For Such A Time As This

Okay, so I was going to write something on shame since it’s been one of the things God has been leading me through these days, but then He took me one step further. Many of us struggle with shame for guilt that was once ours, sin that He has paid for on our behalf, but also a fair number of us carry shame for a guilt that was never ours to begin with. The Enemy is the “acuser of the brethren,” and those accusations are part of what divides the Body of Christ and assaults its members. A man of two minds is unstable in all his ways, and yet somehow we think we can be full of grace and His redemption and continue to carry and assign guilt where it does not belong. We are told that when one part of the Body suffers, all suffer together, and we believe it and teach it when it comes to “clean” suffering that is easy to explain—an illness, a death—suffering that does not involve sin. Once sin is involved, we are divided on the issue. We become like Jesus’ deciples when they asked Him why the man was born blind, “Was it his sin or that of his parents?” Essentially, they had fallen into the same stumbling block that often trips us today, the belief that not just sin, but GUILT, is the reason behind our pain.

This question was recently presented between friends, and it made me delve deeper with Him for answers. The question was if you are being taken advantage of under threat (the example in this case was a missionary threatened with deportation if he didn’t pay a bribe), is there guilt in not resisting? The bible forbids us from receiving a bribe, but it doesn’t say anything about not PAYING one. If you simply pay the price demanded of you in order to avoid the threat held over your head, are you an “accessory to sin”? Is there guilt that is now YOURS, because you have facilitated another’s sin? I took it one step further. Having several good friends that have suffered from various forms of abuse, having suffered years of verbal abuse myself, I asked if you are abused, and you do not resist because of a threat, suspected threat, or fear that the cost of that resistance will be greater, are you an accessory to sin? Do you carry your own guilt for letting it happen? Are you called upon to repent for facilitating the sin of your abuser?

A common passage from the bible came to mind a couple of days later, and with it, an entire story, an entire life—the answer to my question: Ester. The apostle Paul berated one of the churches he wrote to for continuing a diet of spiritual “milk” when they were ready to mature to the meat of the truth. So I’m not going to pull my punches in this account of biblical history. There are some subjects, some sins, some areas of suffering that makes us uncomfortable, so too often we simply don’t look too close; we soften them, clean them up, and then present them G-rated. Life isn’t G-rated, and fortunately for those of us with an intimate understanding of that, neither is the Bible.

The King of Persia had sent away his wife, because she refused to perform before his drunken buddies. Then, in want of a wife to replace her, he ordered that all of the virgins in his kingdom be rounded up and undergo a year of treatments to prepare them for him. He would take one per night until he came across one that caught his interest more than any of the others—the others not to be called upon again unless he “asked for them by name.” So the young women of the entire kingdom were gathered into his harem and forced to submit to the greatest, legalized, forced sexual assault in biblical record. There—I said it. This wasn’t the biblical story of Cinderella, minus the mice and a Fairy Godmother. We’re not in elementary school anymore. We can stop calling it “a beauty contest.”

Ester, or Hadassah I should say, was one of these young women. We are taught as children that she “wanted to win the beauty contest,” but if we look at this through adult eyes . . . it is much more complex than that. She was young, orphaned, and God-fearing. She was kidnapped from Mordecai, her only family, and forced into a year of preparation leading up to prostitution. According to her faith, the life she was being forced into was serious sin. She was to sleep with a pagan king. If he did not choose her, she would remain in his harem. If he did choose her, she would be forced to marry someone outside of her faith, also forbidden by God. There wasn’t a “lesser evil” to choose. We see her enter her year of preparation and find favor with those above her. She finally comes to the king’s bedroom and finds favor there. Nothing about that year leading up to that climactic night suggests that she resisted. Honestly, there is something that turns in my stomach to fully and completely acknowledge that. Something horrifying on her behalf, something disturbing at the same time. The question now, after laying it all out on the table, is this—was she in sin to not put her foot down clear at the beginning and refuse? For a man that opens this story with the act of sending his wife away for denying him and then later went on to sign the death degree of an entire race within his kingdom for suspected disobedience, I think it is fair to say that the consequences for her refusal would have been severe, to say the least.

“Stop looking at your life with regret and instead look at it all—all of it—as what brought you to where you are right now,” a friend of mine told me after we’d talked about some of the hard things I was trying to come to terms with. “Get used to it,” another friend jokingly said when I admitted I was emotionally tired from talking so many friends through pains I had experienced. “God’s not going to bring you through so much and then not use you.” I can just picture Mordecai and Ester having that conversation any of the times they spoke at the gate. I can picture them asking how God could allow this to happen to her, why He had allowed it, what good could possibly come from that trauma and suffering. I can picture the line of scripture, which answered my question by bringing this story to mind, coming on the heels of an ongoing conversation that scripture doesn’t record, “It could be that you have come to the palace for such a time as this.”

We see that line as full of inspiration, full of valor, an opportunity to speak up, to resist evil, a call to act out courageously . . . but there is even more to THAT than meets the eye. What had the palace been at the time that Ester was taken? It had been the location where her abuse was to take place. It was the location where she had submitted to one of the evils God abhores. She had not resisted the sin that had taken place with her in that palace. She had not resisted the abuse done against her. Mordecai was so sure that her life there had been so perfectly planned that he told her that even if she did not rise up as an advocate for her people, God would “rise up another.” Her time to resist evil would come when she spoke up to the king to spare her people’s lives, risking her own in the process—but she arrived at that moment, because she had submitted to sin and abuse without resistance. I guess we could say that God works all things together for good—that even in her sin of passive acceptance, her facilitating the king’s sexual immorality, her allowing herself to become an “accessory to sin,” He still brought good through her. The question is presented again—was her lack of resistance sin? Did Ester carry rightful guilt for the sin she allowed to happen to her, by her?

I find the answer to the question several books later in the gospels where Jesus pays the price for the sin the king of Persia committed against Ester. It says of Jesus that He did not resist. “Like a lamb, He opened not His mouth.” Jesus took it one step further than Ester. He had a power that no one else that has suffered abuse had at the time of their suffering—He could have stopped it. Plenty of times we wonder what would have happened if we had stood up for ourselves. Could we have stopped it if we had tried harder? Jesus could have. He even endured insults and mockery because of it--“If you are the Son of God, why doesn’t He save you? Why don’t you call on the angels?” He could have, and yet He didn’t. He submitted to the abuse, the grievous sin done against Him. The only reason His sacrifice meant anything for us was that He was the spottless lamb the sacrificial system required—without blemish. If He had harbored any sin in Him, any guilt, His death could have only paid His own debt. For our faith to have any weight to tip the scales in our favor before God, Jesus had to be COMPLETELY innocent—and yet He submitted. He did not resist the sin done against Him. He allowed His abusers free reign, because He had determined that the threat of our bondage and eternal separation from God through sin to be more devastating than His present suffering. Is it sinful of us to not resist the sin done against us?

. . . was it sinful of Jesus?

I Lost My Marbles

You cannot imagine the sheer thrill and wonder of figuring out how to sign into your own blog account after being unable for a miriad of "technical diffeculty" types of reasons . . . which is the nice way of saying I'm barely computer literate, and I forgot my own password. *sigh* So . . . yeah . . . I'm finally back after we won't say how long. Fortunately or unfortunately as it may be . . . I don't have to say how long. It's published.

So yeah . . . I am so excited, I don't quite know what to do with myself . . . I guess I'll post something I've wanted to for a while and BEEN UNABLE TO!

