Prologue: Are we
healed yet?
It is Thanksgiving eve, the twilight
hour. In the chill of the night, with a
dusting of snow on the ground, two stealthy figures emerge from my house. Shrouded in darkness, they come to the
vehicles, and using the keys, they enter.
The interior lights are quickly doused, and the perpetrators hide
within. Both sliding doors of the
mini-van are quietly opened, leaving them ajar.
Windows on our sub-compact are rolled down, and there the two warriors
take up their positions. It grows darker
and colder, and still they wait, knowing that their ambush is unsuspected and
of genius proportions. Eventually, an
old red jeep pulls up to the house.
Since the driveway is already to capacity with vehicles, it pulls onto
the lawn. A tall brown-haired young man
emerges with a black cocker spaniel at his heels, and a second young man, with
lighter hair and blue eyes, is disgorged from the passenger side. With a war cry unrivaled in history their
attackers leap from their positions, this one wearing a sombrero and the other
with goggles and a pink karate helmet.
The young men know their female siblings are upon them, with a well
thought out strategy and the element of surprise. Suddenly the peace of the neighborhood is
rent by the sound of electronic automatic weapons, plastic foam darts with
rubber tips soar through the air. Ah,
curses! One of the weapons jams, resulting in an all out charge. The boys, not in any way cowardly or
unprepared, leap to retrieve their own weapons, previously loaded and lying
ready on the back seat. For the next hour there is a barrage of darts sometimes
hitting, mostly missing, as my adult children tear through my house and yard
aiming at each other. These largely
innocuous missiles, many of which will lie hidden in couches and behind
dressers until the next family gathering, these form one of our traditional
reunion rituals. What started as a couple of gag gifts has snowballed into a
highly competitive strategic game, and now the grandchildren have become
corrupted.
I often
wonder, years after the event, if we are healed yet, if we are back to normal.
What makes a normal Christian family life?
Is it the way we dress, or the particular church we attend? Is it Bible
reading and prayer at mealtimes? Is it the absence of certain behaviors and the
presence of others? Is it the foods we
eat or the way we vote or the music we listen to? And when things go wrong, does that mean we
have failed? Have we failed God, have we
failed ourselves? Are we no longer
worthy of the name of Christian? Is our
witness for Christ destroyed? What
happens to faith when the unthinkable happens?
Where is Christ in the furnace of human tragedy?
I found
Erin in the closet, lying on the floor.
I had stuck my head in the door to tell her to wake up and take the dog
out, but she never appeared. Tired and
frustrated that I was again coercing her to take care of what was supposed to be
her and her sister’s dog, I stormed into her room and grabbed her by the arm to
get her up. But her arm flopped down to
the floor. She was lying across her
half-packed suitcase, the insides of which held not only her clothes but also
pools of vomit. That’s how I found my
precious baby girl; that’s how the nightmare began.
What is
the worst day of your life? Can you
pinpoint it? I can. The worst day of my life was that hot summer morning, the
day I became a statistic. When you
become a statistic, life is thrown into a tailspin. We tend to quantify life in terms of percentages:
50% divorce rate, 33% of all women contract cancer, approximately 4400 teen
suicides every year. But when you
experience it, it is no longer this abstract quantity out there, sanitized by
impersonal percentages, all of a sudden you are the statistic, and it is raw, emotional, and fills every corner
of your soul. In the economy of Heaven
numbers are not important, but we live in a world that analyzes the tragedies
of life. This is my story, the story of
my family, when we became a statistic.
And it is the story of how God’s redeeming love burns brightest in the
furnace, how He walks with us in the furnace.
Copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Stone. All rights reserved.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK 1-800-273-8255
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