“I cried out to God for help;
I
cried out to God to hear me.” Psalm 77:1
The kid was eighteen. He was in
his last year of high school, the last month-and-a half really, and he was on
his way to the state high school basketball tournament.
It was one of those accidents that
could have happened a hundred miles away but didn’t. It happened on a
non-descript intersection people have passed for years on their way to work and
never, ever noticed, an intersection minutes away from his home. The three of
them were on a little trip to the state capital, they’d just started, and just
like that one of them was dead.
It makes a difference how, I
suppose, but I’m glad I’m not the law because what kind of penalty could you
exact that would be worse than what has already been given? The guy is dead,
someone who, by all accounts, was a great kid, someone who, just days before,
had professed his faith in God. For that death, someone else already has a life
sentence.
The poet of Psalm 77 starts with
history, repeated like a mantra. “Here are the facts, Lord. In the past, when I
cried out to you for help, you answered. That’s what I know of your love. You
were there when I needed you. My cries were never bootless, never empty, never
unheard.” That’s what he’s banking on now.
Just one of the reasons the
shocking, accidental death of a kid a couple hundred miles away from the chair
where I’m sitting is so frightful is that so many of his friends likely have no
such history. Many of them—just kids—can’t testify the way the poet does in
Psalm 77; many of them can’t—if they’d be asked—recite chapter and verse of
earlier distress or horror. All of this—the sudden, inexplicable end of a life—is
new.
Yesterday, a friend of mine once held
forth in chapel about hairs falling from heads. He did a careful analysis of
every such simile in scripture and showed—forcefully and convincingly—that the
phrase itself, “not a hair can fall from your head,” is scriptural shorthand
for life itself. He referred to specific tragedies suffered just recently in
the community, even mentioned the loss of his own son, years ago; and then
passionately offered this eternal bromide: God himself will never leave us,
even in death.
He was speaking at just about the
time some very tragic news was hitting a rural community in Minnesota—one of
their own, a really good kid, was dead.
I never knew the kid. He’d decided
to come to the college where I teach next year, but somewhere in a campus
office sometime soon, his application will soon be filed elsewhere. If years
were moments—and in an eternal way, they are—he might have been in chapel that
day to hear the powerful lesson about hairs falling.
The Apostle Paul says in Romans 5
that suffering builds perseverance, perseverance builds character, and
character creates hope. It sounds so good at distance, in a rearview mirror. Makes
great sense if we’ve got a history.
But in rural Minnesota this
morning there are hundreds crying, many of them kids. They’re losing some
innocence and gaining a history. Maybe someday the words of the poet will be
theirs just as surely as they were his: when I bawled, you wiped my tears—remember?
But this morning they’re just learning all of that.
May the God of peace answer them,
just as he’s answered the chapel speaker, as he’s answered me, as he answered
the poet. Past tense. And present.
Be there. That’s all the poet
asks. And all of us do.
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