But the Greatest of These is Love

I started this as a rant about governmental and even private beaurocracies that exclude you from aid if you DO have a job, but the longer I wrote . . . I don’t know how to end my writing on a negative note. For all my defenses of tragedies, I don’t think I could ever actually write one. I haven’t been doing very well with tips for the last three months. People don’t like emotional waitresses or waitresses that have just shut off their emotions, because they can’t do them right then. So I’ve seen a marked difference from what I used to make as “one of the best” to what I make now as I just put one foot in front of another and occassionally have a much welcomed lapse into the “old Abi” that my manager says she’s confident she will see again.

There is one thing that is interesting about all of this. I noticed it as soon as I started waiting tables, and then it came to mind again yesterday. When I first started and wasn’t really very good yet, I was always so increadibly touched and amazed when I got a really awesome tip from a table I hadn’t done well with or had downright messed up. I remember standing there in my section one day over a year ago, looking down at a good tip I’d gotten from a table that I thought would stiff me. “This is grace,” I thought to myself. “I didn’t deserve it—but they gave it anyway.”

So yesterday the hosts kept seating me more tables than is the “legal limit” according to company standards, one of them being a large party, and I had to go to the manager and tell him that he HAD to make the hosts STOP doing that, because I was about to loose my mind! Even under the best of circumstances I was having trouble focusing yesterday, and hugely stressed even without the added bonus of being crazy busy . . . I had several tables tip me HUGE! A couple that I thought for SURE would be mad at me weren’t. One tipped me a little over thirty percent of their ticket. The large party tipped me and my section partner thirty dollars over their eighteen percent automatic gratuity, and I realized after they left that I’d forgotten to get something they’d asked for clear at the beginning of the meal.

What a simple and yet profound picture of grace. You were working for it, striving for it, but so clearly didn’t deserve it. When it came right down to it, you had screwed up too bad to deserve it—and yet it was so freely given. Sometimes our minds get so caught up in the theology of grace in terms of a moral belief system that doesn’t handle anything concrete and touchable. And then you get out in the work force, in a proffession with only suggested fees that cannot be inforced (tips), and it cuts away all of the symantics and replaces it with cold hard cash, real debt, something touchable that translates into actual bills paid.

“This is grace,” I have thought on so many occassions. And as I sit here typing this, I think . . . and laugh. I still can’t find this refference, but somewhere there is a passage that talks about how my God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, so—to paraphrase—what the HECK am I worried about? Yeah, I have huge medical bills, but if God will lead me into a life with a chronic illness for which there is no cure, He can and will take care of all the pieces. If even when I screw up, I still have tables tip me well, what makes me think He can’t do anything more miraculous? All I have to do is trust that regardless of if He gives me what I think I need, He IS giving me what I need—whether I can see it or not. If that is grace, then this, THIS right here—the trust that He will take care of me even if I can’t see how or when--this is faith.

I smile again; “But the greatest of these is Love.” Love gives me the heart to even HAVE the faith instead of fear. Love gives me the eyes to see His grace in such simple circumstances. Yes, the greatest of these is Love—HIS love, and the love I have for Him from which all else springs. This is grace. This is faith. This is LOVE.

. . . carry me

(Originally posted on my facebook page on November 28, 2008.)


“She walked with God until it came time for Him to carry her Home.”--A tribute to my friend Emily Joy.

I have said so many times that I would give back everything that Emily’s death has taught me if it meant she could be back here with us. I would gladly hand over—shove away even—all of the maturity, the insight, the deeper understanding of Him, everything good that has come from loosing her if Emily could just be back again . . . Praise to our God, who orcastrates our lives, for His enduring mercy—that I do not have to choose. Inicially, in the shock, and loss, and grief, there was no question in my mind which I would rather have—Emily or the “personal growth” it had worked in me, the new Abi that no one recognizes. Over time I have still held to that while still struggling to imagine going back to who I was before. Now—my graditude knows no bounds for one simple phrase: “You are God, and I am not.”

Jesus knew what He was asking of us when He said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple . . . In the same way, any of you who cannot give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” He knew what that meant. I have never understood it. How could God command that of us if we are called to love one another?

I sit here now in a cubby hole in the kitchen of the restaurant where I work, my hair in my eyes, my heart opened to a tender place, and write, “Anything but Him.” I would give anything BUT Him. In the weeks after Emily’s death, almost nine of them now, the gospel has become so real, scripture has become so real, the undying, amazing, extravagant epic of His Story has become so intensely personal. But in the last two months, as my personal knoweldge of Him grew, it shifted from knowing OF Him into knowing Him, simply knowing Him . . . though I am quickly learning that through the simplicity: how simple, and yet how intricate!

God is so, so close. I can feel Him with me every day—so close it’s almost a physical presence. In tears and turmoil, I am reminded that God will never test us beyond what we can bare. I cannot go back. I cannot EVER go back! In looking at what Emily’s loss has taught me, it would no longer be a choice between Emily and my new self, but Emily and HIM. I know Him now. Her death revealed Him to me. I have always felt a residual loneliness that followed me throughout my life no matter who was near—I miss my friends sometimes, especially now, but I do not feel desolate. It’s not about understanding Him now, but KNOWING, intimately, closely, irreplacably. “Unless a man forsake . . . “ I cannot ever say I would not choose Emily—but I WILL NOT say I would choose against Him. Blessed be the Lord! I do not have to choose. So simple, and yet so extravagant!

I’m reminded of the fiery furnace: “Our God can deliver us, but even if He doesn’t, we STILL won’t bend the knee.” Or Job’s simple defiance to despair, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” I can look the worst in the face and say with gentle confidence, “Take it all. Anything but Him.” Emily is gone. Yet I know she would be overjoyed to know that I choose what she would have wanted. That I choose what she chose. And that I want it reguardless of if she did. I want it in my own right. I can just hear her saying, “I hoped this for you too.” Abraham’s sacrifice comes to mind. The one thing that he wanted most was the one thing God asked of him—his son.
Emily is gone, and yet I must release her. I thought I had. I think it has been a process I was unaware of these last sixty-two days. Where I once felt her presence everywhere, now I feel His. Where I once found comfort in remembering what she had hoped for me, I find peace in His delight of me--past, present, and future all at once. As I looked up on the month annaversary and realized I was thinking of her every moment conciously or subconciously, now, at the two month annaversary, I realize He is always on my mind. “This one’s not yours,” I can hear Him say as He has said of so many others I have had to release into His care. I am reminded of my own art, the picture of the man carrying a sleeping child in the light of the cross that I painted four or five years ago. I picture Him standing before me and lifting Emily out of my arms. “Let me carry this. It’s time to let go.” “

Cast your cares upon Him, for He cares for you.”—Emily Joy, one week before her death.

Cast your cares upon Him for He carries you . . . I let go. I give her to You. Carry her.

. . .carry me.

But I Need You

(Originally posted on my facebook page on November 11, 2008.)

I have written a note every two weeks for the last six. I don’t know why. Two weeks later, it just always feels like it’s time. It has been six weeks since we lost Emily, and it is still hard, yet . . . I am late in posting this, because God has been so at work. I guess He always was, but I didn’t see it before. There are so many layers to this grief, and I haven’t been able to work through one stage of grief and then move on. I keep recycling back through them with every annaversary, weekly and then again on a much larger scale on the month mark. Yet, I begin to see . . . there is such a journey of discovery in this life with Him. As one of Emily’s favorite songs says, “With pleasing grief and mournful joy, my spirit now is full.”

