I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around in my own head over the past few days. That’s probably a little bit good and a little bit bad. Good when I remember the things that I don’t want to forget, like the way I used to hear him walk through the office and the way he kept trying to get us to name our baby after him. Great when we found some old emails and pictures and things that otherwise would’ve never been recalled.
There is a tendency when people die to make them into mightier men than they were in the flesh, but I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope people don’t try to stip away the grit that makes all of us human. You know, not to glorify anything that was negative, but to just embrace reality; which is what I’ve been trying to do. It seems a slippery thing.
There are lessons to be learned through the actual event. Lessons about home safety and knowing which beeps mean what and not sitting around and waiting for someone else to find out what that sound is at your neighbor’s house. And there are lessons about the ones who are left behind and how much one life means, even if you don’t know it. If you’ve ever had a George Bailey moment, standing on a cold bridge in the darkness and wondered, you should know that it would be one of the greatest tragedies of your friend’s lives, to have you ripped out of it.
I wish we could all just stay a while and think about how much we all matter to our little communities of people walking together through this life. I’d like to think that we would spend a little more time talking and a little less time complaining. I’d like to think that we wouldn’t apologize for our house’s state of being and that no one would judge the tupperware in the floor and the fingerprints on the door. I’d like to think that we’d pitch in a little more, laugh a lot more and cut each other giant slices of slack.
I had a dream last night where I was screaming at him and telling him to do things and not to do other things and he couldn’t hear me. He just kept going and didn’t stop. I woke up sweaty and thought for a while about how badly I wished I could have intervened, could have pulled on the emergency brake and watched the train stop. I was angry that he didn’t hear me. I was frustrated at my impotency. And in that moment God spoke quietly and reminded me that I am not the One keeping this ball on its axis. Didn’t fashion these bodies out of dust. I am not the One who is sustaining life. But He is. He is. He is.
