Yesterday was a very rough day. My Pride and ego got a much needed checkup. Sometimes being a Christian is not fun. It is hard to be part of a faith that reveals how messed up I truly am. Yet, it is even harder to make sense of so many things that just make no sense. Death seems to be all around us right now. I know it is easy to focus on the negative and overlook the positive, but something just seems different with the world. My world is definitely different. Yesterday was a day where my faith was tested and I failed.
The weekend overall was just very blah. Gladys had a friend that gave birth to a beautiful baby girl only to feel the same pain we felt 6 months ago, this baby is now playing with our baby in heaven – without us. I understand their pain, but every loss is a different pain for each person. This wonderful couple knew that their baby’s chance of survival was slim. But hope was always there. Their pain is no less than ours.
So in the backdrop of that starting our own weekend, pain was reintroduced to our home, not that it ever left. Yet, in many ways life was beginning to move ahead for us as a family. Soccer games were wrapping up for my boys and we were preparing for our first real family vacation to the ocean. But this family’s loss touched our lives this weekend, especially for Gladys. Old wounds come rushing in. The whys of our pain are still there and now we wonder for this couple the same whys.
My band was scheduled to play a concert at a car show that a local church was having on Sunday. I always look forward to playing out, but I wasn’t particularly excited this time. I wasn’t sure why, but looking back I see now why. You see, we were playing at the very church our daughter was buried at. In fact, from where I was standing, I could see her grave. She heard the songs I have written many times in her mom’s belly. It just never crossed my mind that I was going to be playing those songs to her in her grave. I have worked up a couple of new songs that are about our experience and the band has been rehearsing them for a while now. We have one that is concert ready and we played it out one time before a few weeks ago. It is called Safe. It is kind of a take on being Safe in God, even though as C.S. Lewis wrote, he is not safe, but he is good.
So here I was scheduled to play at a concert I had not really thought through on a weekend when another couple was experiencing fresh what we have experienced for the last 6 months. O.K., I am pretty tough and I love singing and I am thinking I can get through this. I am ok; I have been dealing with this just fine for the last few months- little did I know what rage was still inside of me. I get all of my gear loaded up. My plans are to play the concert, do a quick change and meet my wife who could only stay for part of the concert – at the grave site for a grave site service. Everything is loaded in the van. I get my boys loaded up, kiss the wife and we are off to set up for the concert, or so I think. I go to start the car and click, click, click. “Oh come on,” I mutter. Click, Click, Click. “Ok, I just had the stupid alternator replaced on this thing - what now? “ I pray, “God, just this one time, I need some help here. I have this concert I really need to get to, I don’t want to do it because it is not going to be easy but I need to get there. I need a car so I can leave and meet my wife at this grave site. She needs me there. Please come through.” Deep down inside I am thinking some more wicked thoughts. I am really thinking, “you couldn’t come through for me when I asked you to save Isabella but the least you can do is start this stupid car for me, so I can get all this done. I cannot cancel!” I am starting to see, my real struggle is deep down inside I don’t think God came through for my family, and here we go again. My rage is getting to a breaking point.
I decide to hit the steering wheel and yell at my boys to be quiet. I seem to have a knack for making a fool of myself. I decide what this starter needs is a good hammer. I go toward the house to get it all the while acting like a madman and a fool who is going to praise God at a concert he will be the front man in! Nice! Gladys says something to me to try and calm me down, but I am beyond rational at this point and I mutter back three words I couldn’t imagine myself ever saying.
“I hate God!”
Wow, I can’t believe I am telling you this, but I said it. I thought I meant it; those three words broke me. What? Is that all it takes for me - A starter on a car? I hold it together through the death of my only daughter and my starter goes bad and I lose it? The truth is I lost it a long time ago and I have just been letting it build. I am sorry for those words I said. But I think God used that starter to draw out of me something that needed to be addressed. I am angry at God. I am angry that he did not save my daughter from death.
“Great! Now how am I supposed to play a concert?” Well I did, and God used that concert to reach deep into my soul. We are outside in the pouring rain playing under a metal shed to a grassy hill with all the people inside the gym, because it is pouring. God used two of my own songs to help bring some healing to the way I had just denied him. The first song is called Rest. It is a simple song that is just about how life beats you down and especially service to God’s people in the church. With all the struggles we go through as ministers sometimes we just wish we could rest in God. We just want to rest in his arms. We want to lay down our head and lie in his arms, like a child broken by exhaustion who clings to daddy and sleeps. I needed to hear that song. Right after that song I sang Drowning. This song is a typical song about Peter walking on the water. Peter was doing great walking on the water in the midst of a very real storm. Then he took his eyes off of Christ, focused on the storm and he begins to sink. That is it that is where I am at. I am drowning.
The words to the chorus of drowning say, “I’m not the man that I need to be, I’m drowning. I falling again, from the man I should be, Lord save me!!!” How very true after the way I had just lashed out at God. I look up in the middle of that song and look out at Isabella’s grave in the distance and there is a figure standing by her grave – Gladys was standing beside Isabella’s grave as I sang Drowning. What a picture. I am drowning and so is my family. They need a Dad who is a much stronger man, Lord save me!
I made it through the concert. I found a ride to the grave site to be there for my wife. I somehow found words to try and console another grieving father. More than anything, I found that I need God desperately. I need to rest in his arms right now. I need Him because my family needs me. I’m not the man that I need to be. I have taken a really hard wave from life in the death of Isabella, but Christ is there with His arms stretched out responding to my plea, Lord save me! I just need to reach out and He will walk me and my family back into the safety of the boat and he will calm the storm.
I hope you can see through more than my violent weakness as a broken man. I am a broken man, but I have the only true source that can offer healing.
