(Page 4 of 9) - Ten minutes after hearing he had died I was thinking about that dinner -- the one we’d never have now -- and about the dumb jokes we’d never get to crack at his expense, and about the laughs we’d never get to have with him. And then I thought of that final prayer in BJ’s house, and of how God didn’t seem to have answered it, and of how now I simply didn’t know what to think at all.
Soon after David’s death we learned that the embolism he had died from was a result of his sitting in the cramped space of that modified tank, for days and nights on end. He’d even slept in there. He had told a doctor that he had been experiencing leg cramps and the doctor had told him to take some aspirin and to seek medical attention. But of course this meant that he would have to stop charging ahead toward Baghdad and, naturally David, being the indefatigable and irrepressible optimist that he was elected to continue to charge ahead though the windswept sands of the desert with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Pision. I think most of us would have done precisely the same, or would have liked to think so.
Who could have resisted the undeniably glorious feeling of being part of the central event of your time, and of being the one lucky enough to be bringing it all into America’s livingrooms? And we in our livingrooms could sense it through David and because of him; we could sense the hopefulness and barely bridled elation that came with being part of a liberating army; and America’s love affair with him for those weeks that he rode toward freedom was in a way our love affair with that noble and eternally hopeful and idealistic America, the “shining city on a hill” to use John Winthrop’s famous words. So in his role on the other side of our television sets, on the other side of the world, David was a genuine, palpable hero for us, who like all of his kind touches and somehow inspires that which is heroic in us, who makes us all feel we are a part of what he represents, so that we are sharing in his braveness and optimism and exuberant life.
And then that one bright morning we got word that he had died, and that part of us that identified with David died too.
And so, the obvious and eternal and painful question: how could God let this happen? How? Especially after we had so specifically and lovingly prayed for him on the eve of his departure? How could God let someone like that die, someone so vigorous and young and at the peak of his professional success, with a beautiful wife and three gorgeous little girls, and with a faith more vibrant than it had ever been in his life -- how?
I think for me it was the vibrance of David’s faith that especially made me ask why God had allowed him to die. What a difference someone makes in the world when their faith in God suddenly blossoms! You may have had some sort of faith before, you may have believed in your way; but then suddenly the penny drops and for some unknowable reason you turn your life over to God in a completely new way and everything is new again, as though you had just been born again, which is where that overused and misunderstood term comes from. I had seen this transformation happen in my own life some years before and I had seen it happen in the lives of so many friends over the years. It’s an undeniably beautiful and moving and transcendent thing to witness, as most births are. And for most people, seeing the newborn continues to be beautiful and moving and transcendent. And in a way you are forever newborn, and the world will never be the same. As Scripture says, when this happens, you are a new creature -- the old things have passed away. It was clear that David had given his life over to Jesus with that great exuberance and abandon which we recognize as the unmistakeable hallmarks of true love. Perhaps for the first time in his life he was truly himself, and it was a beautiful thing. Why would God have let that die? 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page › |