So many things about me are different from the way I was before, and so many things of me are different every week, every day that follows. “You are not the bouncy, happy Abi that I remember,” one of my managers, Mary, said when she took me aside to talk last week. I have felt so strongly that each of us, all of us that loved Emily, died on that walking trail that afternoon, and when we all reawakened, she was the only one not in pain. I have grieved my own passing in addition to the loss of her. I have wished so many times that it could have been me. That SHE could continue on in her life and service here. In some ways, I think it is just my own selfishness and lack of courage. As one of my other managers, Nick, said that first week when we were talking about the legal system, “I always thought that capitol punishment was the easy way out, anyway,” He said. “You don’t have to live with yourself.” I heard it that first time in refference to the man that still walks free somewhere, that holds the last moments of Emily’s earthly life in his memory, just as we hold every other moment in our hearts. Now . . . that comment is about me. Death is the easy way out. Death is the absense of me having to walk every day of my life in its shadow. It was relatively easy to come to terms with my death in those first few weeks. Coming to terms with my own life . . . how much harder. How infinitely harder. Last week, as I sat wearily and in tears in a dark corner booth in the restaurant, Mary left me with another sentiment, “I didn’t know Emily,” she said. “But she sounds like someone who . . . she would want you to be strong.” Music has a wisdom nothing else seems to, as I write this, I listen to one of Emily’s favorite songs. A clear woman’s voice sings out for Christ, “I died that you might live.”

There has been so much talk of what Emily would want for us, what she would think of the changes that have come over us, what to do in our lives with her death shadowing, scaring, and reshaping our hearts. In some ways, I feel like all of Emily’s prayers in life were bottled up until the moment of her death, and with her last breath, they spilled out onto an unsuspecting world. She did not see in life what came about in her death, but what poetic beauty. Within the hour of her death, I made arrangements to go to church the following week. I would not learn the infinite, the painful, the heart-wrending, and heart-rendering significance of that moment until the following day. When the news came to me that Emily was gone, I didn’t want to go to church the next week. I didn’t want to go spend so much time with a group of people that didn’t know me and would never, now, know Emily on This Side. But in the days that followed that first horrible one, I began to realize . . . if there was one thing that Emily would want me to do, this was probably it. I mentioned it to Grace as I lay curled up in bed with the phone to my ear. “She would,” Grace said. She brought back a conversation I had forgotten. About six months before I had been spouting off about the pointlessness of church. It was one of my most cynical moments. I had forgotten about it. “She told me that she hoped you’d go back, that it would be good for you,” Grace said. I sat there in silent shock. We hung up, and I still just sat and thought about what Grace had said.

Someone had noticed me. Even in my own blindness, someone else had seen and cared.

Emily and I hadn’t been one-on-one friends who shared personal, intimate, private conversations about deep things. Not like some of the others. She was one of the kids in the group. So was I. That was how I remembered her. I can’t even remember most of our conversations clearly. Except for one that I remember very, very vividly, they were mostly just jokes and hestarical, uproarious laughter over nothingness. With her and with everyone else, I don’t often remember WHAT we laughed about . . . just that we did. There is a sweetness in that simplicity, and yet a sorrow that there was nothing more—at least that I knew of at the time. I remembered that she was always enthusiastic, friendly, cheerful . . . always the first one to say hello, always pulling me in when I felt on the outside. I hadn’t expected that she thought of me, that she had any particular thought of me except to recognize me as Micah’s sister. I hadn’t expected to hear that she had talked to another friend about what she hoped for me.

Within that first week, there was almost always a student presence in the chatroom. One morning, there wasn’t. I came in and it was just me sitting in the “Emily Joy. . . . Memorial Lounge.” I just sat there. It was a step away from “before,” and I didn’t know how to handle that. Those first few days of the round-the-clock vigil were over. No one was there. So I just began to type, talking to her about everything that had happened that week, about how much we missed her, about how much I envied where she was now. After several days of tears, I started to laugh as I gave her the names of people I wanted her to find up there. “Hey, go give my Grandma Margaret some gummy bears,” I said, laughing mischeviously in the empty chatroom. “Watch her stick out her tongue . . . yeah, that’s where I got the length in mine.” I laughed, thinking of an old memory of a woman who had died in her sleep, and left me with her spunky quirkiness. “Oh, and then go find my Uncle Roy and ask him about how he lost his finger ‘digging for buried treasure.’” I started laughing again, that sort of exhausted, nervous, caffeine-like laughter . . . the relief of realizing I still knew how.

I went to church that following Sunday. It was a holy experience in so many different ways. I felt as though she were watching over me. In the weeks that followed, if someone invited me to do something with them on Sunday morning, I declined, simply saying that I had to go to church, that I had “promised a friend.” I walked into church, and my friend was waiting for me. He said hello and then dissapeared with the worship band. I sat down in the pew and began idly looking through the bulletin. I know I wrote some of this before, but it wasn’t until later that I put together the events of the entire week. I read 3 John 13-14: “I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. Peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name.” I sat there and sobbed. I knew it was from Emily. Later I realized . . . I had talked to her in chat several days before, though she hadn’t been there to hear it, asking her to talk to the friends THERE . . . the ones that “send their greeting.” I tend to be very cynical and suspicious about such experiences, but I wasn’t even LOOKING for this. It was as if God were granting me an assurance and a comfort . . . that Emily was happy, that SHE could not wait to see us again any more than WE could wait to see her.

I have been to church every Sunday since. It has been the only place that I feel so fully connected to all of these friends that my heart is with every day even though we are spread out all over the globe. When I am there, I know that almost ALL of us are doing the same thing at the same time. When I am there, I know that we are all doing, at the same time, what EMILY is doing—standing in awe and worship of Him, being completely at the mercy of the One that Saves. Two weeks ago I went to church and then rushed out and went to mass with a Catholic friend. It was All Soul’s Day. I hadn’t remembered. They talked about the hope and certainty of heaven. Somehow I had trouble picturing Emily doing what I was doing, standing, sitting and kneeling two seconds behind everyone else, since she was a Calvinist and a Baptist, but sitting there in the pew, listening to the prayers and joining in a few lines that I knew, I knew that Lauren, the resident Catholic member of the school, was doing the same thing at the same time. We were both thinking of each other during the same time, knowing we knew where the other was.

It is at these moments of clarity, I feel even stronger that Emily’s prayers were gathered together and released at once for maximum impact. She had hoped I would go back to church; in the same hour that she died, I made the arrangements to go. She had prayed for her group of friends, my friends, praying that we would be drawn closer to Him and to each other. In the last week we have had such opportunities to press into Him together. Monday morning I sat at the computer, talking with John in Korea. We turned on Blessed Be the Name of the Lord, and together, on opposite sides of the world, we sat in worship of Him, crying out to him, “You give and take away! My heart will CHOOSE to say, Blessed be Your Name!” Later that day, several of the girls joined in prayer from every corner of the country, our fingers flying as we typed our prayer into chat. Wednesday the opportunity came again, and the prayer went on for an hour and a half.

My close friend, Mary Margaret, called me shortly after the prayers subsided, and I was so full of excitement and enthusiasm. “I feel so different,” I said, almost breathless. “I don’t even know where to begin, what to do with myself. He is SO close!” She must have been smiling on the other end of the phone. She has seen me at my very worst, my lowest points, and my deepest cynicsm. “I know,” she said, a bit of amazement in her voice. “I can hear it in your voice.”

In these last six weeks, He has come to me as He did to Thomas when he was too weak and hurting to have faith in more than what he saw. But then last Thursday began another trial, another stage of the journey in which He was there, but I did not feel Him. Wednesday was the day that we prayed together with such fervor and felt Him so tangibly present. Thursday, I wanted it again. I SO wanted it! That connection with Him and with the others. I have come to recognize that Still Small Voice so personally, like the voice on the other end of the phone that your ear knows even before an introduction is made. I wanted to suggest another prayer session, to go in, to pray, to do so together . . . but I knew it was not the time. “Not now,” I could hear in my spirit. “Not now.”

