daughters were. Even knowing that it still hurt, but it was better than no hope. It was good to know that they weren't hurting.
That's what was most important, but it was still hard on those of us left to pick up the pieces and go on living. As people made in the image of God we were fashioned to need relationship and the loss of it was awful, but instead of embracing the negatives in this moment I was making the conscious choice to fall deeper into my relationship with God rather than curse Him and die alone without hope.
By my best calculations the storm had driven us off in a different directional heading than the one that we'd had when we first arrived to this inner world. I literally had no way of finding my way in this foreign place.