This weekend, I attended a women’s retreat with my mom and sister. The theme of the retreat was “Road Signs”. There were 4 women speakers throughout the retreat who each got up and told their own personal stories in relation to a specific road sign. One lady talked about detours, another talked about proceeding with caution. The last speaker spoke about stops. She shared with us a sudden stop that happened in her life three years ago. Her story touched me the most because of what I have been through recently in my life.
This woman and her husband were devoted Christians. They were strong partners in the ministry, working close together. Then he was asked to step in as interim pastor at a church that had unexpectedly lost their pastor. He later became full time pastor. Three years ago, he was scheduled to go to Mexico on a missions trip with 3 or 4 other guys. One of the other guys was leading the trip. On the day they were to leave, there were heavy ice storms. He called his wife, who was at work, and told her that she needed to go home and he would meet her there. They both made it there safely. Their daughter, who had been there for Christmas, was also there. She took standby flights and had been unable to get a flight out so far that week. That night, they went over to neighbors to hang out for a bit, but the plan was for the guys to leave on the missions trip at 3 the next morning. Their daughter also had to be at the airport at 5 in the morning in order to be there for standby. With the roads being icy, this lady felt uncomfortable with her husband leaving that early in the morning. She asked him to call the guy who was heading the trip and tell them that they were going to leave later. She asked him several times, making him frustrated with her. He let her know that it was not his place to make that call.
The next day, she awoke a few minutes after three. She heard what she thought was footsteps so she felt a bit of relief, thinking her husband had taken her advice and decided to go later. She went looking for him throughout the house, but only found a note that he had left to her telling her that he had decided to not to wake her and let her sleep and that he loved her.
Her and her daughter got up and got dressed to start heading to the airport. As this lady began walking down the stairs, though, she heard a knock at her door. It was the highway patrol. Right down the street from where they live is the on-ramp for the freeway. As her husband got on onto the freeway on his way to pick up the other men for the trip, a semi came up behind him, evidently not seeing him. With the ice, her husband was not able to move out of the way or speed up in time. The semi hit the back of his little car sending his upper body in a forward and then back motion, breaking his neck. He was killed instantly.
Now, three years later, she is still mourning him, but she has somehow found joy. She misses him, longs to still talk to him, to have her partner back. I don’t want to even imagine.
The first question that came to my mind was “Why would God take this man, who was, with his wife, strongly devoted to Him, on his way to a missions trip to bring Him glory and yet send a nurse by to save my husband, who was agnostic at the time?”
The answer that I get back is that God didn’t send that semi to take her husband in as much as he didn’t send Jimi Bellinger to injure Randy. God was there with this man as the semi hit him. Of that, I have no doubt. He took the life from this man quickly, sparing him from suffering. I believe that God planted the trepidation into his wife’s heart the night before, already knowing that the man would still choose to go because God knows everything and yet still gives us our free will, but he put the seed out there because His heart was broken to see the family suffer the pain of this loss.
That’s it for my ramblings tonight…
