Read Part 1 Here.
After 10 years of marriage, I had pretty much made a huge mess of things. I won't recount the whole adventure here, but it's enough to say that it was very messy and I was generally disgusted with life and I was pretty sure people were disgusted with me.
I had been through too many jobs to count, had forced my wife to go to work, and eventually went back to school. Which you'd think is a good thing, but not the way I went about it. By 1999, we had 4 kids, another on the way, and my feeling was that things were really kind of a mess.
My wife and I had these friends who at one time lived in Arizona. Shortly before our second child was born, we moved down there and lived with them shortly before giving up and moving back to the midwest. I mention it because they had a son about the same age as our eldest. By 1999, our friends had divorced and moved back to the midwest themselves. We hadn't spoken to them in a long time but that year, due to a horrible accident, their son was killed, and they contacted us so we could pay our respects.
It was at his funeral that something happened. I won't over analyze it or try to make it into something that it may not have been, I'll just describe it.
We were sitting there at the funeral, completely overwhelmed by this tragedy. The boys mother had chosen some unusual music for his funeral, picking songs he liked, mostly rap, rather than what you might traditionally hear at a funeral. It was while one of these songs was playing that I heard someone say "You could have saved this boy." Maybe it was part of the song, maybe it was people behind me talking, maybe something else, that's not important right now. Those 6 words changed everything.
This is where I go from talking about facts (mostly) to talking about more personal things.
That phrase "You could have saved this boy", haunted me. Haunted me in such a way that I couldn't even talk about it with anyone, not even my wife. I took it personal. Maybe I could have saved him. Without going into too much detail, if my relationship with the boy's parent had taken a different direction, if I had been a better person and talked and acted differently, things would have taken a different direction and maybe this horrible accident didn't have to happen.
The what-if's and where-for's sent me on a spiritual search. I already had some knowledge of spiritual things from my teenage experiences, but only as far as the Christian faith as explained to me by the Methodist church. Since that knowledge hadn't really gotten me anywhere, I started from scratch. If God was real, or even if He wasn't and all was one or whatever the real nature of things was, I was determined to find out. I sincerely believed that the phrase "You could have saved this boy" was a message, meant for me, from somewhere. I was going to find out where, and why.
---- End Part 2 ----