“How can this be You?” I asked. “It’s PRAYER.” Yet I continued to receive the same response. I couldn’t do it. I understand now why we stray from Him. Why do we not trust His leadership? Because we take things at face value and do not look beyond. We, very foolishly, say, “But this is something YOU would want,” instead of waiting for Him to say, “Now it’s time.” We look up at Him with the indignance of a four year old, hands on hips, and say, “But You said . . . “ as if He needs reminding.

I went on without Him. I started the prayer, and it was . . . dead. There was nothing in it. For the first time since Emily died, I could not feel Him tangibly beside me. I sent a private message to friend in the group, “Do you ever feel like your timing is off?” She had felt it too. I had gone on ahead of Him and asked Him to bless what I was doing rather than follow His lead and accept His invitation to join in what HE was doing. I felt like I had failed, and even more so . . . I felt like I had lost Him. It was not like in that moment He was gone, and then as soon as I closed the prayer He returned. I walked away from the computer and could not feel Him beside me. I took a shower and cried out to him. “DON”T LEAVE ME!!!” I sobbed. “I can’t do this alone! Don’t leave me!” I knew that He has promised to never leave nor forsake me, yet I have gone most of my life not feeling His presence as I have these past several weeks. I had a taste of it now. I was still broken and bleeding, and I KNEW what was out there for me. I continued to cry out, to pray, to seek that Voice again, but it was in confusion. I’d hear a simple sentiment, but I did not recognize the voice behind it, but what if it was wrong? I somehow knew that stepping out from under Him had muddied the waters. I had heard his Voice, known it was Him, and walked in the opposite direction. I knew that was the reason I could not recognize Him now. It was not a punishment. It was as Eve, the woman fashioned so literally by God’s hands, who had not trusted that He knew what was best. She had stepped out from under Him, and suddenly realized she was naked—a distance was there that was not there before. I continued to pray, to sing, to cry out to Him. “I NEED YOU!” But He was still distant. I slowly began to realize that I could not pursue Him hard enough. I could not push hard enough and guarrentee that closeness. I could not MAKE Him come. He would come if He came. It was a gift, not a birthright. “He’s not a tame Lion,” as was said of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Several days before, I had fallen to my knees and cried out to Him. “DON”T LEAVE ME!” I had felt Him through those prayers. I had prayed them, feeling Him near, because I needed to say it, not because I felt Him distant. Thursday was different. I cried out desparately, not because of a broken heart, but because I could not feel Him with me. What if that was it? What if the closeness didn’t come back? I kept praying, kept pleeding. I knew I had nothing to offer the others without Him with me. I knew I could not stand up under it all without Him near. I would be wooden and without wisdom. “I can’t do this alone!” I continued to pray. I thought of what Emily’s father had prayed when Emily’s death was confirmed, “Lord, help! Help!” Finally, I got out of the shower. I felt exhausted and still panicked. “Pray for the others now,” I heard the Voice. It sounded familiar, but I was still concerned I was not hearing Him, was not able to tell His Voice from my own. I had gone against Him once when I heard His Voice, and I thought I recognized this voice, so I was reluctant to do anything other than what it said . . . but I needed to say something else. Tentatively, slowly, I ventured out into a conversation. “But . . . *I* need you.”

I felt a Smile, and I recognized it. It was His. It was the Smile I had felt the night nearly a week before when I had clung to my sheets, on my knees beside my bed crying out, “I NEED YOU.” It was the contented, happy smile--the sheer THRILL in His heart for being pursued, for being desparately wanted. THIS was the answer His heart had hoped to hear. I felt it swell in His heart, and in that moment He was THERE. I curled up into a ball on the floor right there, and I felt another promise of His overwhelm me so strongly: “He will shelter you in the shaddow of His wings.” I lay there for a good, long while, feeling His Presence so closely, so intimately MINE. I lay there in comfort and relief, then I heard the Voice again, “Okay, now stand up.” Like a little child snuggling with a parent in the warmth of an old quilt on a lazy afternoon, my heart resisted, “Oh, do I have to?” I felt the Smile again: “just a few more minutes.” And then again . . . “Okay, now it’s time.”

I stood to my feet. I put one foot in front of the other. And He was there. There at my side every step I took from that place, at that moment. Guiding me, giving me little instructions. I knew His Voice. I could hear it. I trusted it, and I reveled in it, delighting in His company. I continued throughout the day, listening for His Voice as He guided me through the simple things. I listened to worship music. I chatted with friends. I felt myself reaching out in my spirit just as I had physically as a small child . . . reaching out to make sure my father was still there. As I realized what it was I was doing, it was MY heart’s turn to smile. In the absense of the physical representative of such a love, the love of a father—HE was there.

I began putting paint to a drawing I had sketched a few nights before, my heart singing praise. A song that Bis had shared with me the day before that Emily had loved came to mind. Suddenly, and I don’t know why at that moment, I felt threatened. “What if there is more to the gospel than I ever figured?” I have always had the loosest concept of what it takes to be saved of anyone I have ever known, but in that moment I wondered if I was wrong. If maybe ALL of us had missed it. I was panicked again. What if I was kidding myself? I recognized the threat. I knew the voice was not His. I dropped my paint brushes on the table, unwashed and ignored, and ran to my room, throwing myself down on the floor. “God, I know this is not true! I know that You have PROMISED us! I know that You are holding her right now! GOD, I claim the promise that all who trust in You are saved.” And again, Emily’s father’s words came to my mind: “If this gospel that I have preached is not true now, it never was.” And then Emily’s song came to mind again, “Forever etched upon my mind is the look of Him who died, the lamb I crucified, and now my life will sing the praise of pure atoning grace that looked on me and gladly took my place.” I lay listening in my mind to the memory of the song. I knew it was true NOW. I knew it always had been. I knew the difference between HIS voice and another.

This has been such a rollercoaster of emotions. About the time I think I have made some progress, I loose it again, and at a moment I don’t expect, God appears infront of me with such force I cannot see anything else. There is a hope and a certainty in my heart, just as my manager Mary said near the end of our talk last week, “I know it takes a long time . . . years even. But I know, I KNOW that someday . . . I will see the old Abi again.” We all died that day. And yet there is the same hope of new life for each of us. We will see her again, and I have that Glimpse of heaven before my eyes every day. I begin to realize, that as I grieve the old Abi, and I learn to acknowledge the new Abi, neither of them are the Abi that will walk out of this Valley of the Shadow of Death. They will merge and become one. Avril Lavine’s When Your Gone sings into the void in my heart where feelings and words do not meet: “Everything that I do, reminds me of you.” I realize that from this day forth, I carry Emily with me, and as her life and death continues to teach me of the power of the Gospel, I carry HIM with me too . . . in a way I never fathomed before. As Bis sang that night, before she had learned of Emily’s death: It is Well, it is well, with my soul.” I need Him, and that desparation feels so good.

Twenty-Seven Days

(Oriinally posted on my facebook page on October 24, 2008. I wrote this for myself and several friends, some that knew Emily and some that didn't. I haven't written much lately, except for them. I'm ready to post this here, though, too.)

