It's Just The Normal Noises In Here

Some stages of our lives are pretty tough. We think high school is tough, and college is tough. Being a young adult and taking on responsibility is tough. But I think those are learning times God gives us to prepare us for the “tough times”.

I’m pretty heavy hearted today as I see a number of my friends being “beaten up” by life in general. Life can really throw a mean left hook. I mean, you take the jabs, you see the straight right coming, but it’s that left hook that you never see that gets you.

When I was 22 years old my best friend and I worked together in the oil field. We had previously worked together in the restaurant business, and I had known him for about 7 years. But the part that made him my best friend was the fact that he was a drummer, and I was a guitar player. He was a really good drummer, and we could really rock the house.

Joe Carlisle grew up in a family that did not know God, and when he was 22 he died in a motorcycle accident. Anyone that knew Joe knew that it was a bad idea when he bought a motorcycle. I mean he had wrecked every car he had ever owned. Joe was a very likeable guy who had many talents and gifts, but driving good wasn’t one of them.

I remember arriving at work one morning and having my boss ask me “well, I guess you heard about Joe?” That was how I found out that the day before he had run his motorcycle off the edge of a small cliff on a winding road in the Arbuckle mountains. I don’t know if he cried out for Jesus to save him or not. I know that me and a couple of other co-workers had been talking to him about Jesus in the days leading up to this. I had talked to him off and on over the years about church and God. And, I know Joe was more receptive to the gospel than he had ever been in the days before he died. But I don’t know if he accepted Jesus in his last moments or not.

I went to the funeral which was held at Bill Merrit funeral home, and I remember the families grief. He had a younger and older brother, and a mother that was inconsolable. And, I remember this really old guy who spoke. I don’t know his name, but I would have guessed his age to be in the 80’s back then. And he talked on and on about youth and life and things. And in the end he looked straight at the family and said “and you want to know why someone so young was taken so soon in life. Someone with so much to give. Someone with so much life to live. YOU’LL NEVER KNOW! AS LONG AS YOU ARE ON THIS EARTH, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW.!! YOU’LL NEVER KNOW!!” You have to picture some guy in his 80’s literally shouting from the platform at the family…. YOU’LL NEVER KNOW! And then he walked out the back, and the service was over. There was no graveside service because his family had him cremated. That was it. Done, Finished.

Well, everyone who attended the funeral talked about the old guy for a while and everyone thought he was a psycho or something. I’ve come to decide that this old guy with the wisdom and experiences that only years can accumulate looked at this family and was trying to say “quit trying to figure out why. Quit beating yourselves up about it. Don’t spend the rest of your lives mourning Joe’s early departure. You have a life to live and Joe would want you to live it happily. YOU’LL NEVER FIND OUT YOUR ANSWERS. Only God knows and he will reveal it to us when we reach the other side.”

The old guy had no tact. But now looking back from the seemingly older age of 46, I’m thinking that by the time he had reached some age in his 80’s, that he had seen to much hurt. He had seen families destroyed. He had seen people beat themselves up over things beyond their control. He had seen hundreds of grieving families. And he had quite possibly been one of those himself. And the bottom line is he didn’t have an answer for them. Because, there is not one.

God tells us “all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called according to his purposes”. And the Bible tells us that God moves people, kings, armies, rulers etc for his purposes. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. We are in God’s hands, but WE HAVE A PROMISE. That if we love the Lord and are called according to his purposes, all things will work together for good. We can stand on that promise. And we can know that when our loved ones pass over to the other side, it is God moving them to his next purpose for their lives.

Those of us that are left hurt. We grieve. We don’t understand. We miss them. It often seems more than we can bear, but we have a promise. And we MUST, I say MUST, have the faith to lean on that promise, even when we don’t understand why.

Boy, I’m not much of a counselor, am I? There are two songs that come to mind. One says “GOD IS IN CONTROL”. It shouts it.

The other says “Trials dark on every hand, and we cannot understand, all the ways that God would lead us to that blessed promised land. But he’ll guide us with his eye, and we’ll follow til’ we die. And we will understand it better by and by”.

I want all of my friends to know that Janice and I are praying for them everyday. As we get older we all have a myriad of new challenges that often seem more than we can bear. But God is always there, with his promise.