Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

How can we keep from singing

Friday, March 16, 2018

From Psalm 34
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those whose spirit is crushed. He watches over all his bones; not one of them shall be broken.

Like flash-backs and flash-forwards in the TV show "This is Us," my life like yours runs and runs away, rushes toward me and off again in faces and scenes, stories of sorrow and joy, memories that rise like hot summer waves of heat above my two-lane highways, above my closely cropped lawns, that rise and burn the ancient sidewalks along the edges of it all.

In late night autumn darkness we drove through Pennsylvania woods near Kutztown. Dodds had landed his balloon "Nimbus Secondus" safely again, his two young kids asleep in our cars, and it would not be long till we got to his friend's two-story, red-brown house with beds and couches for all of us.

Folk festival food and beer filled us up. With Dodds and Sue's five-year-old son Justin sleeping in the back, my friend David and I rode in the balloon van behind two cars full of all our families. Our conversation lightened the night. This was fifty years ago and we were in college, and David had no idea what he was going to do next. We were talking about that while the moon shone down and I drove around one curve after another and down a long hill toward the next left curve, and I pushed on the brakes and they did nothing to slow the van, and David said, "You have to slow down," and I said, "The brakes aren't working."

I think I felt calm. I think I was giving up something.

The van skidded around part of the curve but not all of it, and we flew off the road into the trees, into a large tree suddenly right there and the Ford van's front windshield smashed into the tree, and now the van was stopped, stopped cold. Still.

My face pressed on the broken windshield. The steering wheel held me in, but David's door fell open and he fell out. He stepped on Justin's arm, and he reached down, and he picked up Justin who had been thrown forward from the back seat and his head hit the visor above the windshield, and he flew out the open door. Face down in a pool of water. David picked him up, and he did not drown.

There were sounds again then, shattered stillness. My wife screamed my name, and we found our way through wet grass up to the highway. Silent unremitting highway holds us all in the moonlight, and I am yelling at the sky. Angry! Screaming at the stars.

But there are no bodies, only the same people who started out on this trip home, and nobody seems hurt, not on the outside, not so far. But I feel so guilty and so helpless, and what for just a moment I had given up, I feel myself taking up again.

Dodds went to Wisconsin's Octoberfest in LaCrosse the next year, and we went there with him. He taught philosophy for a few more years at Valpo and later flew a balloon over the North Pole. Justin had no more than a bruised spleen, as it turned out. Neither David nor I had a scratch.

Eventually I felt grateful, maybe even that night as we ate soup and finally fell asleep. I remember the soup, and I remember my wife's scream from what seemed a long ways away, and in those moments I know I was loved.

Lord, the psalm sings out, and it's your voice that does the singing - oh! there is so much joy in all those notes. Now I can stop screaming, Lord and sing along, sing about the great great joy of being held by you.

Devotions Archive

How can we keep from singing

Friday, March 16, 2018