It has been one month, four weeks tomorrow since we lost Emily. I cannot quite believe that taking one day at a time has lead up to twenty-seven of them. It feels like it just happened, and yet I don’t think I would recognize my old self anymore. I haven’t decided yet if I miss the old Abi. . . but for better or for worse—she’s gone. The new Abi. . . well . . . she’s not a lot of fun right now, but she’s certainly interesting. It’s strange—I’m learning more about the old Abi now that there’s a new one replacing her . . . the old Abi talked casually a whole lot more than the new one. That was one of the first things that people noticed, and I noticed too. “Why are you so quiet?” they would ask. I didn’t feel like talking just to talk. I’ve found that, when I am with my close friends, I ask more questions than before. I have so much I want to know about them. Questions that hadn’t seemed so pressing before that I want to understand now about their lives, and thoughts, and the directions they were each heading. I iniciate conversations that had intimidated me before. Instead of shying away from questions I “don’t know how to ask,” I give it a shot and work my way from there. It’s fulfilling. I feel more contented with the time I have, more powerfully present. The people in my life seem more real in their own right, and less the scenery around the edges of my own story. I am grateful for this fuller life. I have always wondered what I would do if I knew that I would not have another chance to talk to someone I loved. If I SAW the end coming, what would I want to leave them with? Nothing ever felt big enough, so the hypothetical answers always turned out to be sappy, melodramatic, and embarressing—far too embarressing to ever REALLY say if I didn’t KNOW the end was near. So what do I do with the fact that Emily had no warning? We all looked up forty-eight hours after her death and were struck that, while she had been just as surprised as we were, she HAD said goodbye. In the week before she died, she had left us notes, messages, emails, sharing her heart with us, her beliefs, the things that MATTERED to her—sharing that WE mattered to her. One of the girls told me that Emily’s final words to her had been, “I’m praying for you” at the end of a conversation they had had the morning of the day she died. God was helping her set her affairs in order even though she didn’t know she was running out of time. Two years ago when my brother was in and out of emergency rooms and intensive care unit, my dad moved out, battles over custody and finances were waged, we moved from the home where I’d been raised, and my mom and I ended up in separate appartments—back then I had HATED the phrase, “Live every day as though it were your last.” The only way I could drag myself out of bed every morning to sit numbly on the floor of my room and stare off into space for hours on end was to KNOW that there would be a tomorrow, and after that another tomorrow, and after that another, each one carrying me further and further from the depression and pain that was eating me alive. The only way I could survive the present was to look to and have faith in the future. Now . . . I recognize that there is a season for everything, and that sentiment that is so irritated me then really does speak to me now. I find myself looking at the things that demand my time and asking, “If I died tomorrow, where would I wish I had poured out my time?” When I am stressed at work over getting someone’s order wrong or forgetting their alll-important extra olives, I stop and think, “If I have thirty minutes to live and simply don’t know it, would I have wanted to squander my emotional energy in this way?” As I got home from work every day during Succoth (one of my favorite holidays on the Jewish calandar), I would briefly consider my options for the evening, each time an evening of funny stories, deep talks, dancing, and games in which everyone I loved laughed at my expense—Succoth always won; I started to stop even asking the question.

Inicially, when Succoth came upon the heals of Emily’s loss, I complained inwardly. Not that I wasn’t excited to see all the aunts and uncles and friends that were traveling here for the holiday, but that it is the holiday, ironically, in which we are Instructed to lay aside the things that weigh us down and rejoice in God’s care of us. I look at it now . . . God has such a sense of timing. I needed to be close to my family. I needed to be with the people with whom I can be every version of myself at once. That first night of Succoth I sat for three hours and talked to Uncle Bob about Emily. He had read my note on facebook Emily Happened, as had a couple of the other aunts and one of the cousins. We talked about life, about God, about grief, about hitting rock bottom and picking yourself back up again. A few nights later I sat down with one of the cousins, Jessie, and we had a real talk about something I had wanted to ask her for some time, but hadn’t known how to. A few nights later, I struck up a conversation with her brother, asking him about what he was doing, where he hoped he was headed, and the reasons behind things that mattered to him. As I looked into each of these people’s eyes, asked them questions, and really LISTENED to what they had to say, I realized that THIS is how you say goodbye . . . it looks a lot like saying hello. As I pulled out of the driveway each night and started the hour drive home, I felt content. If I had hit any of those deer that ran infront of me on the way home every night and never got the chance to talk to any of my family again . . . I would have done precisely what I wanted—each night I tried to make a concious effort to say, “you matter to me” in a way that would last if I didn’t get the chance to say it again.

I read over everything that I have written above and laugh a little—“Man, she sounds like she’s really put together. I wonder what her secret is.” Yeah . . . not so much. Okay . . . I have decided; I miss my old self. This new one is confusing. I feel like my mind is stuck on the scene from Fiddler on the Roof where Teviah validates two or three diametrically opposed statements. I feel at peace and acceptance with what happened, with Emily’s death, with her murder—yet I am angry with some cosmic sense of unjustice. I slam doors from time to time. I pound my steering wheel as I drive, “God, why?” I feel so mellowed out, so much more patient with the world and myself. Things that once felt so critical loose their weight. Yet in many moments I feel so easily angered by the people around me and their trivial complaints. The nuttiest thing about it all is that I can, and often DO, feel every one of these conflicting feelings at the same time with equal intensity. I sat on the porch swing of my childhood home late Saturday night with a friend, “I feel like the deepest, deepest place in me is at peace, but everything else . . . all that is an overwhelming current of confusion that keeps knocking me off my feet.” If my mind was short circeting at the moment I learned of Emily’s death, now it just feels like it’s running a search of all my computer files . . . ALL of them. No particular search, just so much information and feelings filtering through at breakneck speed that sometimes I cannot tell if I’m really processing anything or just standing back and watching the stampede flood over me. As Josh said in Timeline of their nifty little machine, I can say of this ordeal: “It strips you down to a mulucular level.”

There is a daily struggle to know what to do with all of my feelings. How to hold on and at the same time let go. I cried to Grace again this week. “I’m afraid we are forgetting her,” I said. She said she didn’t think that was possible, even if we talked about it less. “Do you really think any of us will be able to hear the name Emily ever again and not think of her?” she asked me. She was right. I find that name everywhere now. One of the other girls told me that first week that she found herself cumbulsively writing Emily’s name all over her hands. She didn’t know why. A few of the girls went out and bought a piece of clothing that reminded them of something Emily had worn and loved. I stopped wearing mascara the day she died out of necessity. I could probably go back to it now—most of the others did two weeks ago at least—but I didn’t want to. I didn’t quite understand why, though I was starting to guess at the reason. When I went out for Succoth and saw all the tzit tzit, tassles with blue threads, hanging out from under the men’s untucked shirts, I understood a little more fully this response to our loss, and I understood the reasons behind the tzit tzit that served as a constant reminder of God’s Word. I understood the desire to be marked just as God had Instructed the Israelites to mark themselves with their clothing, their food, and even their own bodies—this wish to have something on the outside that spoke of the change that had taken place on the inside. One of my favorite quotes, an African proverb, came back to me with more meaning than I had ever found in it before: “As I go from this place, I am wearing you.”

