Threads

In the movie, Amazing Grace, British statesman William Wilberforce is touring an empty slave ship, guided by a friend, Oloudagh Equiano, who, years before, had been shipped out to America as a slave himself, on a ship much like the one the two are walking through. Wilberforce – who would go on spearhead the end of the slave trade in England, is aghast at the horrors he finds in the incredibly cramped, filthy interiors of the ship. He marvels that Equiano, or anyone else, could survive a months-long sea voyage in chains and under such conditions.

Equiano shrugs. “Your life is a thread,” he says softly. “It breaks – or it doesn’t.”

Read or listen to the stories of 9/11 and you’ll realize the truth of that statement. People lived or died based on whether they dallied for a moment at a conference table, after the meeting was over. On whether they turned left or right, coming out of a bathroom. On whether they scheduled their flight home an hour earlier or later. On whether they were two steps ahead, or behind, coming down a stairwell.

It comes that close for each of us, every day, of course. We just don’t have much call to focus on the cold, hard fact of it, and even less incentive to want to. So much depends on what time we leave the house … on how long we glance down amid heavy traffic on the freeway … on some stray microbe or germ suddenly introduced to our cells or bloodstream. On the psychological state of the man coming around the corner in front of us.

We can’t live in that frame of mind, of course – waiting, watching, worrying. But Lord knows I try.

Chanced to read, a while back, of a young married couple who were driving under a highway bridge when a crane on the overpass accidentally dropped the huge concrete slab it was moving. The slab flattened the couple’s car as they emerged from the bridge’s shadow, killing them instantly.

I think of that, approaching overpasses. Wonder what they were talking about, going under. What song they were listening to on the radio. What plans they had made for later that afternoon.

A dear friend was among those murdered, years ago, by a man who walked into the church foyer where she was sitting, chatting happily with friends. He just pulled a gun and started firing. That was 22 years ago this month, and to this day I don’t walk into a church auditorium – or a hotel lobby, or a grocery store – without thinking where I could go, where I could push my wife, if the shooting started.

Nor do I sit on an airplane without watching those boarding after me, one by one … trying to read their character … wondering which of these might be depended upon to fight back against terrorists, like the passengers on Flight 93, that sunny September morning.

What is it like to be settling in for the long flight, thumbing through the in-flight magazine, thinking ahead to the reunion at the airport … and suddenly realize that this is the end of it all?

To quietly understand – amid the murmuring, sobbing, whispering all around me – that this morning, my country will require my greatest sacrifice. That this is the hour in which my thread will break.

How do so many people live without faith? With no hope or belief in some kind of afterlife … much less one in sweet fellowship with God? The suspense must be unbearable, knowing any ticking instant could be the end of everything. The finality. The nothing. The extraordinary fragility of every hope and memory that a human heart holds precious … dangling by the thinnest of fibers.

To have no one to pray to, when the instinctive urge inevitably comes. No idea how to pray, no relationship to justify the asking, no one to give thanks to, if mercy is granted.

“Only the dead are without fear,” the wise paisano says, in another favorite old movie of mine. His point is well-taken. How can you dread what you’ve already come through? What need is there to brace for what you’ve already endured?

The Bible keeps nudging our thoughts in that direction. “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily …” Jesus says. “My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.”

The courage to lay my life down – in a thousand day-by-day situations, in the great once-and-for-all moment – comes from the confidence that I will take it up again. Without that confidence, I have nothing to offer the deepening shadows but a small, desperate bravado. With it, I combat the great Death with something bigger than himself. With the one thing Death never sees coming.

A living sacrifice.

It seems to be something of what Todd Beamer and maybe others grasped, in that last half hour of their lives, 20 years ago. They could die … or they could lay down their lives. A merciful God gave them that choice, anyway, on a sunny morning when so many things had already been chosen for them.