Hello,
Regular readers of the Bungee Cord know that each week it is formed by
the events of my life, some trivial….some significant. Today it is significant.
Woke up this morning, turned to my Facebook page and saw that a very
dear and old friend of mine had placed a post, a post to let his friends know
of the unspeakable tragedy of the death of his 29 year old daughter in a car
accident last night. He and his
wife, whose death to cancer in her early 50’s still stings sharply, enveloped
us in their arms of friendship when my wife and I took our first steps into our
adult lives. They lived a short
two blocks from us and we wove our lives together for the first four years of
my career as a pastor thirty years ago.
We shared dinner. We often
shared a glass of wine. He and I
hunted a squirrel that had snuck its way into their basement, and he came over
to our house to install a dishwasher in our kitchen (is that supposed to
involve smoke coming from a circular saw?). They gave birth to their daughter in the same year that our
oldest son was born, and together we learned by experience the challenges of
being a first time parent. They
invited us to their cabin in the north woods of Minnesota, and in the company
of newborns, mice, mosquito’s and M&M’s our lives were sealed together.
When I read his post…all I could post back was, “Oh no!”
I don’t know how he found the strength to type the horrible news.
To try and make any sense of such a tragedy seems to me to trivialize
the pain and the anguish in a father’s heart, or in the hearts of any of us who
love him and his daughter.
Although the news that greeted me this morning was shocking, those of us
who have trudged our way through life know all to well that none of us is
immune from this sort of thing befalling us and shredding our hearts, too.
I don’t know when it was, maybe it was in those first four years of my
ministry that I shared with these dear friends, when I stumbled onto a verse in
the Bible that I call my focus verse – it stands before my eyes every time the
phone rings, every time I do something that magnifies the wretch that I am,
every time I do something that waters the weeds of presumptuous pride, every
time that I see the blessings in my life that are well beyond my deserving,
every time that I walk into the lives of others whom tragedy has tackled with
unrepentant roughness…my focus verse: 1
John 3:1, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called
children of God, and that is what we are.”
That is what we are….period.
God’s grace and peace, (ggap)
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
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