I find kinship to characters in stories I have known for years. Corrie Ten Boom’s admission, as she watched her family die at the hands of the Nazi occupation, that Scripture suddenly took on an epic feel . . . I have “known” this woman since early highschool, but not as I do now. I find that a single passage of Scripture can capture my complete attention for days on end. Last Saturday as I drove out to Succoth, making a mental note of the time signifying the exact time of Emily’s death three weeks before, I slammed the palm of my hand against the steering wheel, “God, why? I don’t understand.” The thought had been following me all day. She SHOULD be here! Why did a fourteen year old girl that would listen to anything you needed to say, who loved to laugh, loved God, and would do ANYTHING for you . . . why did SHE die? Why does a man who could so easily take her life for no reason as she walked home in the middle of the afternoon . . . how could he go free? As I pounded my steering wheel and demanded an answer I didn’t expect to get, I suddenly heard a Voice I have come to recognize: “Will you have Barabus or Jesus?” I was stopped in my tracks. As my foot lay heavily on the gas and the yellow lines whizzed by down the center of the road, I recognized an answer I had not anticipated, and for a long moment my spirit was quiet. Why had Jesus, a man who listened, who laughed, who loved God, who would do ANYTHING for you . . . why was he murdered? Why was he taken when a murderer walked free? I could answer with something about the reason behind Jesus’ death, the purpose in it, the plan from the beginning of time, but really . . . our very sense of justice MUST be taken aback by it just as literally THOUSANDS have been struck by the unfairness of Emily’s murder. Just as Corrie Ten Boom wrestled with the same sense of injustice, she and I both were and are struck by the overwhelming REALITY of the gospel.

These are the parts of this new Abi I am grateful to be as much as it hurts sometimes to walk in her smudged yellow sneakers. Henry Adams once said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Emily was not a recognized teacher by any means. She was really more of a student than anything else. But she has taught us so much by befriending us and letting us see her life and work through her death. Each of us that knew and loved her are changed. I can feel a depth in my soul that was not there before. I was talking to one of Emily’s other friends a couple of weeks ago, and we both agreed it is harder for those that are left behind, and yet Gwyndolyn from George Elliot’s classic Daniel Deronda really said it best, “Do not think of me sadly—I am better for having known you.”

Yet after all of this, all of this writing, processing, thinking . . . I don’t know how to go on. I don’t even know if I want to. There is a grief in realizing that the grief is not as strong as it once was. It is the grief of my heart beginning to heal, beginning to step out of the deep, dark hole I had fallen into. And yet I realize it will be a long climb and the shadow of that darkness will remain on my heart along with the scar where Emily touched me and where it bled when she was taken away. There is a constant struggle both externally and internally over the insistance that I have to go on. Coworkers that don’t know what to do with my changed, more quiet and serious persona tell me I have to go on, let it go . . . I am irritated, insisting that it is a long process that I can’t just rush through, and yet I find myself arguing against an internal voice telling me the same thing that they are saying out loud. I have been determined throughout the last month to FEEL it—all of it. I tell myself that I get to decide if Emily’s death was in vain. Yet as I focus on on MY choice, what I have decided to do with this loss, how I have made the decision to carry her with me, I also realize I’m not in nearly as much power over this as I sometimes like to believe. Just as passages from Emily’s favorite Book keep sifting into my mind at random, quotes from other stories she loved keep coming to mind, shedding light and wisdom into feelings I cannot put words to on my own. One of Emily’s other friends quoted Frodo, the unlikely hero from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that suffered the loss of friends, health, and innocence, in an effort to express her own sense of personal loss, “How do you pick up the pieces of an old life? You go through the actions, but in your heart you begin to understand; there is no going back.”

I am more alive than I was before, but it is because a friend of mine is now dead. I am grateful for the perspective she gave me, and just as grateful to know that Jesus too was a man “of sorrows and aquainted with grief.” I used to feel so depressed whenever I read that passage, but now I feel comforted. Nothing Emily suffered is unknown to Him . . . . and nothing I suffer now is beyond His intimate understanding. We sang a song every Shabbat during Succoth, “I was a young man, and I grew old, but I have never seen a righteous man forsaken.” Psalms reminds me that, “as I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil for You are with me.” Jesus promised to “never leave me nor forsake me.” I always thought it was harder to be left behind as my siblings went off on trips to the West coast and the East coast, down to he Gulf and clear up north where it actually snows. I was always left behind while they went off on the adventures. I am left behind again as someone I love goes off further than ever before, but as Stephen Curtis Chapman wrote, “I have been invited as a son. I’ve been invited to come . . . “ I am left behind, but the adventure is spread out before me—the adventure of tommorow. Four weeks ago from tomorrow at 5:45 p.m. my time, the examiners pronounced what Emily had already known for nearly a quarter of an hour—she had gone on ahead of us. Tomorrow starts the weekly rite of counting down the time to 5:30 p.m., counting down the time that Emily had left on another Saturday. “Three hours, two hours, one . . . “ I tell myself, dramatically struck by the realization that she didn’t know any more then than I know now of what is to come. My hour IS my adventure. I may have one hour. I may have one hundred billion. But that not knowing, the every day courage of dancing backwards and following His lead, living every day as though it were my last--that is my journey. As Chinese wisdom tells us, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I will take the step. I will live each day she does not have. I will honor the scar she has left on my heart, and the Scars that made my Hope possible, knowing in all certainty that I will see her on the Other Side. So as I mark this moment, this collection of twenty-seven days, I take the first step into the next. With every greeting I am saying goodbye. I miss my old self, as I willingly take on who I am now. As I go from here, I know I am better for having known her. I thank Him for the twenty-seven days He has given me. I ask him for the twenty-eighth, and I look forward to the day in which death too shall die.

Emily Happened . . .

This is something I wrote on my facebook account:

I have something I am finally prepared to share with all of you—with those of you that knew Emily and those of you who are wondering who all of these references on my facebook are about. It is a story that is still in the telling. I have yet to learn the end. And as my friend Lindsey once said, quoting Robert Frost, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” If that is the case, prepare to be balling your eyes out--I have been.

As some of you know, I grew up on a farm in the north eastern corner of Texas. Late in the summer of 2001, my mom heard a whisper from the Still Small Voice, saying, “You are about to become part of the Bigger Church. Broaden your horizons.” She didn’t know what it meant, so she just held it with her. Then Tuesday, September 11th 2001 knocked the world to its knees. After spending fourteen hours that day in front of the television in shock and horror, we were told from the pulpit that the attack on our nation was judgement from God for the sins of this country. And in the string of events that followed that statement, my own personal world, or rather my corner of it, came crashing down around my ears as we left the church and charted new territories. I was fifteen years old, awkward, chubby, and painfully self-concious, but I was stepping out into a whole new world. It’s amazing how strange those words sound considering how claustrophobic I felt at becoming so isolated so quickly, but the scope of our life was really broadening, not closing in. Our life turned online in a desparate attempt to maintain contact with the outside world.

That was the beginning of Emily.

Three of my brothers and I started taking highschool classes on an online Christian school called The Potter’s School. David, the youngest of the first half of the family, took his classes but didn’t socialize much. Myself, the oldest of the second half of the family, and my younger brothers, Taylor and Micah, took to the online community like ducks to water. Taylor became an editor for the school newspaper. I started a creative writing and critique group on the forum. Micah hung out in chat with the kids quite a bit, and all of us made a bunch of friends. Well, here I am twenty-one, five years after taking my first class on TPS and two years since graduating from it, and I am still doing the same thing I ever was--hanging out with the kids, discussing and debating big thoughts with passion and gusto, writing and critiquing stories, looking at photos, fooling around, and building friendships by mutually wasting time . . . or so I occassionally thought. Today I am off the farm, not nearly so isolated, but still find that the friendships that sprouted and began to grow on that forum to be among the ones I cherish most. Five years of watching myself grow up in the reflection of their eyes and seeing them change and yet stay beautifully the same on the other side of my computer screen as my fingers flew across the keys in a vain attempt to keep up . . . after a while we might as well be spending every afternoon on each other’s couches—we had just as much a bond.

