Scotty's Joy

Wednesday, 21 December 2011

I don't know what to write tonight. I am here in Belize. Mission accomplished. The car is in park.

All of the things chasing me on the trip, that I didn't have time to process because We Have to Get There, I now have time to process. Oh God. My nephew Scott was killed last week in a car explosion.

I used to ask Why all of the time. I had a running list of ways that (it could be argued) God failed me and was not helping and was not merciful because Life is Too Hard. When I kept the list, I had a sense of entitlement to know Why. If you are going to mess with my life in this way, I Deserve to Know. Everything that was not what I wanted was God's fault. It was one way to see life. It left me frustrated and angry and not seeing life clearly at all.

I was driving in a caravan of trucks and cars-hauling-cars through the possibly perilous maze of Matamoros, Mexico, when Rebecca called me on my just-bought Mexico phone to say, "Scott was killed last night..."

What? What? What? This is not one of the possible variables of what might go wrong on this trip. What?

I thought of how many times our trip had been delayed, why hadn't there been one more to keep us there for this family crisis? How we had just crossed into Mexico the night before. How there was no easy way to turn back and mourn our loss together with our family. How Scott was gone, my heart was wrenched, and I was not there. The only thing to do was keep going on. It seemed Wrong. But I knew it was Right. Sometimes your mind tells you "I have to do this!" but your heart quietly knows: "The other is the path to go."

In these instances, it doesn't matter how things look or what people think or whether everyone agrees. You sometimes just Know what to do. And life is (infinitely) smoother when you heed that sense in your heart, and do it.

I don't think I said, "Why did Scott die?" (or maybe I did but it wasn't foremost). God has shown me nothing in the last year if not that Life Is Short. Live It Now. You don't know if you have even this afternoon, never mind tomorrow. Forgive people, move on, live with abandon, live without fear. If death does not have the power to change the number of your days (and it doesn't...) then what is there possibly to fear? Not even dying.

Maybe I say this a lot. Maybe I have blogged this a lot. It is what God has impressed on my heart in these months of struggle with the words the doctor had for me: "Yup, it's melanoma. That's the bad cancer. You don't want that one." Sheesh.

But I have that one. Or maybe "had", past tense. That's the hope. And having it makes you have to think about a really short foreseeable future. You can't look away. That might be the point of these life-jarring matters. We spend a lot of time ignoring what we don't want to see in daily life. To keep the peace in our own heads. Realizing death looms (for every one of us) makes you not look away, not ignore what you're too tired to fix. A broken friendship, a decade of resentment, fear that has immobilized you, the arm's-length place you like to stay from God.

If you think you have, say, 18 months, you involuntarily think about life after you're gone. You think about how you would Hope to leave things. You don't, as far as I can tell, get vindictive; you don't have a penchant for telling people off; you don't speed up the getting back at people who have done you wrong. Those are temporary-world traits. When you realize that what you have done and who you have been to date might be all you have to contribute, it makes you seriously think. Am I good with that?

And, if you have a finite number of days to build on that, what becomes most important to do? Who, frankly, do you want to be when you die?

I don't know if Scotty had the chance to think of life that way. But a death, sudden and inexplicable, like his makes the rest of us start to think...

Whatever God has for each of us to accomplish or process and Become in this life, He completes. He is not small that He can be thwarted. His design comes to pass no matter our opinions, our choices. We are not the great determining factor of the universe. But there is no way merely humanly to look at Scott's life and think it was completed. He left disconnected, battling his demons, in a place of suffering.

We want resolution. We want the storybook ending where all is well just before the fatal end. Then the tragedy, we think, is tempered by the precious resolution.

In most of real life, tragedy is not tempered, I think. Except by grace - knowing that the worst was held back, that God does not require of us more than we can bear. I know Scotty must have questioned that as he struggled in his life. I did.

The thing is, we were not meant for the untempered tragedy. We were meant for walking with God, who goes before us, whose angels surround us, who tenderly loves us through the tragedies that make us into who He created us to be. Without Him paving our way, we don't rise above, we sink beneath. Without crying out to Him, we bear the impossible weight alone that doesn't build us up, but tears us down. We become weaker, not stronger. Without Him, tragedy destroys a part of us and makes us bitter, cynical. Without Him, there is no redeeming value to the grievous loss.

I know that stings. I feel it. But I know that more joy and truth and strength and Reality come into our lives through suffering than through anything else. If we will have it.

The Why is simply life. It is a joyous, perplexing, painful, and profound existence that feels terribly imperfect. It is what it is. Why did we think it would be otherwise? Why would things mend when they fall, rather than break. It is not the nature of the life we live. Breaking is easy, mending is hard.

I used to Demand to know why. It is our human reflex, and it's part of processing something terrible. But now, the Why season is shorter and I Trust. I trust that my circumstances are in God's hands. That an inexplicable car explosion is not out of God's reach. He was not tricked into losing his child. He was not busy with someone more important. He was not looking away. He was present. Scott probably did not know the horrors of how he died. Those are details we, left behind, sort through. Scott only knew the hand of Jesus, reaching down to pull him from this life, into the great expanse of the next. Where everything Scott was made on earth to do has become his joy in heaven. If we live out in heaven the talents God has given us on earth (and I think we do), Scotty is writing songs and playing instruments and dancing a cool move and kicking a soccer ball, and creating things, and telling stories with his sweet half smile. Maybe some about his Auntie Sue. He loved me.

Scotty knew from life with my sister that God loved even a castaway child from a refugee camp. That he was valuable and had potential and could rise above his past.

He was in that process, trying to understand his pain in the context of God. And then he was gone. We are the ones deeply sad about this. Scott finally understands. He finally can see, face to face, life in the context of God - and it is sweet.

I will miss you Scotty. It will only be the blink of an eye til we are there with you. Understanding fully what we can right now only see in part. You were brave, and you fought in the way you knew how. I will always cherish you and your beautiful spirit.

Until then, sweet boy...