Category Archives: Learning from our past

Damage Control

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Last weekend a bunch of us drove from our home in southwest Michigan to the Chicago area for a wedding. As we approached the city on the Dan Ryan Expressway, a disturbing sign caught my eye:

892 TRAFFIC DEATHS THIS YEAR      DRIVE NOW     TEXT LATER

Traffic deathsSurely all 892 weren’t killed as a result of texting, but some probably were. I know what it feels like to stray from my lane while texting and have done it just enough to say, “No more.” One second too many could exact a terrible price.

The other day Birgitta showed me an iPhone video taken through the front windshield of a squad car. An SUV in front of the policeman began drifting left. As it hit the shoulder, the driver must have looked up, recognized his error, and sharply overcompensated to the right.

He cut across several lanes and hit the side of a truck on the far right, bounced left across those same lanes and into oncoming traffic, and was hit head-on by a fast-moving 18-wheeler. The SUV and anyone inside were disintegrated on impact in an accident that took 5 seconds.

All of us are tempted to say, “I’ll just glance for a second.”

I wonder if similar life-devastation can happen when we look away from the Lord for “just a second.” The problem with texting while driving and also with taking our eyes off God probably isn’t as much about the quick look away as the getting stuck on what we’re looking at. Two seconds. Maybe three or four.

Whatever it is, it grabs our attention ever-so-slightly longer than the one second we promised ourselves. Suddenly we’re “stuck” and catastrophe occurs. It wouldn’t have happened at all except that whatever we were glancing at was, for those seconds, worth it to us.

The most devastating part of the whole thing is that there are no do-overs. If our quick peek turns into a longer one, it’s willful, risky, and a foolish gamble on our part. And if permanent damage gets done, whether while driving and texting, or in other areas of life when we let ourselves dwell on something we shouldn’t, back-peddling isn’t possible.

In hindsight, that just-a-second peek is virtually never worth it, because it doesn’t take much of a look to find us quickly invested in what we’re seeing. And when that happens, it gets more and more difficult to look back at God. As a matter of fact, it might be quite a while before we can pull our attention from what first distracted us to turn back toward him.

So hopefully, if we don’t text and drive, the odds are good we won’t be one of those numbers on Chicago’s expressway sign. Better than that, though, is not to take our eyes off God, not even for a second. If we focus exclusively on him, he’ll save us from many an accident.

“[Lord], turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in Your ways.” (Psalm 119:37)

Failing and Falling

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In the last 48 hours wild winds and rains whipped through our neighborhood causing umbrellas to flip inside-out and autumn pumpkins to roll off porch steps. Inside the house we could hear Lake Michigan roaring, even though the windows were buttoned up tight.

Caught.Stray tree limbs flew everywhere, and in our back yard a tall, pole-like tree went down, though not all the way. It fell into the “arms” of a nearby tree instead.

The visual of this partially-fallen tree reminded me of a popular expression: “If you fall, I’ll be your soft place to land.” In other words, you’ll go down, but you won’t have a crash landing.

That’s what happened to the tree, and for those of us who are Christians, that’s what happens when God offers himself as our soft place to land.

Black JackA few months ago I turned around in a dark room and didn’t notice my big black dog Jack lying on the dark-colored carpet. As I stumbled over him, I felt myself going down, unable to catch myself. I hit the floor with such a loud crash that my children came running. It was a hard landing for sure, though no permanent damage was done. If only someone had caught me, even just a few inches above the hard landing, the result would have been quite different.

And that’s what God does for us.

We may be on a fast fall toward disaster and might even be the cause for the whole mess by our own bad decisions, but still he’s willing to catch us. It may not always feel that way as we’re going down, though. During a circumstantial fall, we look for his rescue and wonder where he is. “What’s keeping him?” we say. “Why doesn’t he do something?”

He’s well aware, but often lets us learn the hard way, because that’s when the lessons stick best. As Pastor Erwin Lutzer says, failure is frequently the back door to success. So we feel ourselves falling, failing, dreading the hard landing of horrendous circumstances, and we brace for impact. Then when it doesn’t come, at least not as severely as we thought it would, we wonder what happened.

That is God’s catch.

One of the big reasons he lets us fall/fail is so we’ll recognize our need for him. If we continually succeed at everything we try, we’re much less likely to reach out to a Savior. Recognizing our own need is an important prerequisite for being able to rest in the Lord after he catches us.

When I look out my window and see that partially-fallen tree, I wonder if spring will find it continuing to grow, despite resting on the other tree. After all, it didn’t crash all the way to the ground but found a soft place to land.

“I know, my God, that you test the heart and have pleasure in uprightness.” (1 Chronicles 29:17)

Studying the Pictures

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I love looking at photographs of Nate. Now that no more can be taken, each is priceless. When pancreatic cancer came along, a widow-friend advised me to “take lots of pictures of him.” That sounded odd, since I already had 190 photo albums in my basement.

Not himself.But there were two roadblocks to taking those pictures: (1) quickly, as the cancer gained ground, he didn’t look like himself; and (2) how do you snap pictures of someone who knows he’s dying, without making it awkward for them?

Once it was all over, I remembered what my friend had said and wished I’d followed her advice about photos, because we have precious few of his 42 days of illness. That’s why I often find myself in my basement albums studying the face of my husband.

What impresses me again and again is that in most of the pictures Nate has a child or two in his arms or on his lap. Not being a “natural” with children when we married, I’m reminded of how significant this effort was. These pictures, the ones in which he’s busy “doing” for his children (and by that, for me) are the ones that mean the most.

At Chuck E CheeseFor example, here’s one taken at Chuck E Cheese’s. The occasion was Klaus’ birthday (turning 6), and Nate is holding 3 week old Louisa, his 6th child, while trying to manage the rest of his own children and a dozen young guests. The Chuck E Cheese entertainment stage was in full swing with it’s robotic characters singing at peak volume, a frenzy at best.

Nate was working hard, and I knew he must have been hoping the event would end soon, so we could go home to normalcy. But from his place across a mob of children, he caught my eye and flashed a smile. It was one of those very private moments between a husband and wife in a very public place. And today it’s a precious treasure.

Taking care of businessAnother picture I’ve studied recently was taken on Christmas Eve. We’d lunched at Marshall Fields’ in Chicago’s Loop and were on our way back to the suburbs on the “L” train. (We only had 5 children at the time, though a nephew is also in the picture.) But once again, Nate is hard at work, watching over the precarious steps of a two and three year old about to stumble off the bottom of an escalator.

My photos are a poor substitute for the man himself, but they’re wonderful gratitude-boosters for the wife he left behind. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all that I didn’t take many pictures while he was sick. Seeing him in action (and in good health) is probably much better.

”Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God.” (Philippians 1:3)