I look back now with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and I thank God for every day that I stayed. I am a good three years older than the oldest kids there, having watched my graduating class, the one after me, and the one after that slowly dissapear into “real life,” seldom if ever to be heard from again. I guess in a weird way, I am grateful that the kids I hit it off with in my first few years were freshmans or younger, giving me reason to stick around to meet the kids that joined the school the same year I graduated. I know now that I could have spared myself a lot of heartache had I slowly drifted away and by that skipped this last, hellish two weeks—but never. Had I done that, I would have missed out on Emily completely, and instead of introducing you to her someday when we meet on the other side, my long-lost highschool buddies would be introducing me to a young woman I would never have realized I NEEDED to know.

Sunday morning, September 28th, I got the news that Micah had been up with all night. My mom told me that she had found him asleep on the living room floor beside his laptop computer at 5:00 a.m., which was when she learned the news. One of the girls on the forum had died. For some reason I may never know, I asked “how” before I asked “who.” I don’t know why. Some foreknowledge that on some, painful level the answer to that question would be harder to accept than the answer to the other? I don’t even know if that is true. How do you measure the weight of grief or even where it comes from? My mom answered with a grave, serious face, “She was killed. They don’t have all the details. She was out for a walk.” I felt the wind squeezed out of me. My mind went blank. For a single moment as long as eternity, panic welled up in me as I thought through every possibility. In that moment, I had lost every one of the kids that had come to mean so much to me, but I could not ask the question. As soon as I did, regardless of the answer, I would have lost the one that meant the most.

Emily.

My mind must have been short circeting. In a single moment I could not quite remember who she was and yet was flooded with memories. I remembered, which is more than I can say for most of my friends from TPS, the very first time I really met her: a little over a year ago. Micah had pushed me into one computer chair as he took the other. He wanted me to meet his friends on chat. I knew a few of them already--most of them infact--and Emily and I had even seen each other around the forum, but she didn’t know before that moment my connection to Micah or “belly button lint,” as she liked to call him for some reason neither of us will ever understand. She dove into an escapade of secret-sharing, as she divulged information that all of the others present already knew, but the “big sister” wasn’t supposed to know. To her dissapointment, the information wasn’t so much the surprise to me as the fact that she knew it. It was something that Micah never talked to ANYONE about—not even me—but he’d shared it there in chat with her long before. That blush-inducing moment for Micah actually lead us to find a wonderful place for he and I to have real heart-to-hearts: over private chat. We could sit side by side at separate computers and share things that we couldn’t bring ourselves to say to the other’s face. That was the first, of many times, Emily brought me closer to another soul . . . I suspect, though she’s gone, I have yet to experience the last.

I hung out with her in chat several other times, bumping into her in the forum as well, and always laughing when I ran across a post with Emily’s name on it with a P.S. on the bottom reading something to the gist of, “This is actually Josh, her brother, posting under his ‘psuedo-Emi’ by mistake.” Her account profile made me laugh and cry the morning I learned of her death and opened it to send her a goodbye over private message: “any odd occurrences in my avatar, title, and sig tend to occur from my brother hacking my account—please tell me if you notice, because I usually don’t.” Even after her death, she’s EVERYWHERE. That girl was so darn proud of her status as the lead poster, and boy was she ever—with or without “psuedo-Emi.”

I tried to go to work that morning. I went in, filled out my goal card with my manager, and then slumped down into a chair near the lobby, trying not to loose it or vomit when someone offered me a breakfast bar. I thought I was going to be able to suck it up and make it through my shift, but as soon as I saw my sister walk through the front door, I melted into a puddle of tears on the floor, and the simple news that I had lost a friend to murder gave me the day off. I got in my car and numbly drove for a while along Tyler Loop 323. I stepped on the gas for the green light, on the break for the red light, and drove with the windows rolled down. I had nowhere to go, but I needed to drive there. Finally, I turned around and headed back into town. When I stopped my car outside of Barnes and Noble, I blessed my messy habits as I discovered my journal still in the backseat from a trip I’d taken a couple of weeks before back Home, the farm where I’d grown up.

So there I sat alone at an empty table for two, writing anything and everything that flitted through my mind. Slowly, a wave of disbelief started to mount in me. When it had built to a tide, I gathered up my things and rushed home. As I darted up the stairs of my mother’s appartment, I harbored the fleeting, comforting belief that it had all been a prank. We’d had our share of April Fools pranks in the past, not all of which had QUITE landed on April Fools. I couldn’t remember that Emily or Josh had been in on any of them, but Emily had liked a good joke, though through my hope that that was all it was, I knew I was going to seriously kick her butt if my hope was true! I figured that if the chatroom vigil through the long night hadn’t brought her around, my tearful goodbye letter in her Inbox would do the trick. Honestly, whoever said ignorance is bliss didn’t know the sheer wonder of stubborn disbelief. I unlocked the front door, made a dash for the computer, logged in to chat, and the illusion was shattered. No appology. No Emily. Just a chatroom full of crying kids spread clear from Washington, to Kansas, to New Jersey, to Korea.

Emily was gone.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, the kids continued to join the chatroom that was quickly becoming an online wake between kids whose hearts were joined across state lines, nation’s boarders, and even oceans—now stretching all the way to heaven. We sat together and shook. We shared links to a few articles that had picked up the story, giving us details we hadn’t had before, but still remaining silent as to “the victim’s” name. Josh had asked us to keep the matter private and try to deflect media attention. No blog posts, no public foruming, no facebook updating. Because of the lack of identifying features in the news articles, a few of the kids refused to believe it was Emily. Slowly, with horror, we traced the growing knowledge of the newspapers as they first found her father’s blog, photos of Em, and even our school newspaper’s student spotlight from June 2007, and we began getting more information as to what had happened as they gathered information from us regarding who she was.

Denial was over.

We couldn’t bury our heads anymore. We had been robbed of a heart that had touched each of ours so deeply, and nothing could ever make it okay. The next stages of grief swept over us. We cried. Sharing stories. Laughing at Emily’s sense of humor through our tears. Then rage hit us as we started thinking about the man that still walked free as examiners were determining the “cause of death” of our friend. I had sent a private message to my friend, Grace, at the beginning of the day, warning her that her job as forum moderator was about to get harder, as I expected tempers would flare in our grief. I guess I hadn’t assumed it would be MY temper. I called out for capital punishment, falling back on the good ol’boy attitude of my home state and wishing all of this hadn’t taken place in Canada, so we could inflict the death penalty. John, our friend in Korea who was up in the middle of the night his time, told me to stop and think—would Emily want us to be thinking all of this right now? I wanted to tell him I didn’t care; she wasn’t here to correct me, and as the thought sunk in, restraining my fingers from speaking it out loud, I wanted to cry.

John finally talked me down, and I melted again into the pain that had fueled my anger, and started appologizing profusely, realizing that regardless of if Emily were here to tell me to change my focus, it wasn’t what any of us needed to be thinking about right then. As I settled back down and started to cry, they all gathered around me, and it was like we were sharing a group hug, crying on each other’s shoulders--wishing they were tangible. We fell to laughing about our memories, picturing Emily on the other side of Glory. “You know,” John said. “I can just picture her realizing she’s in heaven, looking back at the rest of us and saying, ‘YES! I got here first!” We all laughed through our tears, grateful we had each other. We couldn’t quite shake the feeling, though, that Emily should be there with us. For such an important moment in the life of our shared friendships and the forum where she had lived with us, she should be here and her absense was startling.

As the end of that long, aweful day came upon us, many of us had cooled from wild grief and bouts of rage into a dry, sullen ache. Watching news footage from Alberta—showing her community and the spot where she had died . . . for some it was harder, for me it whispered a closure to the day. The details we were given as to how she was killed calmed the racing images in my head of every possibility into one, monotonous image that played over and over again, but at least I knew more of what had really happened. I realized as I went to bed that, while I had reminded the others all day that they had to eat, aside from a few random things throughout the day, I hadn’t eaten all day. I couldn’t. I was sick to my stomache, and the thought of putting food in my mouth brought up a wave of nausea. I went to bed and tried to sleep.

