Scott's N-Cites

Senseless Death

One phone call is all it takes to change you day, and sometimes your whole life. I got one of those calls this morning from the BGPD. I enjoy serving as the chaplain, but it’s not very glamorous or prestigious. It’s fun to ride in the police cars when nothing is really happening, but to be honest, it’s a position full of opportunities to encounter people on the worst days of their lives. Like all calls of this nature, they surprise you with the sensitivity of a bull in a China shop, crashing into the ordinariness of life with a vengeance that is the emotional equivalent of Katrina.

The dispatcher told me that a boy had tried to hang himself at our high school and was now at the hospital. When I walked in I realized I knew the boy’s mother. She had brought her twin sons to a program at our church almost ten years ago, but they never came after that, even though they had a good time. I wonder if there was something I could have done, that we could have done differently that would have helped them really get connected with God and other believers. But I didn’t, we didn’t, and they didn’t. I’m not blaming anyone here, including myself. I just wish things would have been different.

How can you possibly know how a mother is feeling when the doctors are doing everything humanly possible to save her son’s life and you know it will take a miracle for them to be successful? I didn’t pretend to understand, but prayed to the God who does. In spite of our prayers, he didn’t make it. A junior in high school who was popular and talented and full of potential chose to end his life, and now the people who loved him are trying to make sense of something that is utterly senseless.

This is now the third student in our town to kill himself in the last two years and I’m getting tired of doing these funerals. None of them have been easy but this one seems worse, at least to me. Maybe it's because I have a greater hatred for Satan's lies. Maybe it’s because this time I was in the room when they were trying desperately to save his life. Maybe it’s because this time the kids have already experienced the pain this choice causes and should know better. Or maybe it’s because he was a twin, and I’m a twin, and I’m really angry that a boy has to go through the rest of his life without the benefit of having his brother to share it with him.

Thank God there were some bright spots in an otherwise dismal day. I saw friends showing compassion, students clinging to one another as they fought for survival in an ocean of pain. I saw a dear sister, Deb, ministering with the love of Jesus. I watched people like Bill the counselor, Doug the baseball coach who really cares, compassionate nurses and weeping doctors, friends and family doing the best they can when none of us really have much of a clue what to do.

Please pray for this family and for our community. Pray that it doesn’t happen again and that God will somehow use me and other people of influence to be the hands, feet, and voice of Christ in these tragic days.

Right now I’m tired, I’m angry, and I hope I don’t get any more phone calls like that for a very long time.

posted by Scott @ 9:51 PM