“Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.” – Emily Dickinson
– Song Of Solomon 8:7a
Wonder what they were thinking, watching those great clouds darken the sky. Feeling the rise of the wind. Knowing, from the news, something of what was coming. Knowing, too, of course, that it’s hurricane season, and there’s always a chance, this time of year, that a really big storm might reach out their way, even as far inland as the great eastern hills of North Carolina.
Did anything more than that flicker through their thoughts? Some small sense of foreboding, maybe, slipping through some unlocked back door of their minds, offering its faint, intuitive warning of something … more?
What chill shivered the nape of their necks, when the trees, the telephone wires, the tire swings gradually stopped swaying? When the dogs grew quiet, and the leaves went still?
When they felt the air grow suddenly heavy, and then … eternity, rising on the breeze.
You have heard the stories, so many of them, of the thousands who lost everything. Of some who lost even more.
A woman on television told of her son, Micah, seven years old, sitting, shivering with her and his grandparents on the sagging roof of their Asheville home, praying, hoping, hollering for help. Help was coming, they heard – but then, suddenly, the roof gave way, and a wave swept them out into the flood. And down into the darkness.
The mother, struggling herself, never saw the others again. But against the roaring wind and breaking houses, the tearing trees and the cries all around, she made out the voice of her son.
“In his last moments,” she says, “he wasn’t screaming for me. He was screaming, ‘Jesus! Jesus! Save me! Jesus! I hear you, Jesus! I’m calling on you!’”
He was gone.
“He wanted to be a superhero,” she told the tv reporter. “That was his goal in life. And instead, he’s my hero. He was the smartest, bravest, hopeful, great … friend. Great son.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better son. He was so happy, up until the very end, when he was screaming for Jesus. And in that moment, I think he found joy.”
Heard a woman on a movie screen last week tell a crowd – eager to hear it – how despicable this nation is. How richly we deserve what is, she predicts, our coming destruction. She relished her hatred, sneering as she spat out the endless bigotry and inequity she sees everywhere she looks.
I suspect she will not look at the montages of mercy airing on many television news stations and X pages this week. She may not find it in her heart to wonder at a country whose people still make enormous sacrifices for each other … through their government, or in spite of it.
The endless lines of trucks, the flurry of private helicopters, the pack-laden mules and horses and motorboats and canoes feeling their way through the weather-made wilderness. People of every age, race, and background – hillbillies and millionaires, blue-collar families and pastors – wading through dark waters and mountains of mud and endless wreckage, handing out food, setting up generators, bringing in water and hope, prying their way through the twisted puzzles of brick and wood and metal. And listening for cries in the dark.
These wonderful people, who seem – in a campaign season that wallows in our differences and divisions – almost to leap at an opportunity to pour forth love on their neighbors.
Look on the faces of these people, working round-the-clock, day-on-end. What you’ll see, between the lines of sweat and grim exhaustion … is joy. A deep and weary satisfaction. The fathomless pleasure of helping others. Hard work that draws from deep wells of God’s love.
But they can’t save everyone. And it’s hard to shake off thoughts of little Micah, sinking into the cruel, muddy water, crying out with his last breath to Jesus.
To Jesus …
… who with nearly His last breath, cried out just as desperately to His Father in heaven: “My God, My God – why have you forsaken Me?”
Only to know, in that brutal, final moment – when time stopped, and His worst fears were realized – and all of eternity changed …
… that He hadn’t been forsaken at all.
In that moment – “It is finished!” – I think He found joy.
On February 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless II, age 46, did something no one else had ever done before. He stepped away from the space shuttle, Challenger, detached his lifeline, and floated away, untethered, into the icy cold of space. Free from his ship, free of earth, free of gravity.
Two things, though, he was not free of: the two things he wanted to be free of, most.
He’d wanted to just float for a minute in utter silence – alone, with naught but his thoughts, in the great, sweeping expanse of the universe.
It wasn’t to be. Three different radio receivers were wired into his helmet, and the voices of NASA scientists, doctors, and his own shuttle crew wouldn’t stop jabbering to accommodate his yen for even one small moment of ultimate solitude.
That left one wish: to turn away from the ship, away from the earth, and gaze – with no periphery distractions above, below, or beside him – into the yawning maw of black, endless space. Into the fathomless darkness. Into the unblinking void.
He couldn’t do it. He steeled himself, willed himself, ordered himself, he said, to make that lonely turn toward the unknown … but something would not let him. Something beyond even his own deep will urged him to keep his one true hope in sight.
To hold onto – reach out to – the light that offered the only way home.
Surely, it must be that way for all of us, when the great darkness comes. We cannot but cry out to the only One listening … the One who came so far and gave so much to save us … the One even now preparing a place for us, that where He is ... we may be also.
And share His and Micah's joy.
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