by Eric Metaxas
(Page 1 of 9) - At twelve o’clock stood New York Governor, George Pataki. At one o’clock, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher. At two o’clock was former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani. At three o’clock, just across the aisle, were Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, and Ann Curry. Everywhere one looked were pundits and anchors and government officials, so many of them that you thought you had fallen into your tv set. There was Tom Brokaw and there was Tim Russert and there was Andrea Mitchell. And there was Chris Mathews and Lester Holt and Campbell Brown. And there was Dominic Dunne and there was General Barry MacCaffrey and there was Peggy Noonan. And there we were, my wife and I, at our friend’s funeral.
The scene was St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, just over a year ago, and the sad occasion was the funeral of David Bloom, the former NBC White House Correspondent and Weekend Today Show anchor whose good looks and brilliance and ebullience had recently brought him the greatest fame of his famous life. For several exhiliarating and tense weeks the entire country had watched him and prayed for him as he bounced along in his modified tank, which someone had dubbed the “Bloom Mobile,” windswept and typically enthusiastic, the best-known embed in the Iraq War, updating us from the ever-changing middle of it all, and somehow reassuring us by his very presence, by his inherent and ineffable upbeatness, that everything -- despite everything -- was okay.
There was something inescapably iconic about David now, as if in this new role he’d become something larger than himself, as if in spite of himself -- shouting over the desert wind to those of us in our livingrooms -- he now stood for something -- something important. But what? It was as if bright and young and optimistic and brave he had come to represent the very best of us, of America -- as if he had come to represent our own best image of ourselves as a people. And then one Sunday morning we got word that he had died, that our friend David had died, and for a little while, the whole world seemed to make no sense at all.
Our lives sometimes seem punctuated by these moments of bad news breaking into the delicate peace that surrounds us and that we don’t notice until it is broken. I was still in bed with The Times and coffee when my friend B.J. had phoned me with the news. B.J. Weber was the chaplain for the New York Yankees for twenty years, but he has a much wider ministry to Wall Street executives and other professionals and he had become a close friend of David’s in his last two years. “Beej, what’s up?!” I asked. He didn’t mince words: “Our friend David Bloom is dead.” This was the black news my wife and I and so many of our friends had been dreading in the weeks and weeks that we’d been watching and praying for David in Iraq. And as usual with this sort of news your whole being seems to reject it instantly, viscerally, even though it’s irrevocable. But somehow you sort of tense up once you’ve heard it, as if to fight it back into non-being, something like the way a ball player desperately and inanely tries to “will” a long foul ball into fair territory from homeplate.
Lord, no. No. I gritted my teeth and pounded my thigh -- “damn, damn, damn!” I then got the details from B.J., and learned that David had not died from an enemy inflicted wound, but rather, had died of a pulmonary embolism. Then I hung up and just sat there, probably for the very first time in my entire life almost angry at God and utterly, hopelessly baffled at His purposes. I always knew that God never fails us, that however difficult it is to see sometimes, He has a plan in the midst of the chaos; and I knew that now. But I suddenly felt as if for the first time in my life I only knew these things intellectually, as if my faith in God had now, for the very first time, been tried and shaken. * * 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page › |
