I Love You and God Loves You

I have been struggling with an article for the Pursuits over the last two days. I could not translate what has been going on in my heart and my head into words on a page. For the last couple of weeks I have been chewing on words from Peter’s sermon. He said when his sister died in a tragic accident, that what he needed from friends was to hear, “I love you and God loves you”. I have experienced two tragic accidents in my life, the death of my wife and the near death of my daughter in an automobile accident. It took me year to come to terms with the first tragedy. One of the reasons was I never hear those words, in fact I heard little about God or Love after that accident. The most common response I heard was let’s try to put the pain, hurt, and grief behind us and move on. That did not work well and I spiraled into alcohol, drugs, depression and suicide. It took years to recover, years that I blamed God and denied the One who loved me the most, never left me and was my only hope for redemption.

How different it was when Michelle had her accident. The response of our church family was immediate, simple and profound. When a parent fears they are losing a child, there are no comforting words that take away the fear and the grief What we needed was to know that we were not alone, that it mattered to God and others that we were hurting, frightened and vulnerable. This church family reached out to us and did just that. It was important that they were there, not that they had answers. What was amazing was that we also heard from unexpected places that same message. A convent in New Orleans wrote us that they were praying for us, a prayer circle of women prisoners in Eastern Oregon wrote us that they were praying for us, and a lady from Scio who did not know us, but had read about Michelle came and sat with us one day. She had had a dear one experience a traumatic brain injury and knew how lonely the vigil was as you waited for someone to emerge from a coma.

I was reminded of that this morning. I woke up to a phone call from my dear friend Barb wanting to know how I was. I was confused, but I heard “I love you and God loves you in her voice. It turned out that she had been listening to the news. There was an accident in the Springfield and one of the drivers was named Derek Jones (my second son’s name.) I immediately called my son and found out that, fortunately, it was not him. By that time I had a call from our pastor, Peter and an email from our secretary, Sally. I suppose one could be upset to be put through that, but I was not. I was so thankful that my church family reached out so quickly and so lovingly. I will spend much of today praying that those involved in this accident. I pray that they are hearing, “I love you and God loves you”.