Life is dangerous.
Do what we may, live as well as we can. Wear your seatbelt. Eat the right foods. Exercise regularly. Get enough sleep. Watch your weight. Stay away from bad stress.
Still, life can be dangerous. Unfair, too. Rheumatic fever may not break the hearts of many mothers as once it did. Sailors rarely die of scurvy any more. TB kills few in the West, and mosquito bites rarely cause death from Yellow Fever where I live.
But life is still dangerous for rich and poor alike, for the powerful and the simple, even if its dangers are kept out of earshot of polite conversations. Illness still kills prematurely. Accidents can snuff out the brightest of lives. Blisters from playing tennis killed a US President’s child as late as the 1920’s. The Kennedys, for all their wealth and connections, could not stop a miscarriage in the ‘50’s, spare the life of a son born prematurely in the ‘60’s, nor the life of a President on a beautiful fall day in November of 1963. Nor, in 1999, was John Jr.’s plane able, in fog, to be steered to safety over the Cape Cod Islands. Life may seem safe, but it is not ours to control.
But I hadn’t always thought so.
I’d once thought that if I were careful, lived right, loved God and were kind to my neighbor that an invisible hedge would grow up to protect me and that the worst that life could throw at me would, somehow, be kept from my door.
But I learned that loving God and desiring to do good and love others provides no guarantees that tragedy will not strike me. In fact, I learned that, sometimes in seeking to be a blessing, one may become all the more worthy a target for evil.
In the summer of 1994, our family moved from Boston to Huntington, Indiana, a move of some 852 miles, as the moving van clocked it, but a move of immense cultural and social distances.
And change.
Nine years earlier, I had experienced a different change, not of mere address, but a “change of heart” — a euphemistic way of describing a profound spiritual and religious upheaval that turned me inside out and upside down. I had thought I was on my way to divorcing Lizzie, my wife, of then some 14 years. But, as John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you have other plans.” I’d planned on leaving Lizzie for no better reason than that I wasn’t wildly fulfilled. Mine was, as I look back, a shameful and cowardly reason to leave anyone, let alone a wife of many years who had stood by me and with whom we had born two boys.
But the divorce didn’t happen. Instead, I met God.
For nine years after my somewhat-changed state had begun, I continued to work in New York and, later, Boston with some of the nation’s top financial services firms, places like Fidelity and Scudder. I had even risen — in spite of “the change”— to become an executive vice president with Fidelity at one point. But my heart was no longer fully engaged in the financial services business. No, I wasn’t aching to work for Mother Teresa, but I wanted to do something more than just increase my own bottom line. More and more, I felt I was only making rich people richer. Good work, if you can find it. But I wanted more, crazy as that may seem.
I was in no hurry. I saw what I was doing as useful enough. Useful to clients. Useful to fellow employees, especially my “underlings.” I was a bit of different boss. In my somewhat-changed state, we still had goals to meet, but I became a more caring, rather than merely the more clever, person I had been. I continued to serve my employers — yes — but profit maximization was no longer my highest ideal.
So I waited. And continued to try to give glory to God where I had been planted.
In that waiting, I wrote and spoke a little on college campuses and elsewhere about business and ethics and the spiritual changes that can come to a businessman, even in the 20th Century. And then along came an opportunity to teach at a small, 100-year-old, Christian, liberal arts college out in Indiana.
By the summer of 1994, after more than a year of fussing over our pending move, our house in suburban Boston was sold, we were packed and ready to go.
And so we went. All five of us. Lizzie, me, Nick, our 18-year-old heading off to college in a month; Andrew, our 15-year-old, who hated us for moving him and, as he told us, “destroying his financial security with the dumbest move a father could ever make.” And Jonny, aged six, happy as long as mommy was in sight.
At the time, I thought, for sure, the hardest issue we’d face would be getting used to living on about a fifth of our former income. I also feared the cultural vacuum I suspected was ahead. Prospectively, Indiana was, for me –- and I think for many who think “bi-coastally,” as I did — a place to fly over, or maybe change to planes in on your way elsewhere, hardly a place to live.
But how wrong I was!
Within a few months of our arrival in Indiana, Lizzie was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and given months to live.
What follows is a small collection of letters written initially to friends back east in an attempt to build a prayer network to wage war for Lizzie’s life in our new home. The letters were written to about 200 individuals, both friends and acquaintances, some of whom thought we were crazy, others who thought we were courageous. What they did have in common, for the most part, was that they did not share our faith. Most of them, in fact, expressed little religious faith.
At the time each of these letters was written, I didn’t know if Lizzie would be alive in a year. She was not supposed to be. Nor, I confess, did I know whether or not a prayer network would influence her outcome. As a still young believer — after all, I was only nine, spiritually-speaking — I had heard of such networks, and I was going to see if God mightn’t help me create one.
Our friends back east responded, as did others who were forwarded our letters. Our mailing list grew to hundreds. Miraculously, Lizzie made it a year, even though that had not been expected. But, along the way, she suffered end-stage heart failure that took us into another frightening world: that of organ transplantation.
The letters continued. The prayer network grew.
Lizzie’s remained alive longer than many ever thought she would. But healing in the way I hoped God would answer our prayers was not what happened.
These letters, and their retrospectives, which I call “looking back’s,” may trouble some. Religious people will differ on whether we can fight with God in our suffering. They may even more doubt the wisdom of fighting out loud. Many hold a notion of God that says He listens only to those who are just and good. Therefore, if your prayers goes unanswered, your faith – or your prayers – must not be very good. Or, worse, maybe you’re not very good. Illness can, to some, be the judgment of a very just God.
And it may be in some cases.
But life-threatening illnesses and serious accidents will find us all in time. Some sooner than others. They don’t discriminate between what side of the battle of good versus evil you stand on, for tragedies strike both the good and the bad. Those who have suffered — and many have suffered worse than we have — as well as those who have not yet suffered greatly, are, therefore, linked. Some of us may be assigned the suffering, while others, for now, are assigned the caring. Both, however, might reflect upon suffering’s role in life.
And how very much we need to ponder such mystery. For in our “feel good” culture, where TV often covers the road between tragedy and triumph in under an hour – even fitting in a laugh or two – the irreplaceably central role of the Cross – of suffering itself, that is – is marginalized in our lives. In an age that also encourages us to feel like victims if we suffer from receding hairlines or premature wrinkles, we crave to keep life “light”. Lots of us — even Christians — crave to be entertained or have our emotions tickled. For maybe, if we’re lucky, we will keep suffering at bay, or at least in someone else’s yard. Yet, as surely as each of us will be older tomorrow, every one of us will, one day, have to travel suffering’s strange pathways.
These letters, written at some of the darkest moments in our lives, offer a map of sorts, or maybe just a beginner’s vocabulary for those who have traveled through the Valley of the Shadow of Death as well as those who might only be curious about what it looks like. Sometimes Christians can get “triumphal” over any number of dark, sad experiences in this life. By so doing, we can trivialize the enormity the suffering that is, all the time, taking place around us and in our midst.
Underneath a mature faith must be the certainty of that God loves us, cares about us, and is competent to help us in our hour or need. But those certainties are often shrouded –at least for a time – in the midst of our suffering.
May these letters give you hope amidst your darkest fear. May you find strength in connecting with others who will love you at your worst hour; and may you, in the strange darknesses that life can send, find the outstretched hand of the most powerful Unseen.
