When All Others Have Gone Away...

Psalm 27

Our Youth and Young adults were visited by a classmate of mine at Sunday School yesterday. He spoke to them about how his near-death experience completely changed his outlook on life from extreme negativity, one filled with anger and hate, to a life of being positive, filled with forgiveness and acceptance. It was a touching story, told by someone who is not a public speaker, and who just had it in his heart to share a part of his life with others.

My friend is, or used to be, a sanitation worker and one day while on his route the driver of the truck he was on took a turn and my friend fell off the truck, splitting his skull which led to a blood clot in the brain. He was in a coma for 3 days and when he came out of the coma he had no recollection of what happened. Immediately after waking the doctors tested him for memory loss beyond the accident and my friend could recall everything; names of friends and family, dates of importance, faces, and things like that. It was determined that his brain was okay, and the only therapy he would need was to retrain it to think in logical steps (this was done with math word problems, so, yeah, something I would fail).

The most important part of the story, to me anyway, was when the driver of the truck came to visit him 4 days after he woke up. According to my friend the driver was a mess, blaming the whole thing on himself. To the driver's surprise my friend simply forgave him, telling him it wasn't his fault, and if he can't get over the fact that it wasn't his fault then he needs to get some counseling to help him work through whatever is going on inside. He told us that the driver did indeed get counseling and in time was able to forgive himself.

Feeling as though we're solely at fault for something as terrible as possibly taking away another's life does eventually lead to a place where we shut out the world and begin to live in a "dark" place. We fail to see that there is a way out of the darkness and that way is to find forgiveness for our self. What my friend did was give permission for the driver to reach out and begin to find a way towards that forgiveness, and my friend did this by simply being forgiving.

It's in the time of our deepest despair we seek that which will shelter us from the fears and uncertainties of life. God is that shelter, and God lives through the Christ in us all. Christ came through a man awaking from his almost-deathbed on that day in the hospital, a man who shone a light as bright as any has ever seen to lead another out of the darkness. We can be that Christ too, if we just let ourselves kindle the flame of God's love brightly so all can see.