Over the next few days, the grief and shock wore on. I never felt fully awake nor ever really asleep. It was like walking through a dream while wakeful. Almost like sleeping with your eyes open--you don’t realize you’re doing it until someone points out the light in your pupils is gone. I discovered so few people that could relate or even handle my grief, and tucked away among their ranks, I found a few that could listen to anything and everything I needed to say. I have learned that angels are everywhere—even heavy-drinking, hard-living, atheist ones. Just a few days ago, as a wave of grief washed over me and I slumped to the floor of the drink station in the restaurant where I work, one of the guys got down on the floor with me, to talk, and to listen. He had asked me several days before what was wrong. “I lost a friend to murder too,” he had said. “This too shall pass,” he quoted with a knowing look in his eye.

Yet over the course of th at first week, I felt, very distinctly, a sharp separation between “us” and “them,” those who had known Emily, and those who hadn’t. We cried, we remembered, we reminded each other to eat. We dealt with the pain of having wasted time with her. Slowly, I came to realize that, though I had had so little, I had been given all the time I needed. God knew I NEEDED to know her, and I hadn’t missed out on anything I had been intended to have with her. As one of the girls said, “God knew how much loss each of us could handle.” So I worked during the day, comforted by the knowledge that when I got home, I could sit back down to chat, or curl up in a ball with the phone to my ear—knowing that while I walked through my day, as a washed out girl that no longer trusted mascara, there were others just like me all around the world.

I began to feel the universality of the Church. My horizons were broadening. Just as Josh and his family were receiving letters and flowers coming clear from Shri Lanka, I was feeling bound and united with Christians living all over the world. As we sat in the chatroom day after day, we began to share the striking sense of heaven that we had never had before. It was REAL--so very, very real to so many of us. One of the girls told me over private chat, “I can see heaven now . . . now that someone I know is there.” Another shared with me over the phone, “If God took me tommorow, I would be okay with it,” and I understood. It’s not that we wanted to die or were in despair. It was that we were, and are, at peace with God—completely.

Last Saturday was a hard day for all of us, being the one week anaversary of Emily’s death. After work and school almost all of us gathered back together in chat for a special night. Grace had asked our school administrator to come and speak with us, to answer any questions we had after loosing Emily. I was INTENSELY uncomfortable with the invitation. Our forum isn’t exactly the “official” forum for the school. Several years before, the free-thinkers of the school had separated onto a knock off forum, which had received a fair amount of hostility from the school’s administrator. (I marvel daily how I somehow manage to never be the new kid and always be the rebel.) I felt hugely territorial of our space, but I knew that Grace had been going through a lot and, in the midst of her own grief, had had to continue in the role of “Forum Mommy” and everything that entailed, so I decided I would not opose Mr. G. coming—if she needed to hand the reigns over for a while, I would support her in that. I would go because of Emily, because of the other kids, and for Grace--even though I didn’t much care what he had to say. My deepest fear was that he would come in, not having known Emily as we had, and turn this into a theological dissertation or at the very least say something meaningless and churchy like, “Emily wouldn’t want us to be sad—she’s in a better place.” What we received from him that night . . . I could not have anticipated. It was another instance in which Emily has brought people together.

His first words as he came into chat, our names lining the sidebar as if we were standing with locked arms, were, “I am so humbled and honoured to be here.” He said he had not expected the invitation to speak to us. He said that before joining us in chat, Grace had given him access to view our forum, all of the memorials we had set up and the tributes we had written, and the avatars and signitures that had simltaneously been changed to photos of Emily or quotes she had left behind. “Seeing all of this,” he said in shock. “I realize what you all lost, what this place meant to Emily.” He let us talk for much of the time, asking us leading questions and then letting us answer. We talked about who Emily had been, what she had meant to us. We talked about the hardest things about loosing her. It was a special moment, since many of us hadn’t had the courage, or perhaps had been so busy trying to comfort each other, that we hadn’t shared with each other the thing that was the hardest. I had voiced it to Grace, and she to me, that we had the image of Emily’s death playing over, and over, and over in our heads. We all said the hardest thing was knowing that Emily was alone in that final moment. And then he said the words that could have come from God Himself, they have been so comforting to each of us. I think they will be in our hearts forever.

God grieves Emily even more than we do—and she WASN’T alone.

One of the girls said something about Him being at her side through it all, and Mr. G. corrected her. Not at Emily’s side, but ACTIVELY INVOLVED. I am so grateful to him for bringing us to that realization. I talked to several of the others after Mr. G. left, and we were all floored by the realization that the thought had never occurred to any of us. We had seen her in our minds alone, afraid, in pain—and no one came. And now, the picture I hold in my head of that moment is the struggle, the rope around her neck, the man infront of her—and God standing behind her, her leaning back against Him; Him holding on tight in a strong embrace from behind; Him stroking her hair, crying, whispering in her ear, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And then finally, “Okay . . . now it’s time to go home.”

All of you reading this have known me a long time. You’ve either known me from infancy, or young childhood, some grew up with me . . . I tell you truthfully, I have never felt God so close before. Despite my grief that still comes in wild, uncontrollable surges, I feel His presence closer. I have often felt God with me in the past—but never standing at my elbow, never in the passanger seat of my car as I drive. One tribute to Emily read, “She walked with God until it came time for Him to carry her Home.” I have never known what it meant—what it TRULY meant--to walk with God, never read it and understood it as anything more than poetry. Now . . . I feel it. I understand. I am overwhelmed by His presence. As I sob, as I cry out for help in this grief, as I reach out to others for companionship as I mourn, as I am weighed down by the burden of Emily’s death, I feel Him all around me. I see Him everywhere. I have no fear. And in taking one day at a time, I find what a true marvel each day is. Even in moments in which I am at an utter loss and wish I could just pull the plug and end the world right now, I am aware of eternity. I am aware that if I live to be ninety-one . . . that is still only seventy years. Such a short time before we are all together, and not just with Em, but everyone I ache for. Heaven feels so real.

It seems so strange to me . . . Emily seemed to understand all of this. Reading over things she wrote to hers and my mutual friends in the week before she died, notes on how to put God first, quizzes about what she believed, her final words to another friend the morning of the day she died, “I’m praying for you” . . . she seemed to get it, and, oh, I wish I could talk to her about it all. There are so few in this world that seem to TRULY understand the boundlessness I feel about life and eternity, the intimacy I feel with God. And yet I am aware of the irony that I have this—all this—as a result of loosing her. If we could hit a rewind button and I had the chance I had then . . . I wouldn’t be able to talk to her about all of this. I understand now what it means for God to work all things together for good. It’s not that it’s “worth it.” Honestly, I would give it all back in a heartbeat. I would return to my cynicism about religion, my lack of use for Scripture, return to the way my friendships were then, my inclination to harbor enemies—storming off from the computer when Alan said the “wrong thing,” while muttering about “highschooler’s immaturity” and missing my own. I so wish I could go back to being diffecult, go back to having enemies over stupid things, go back to hostility towared Mr. G., go back to everything I was before . . . if it meant somehow none of this could have happened. Yet as I recognize my own preferences, I recognize the good God has worked anyway out of a situation I so desparately wish could be changed. But it can’t. Instead of thinking fondly of Grace, I call her when I am in tears. Instead of growling at the thought of Alan’s views on politics and religion, I think of him as a friend. Instead of being afraid, being in a race against time, being distant to my Heart and His calling . . . I am who I didn’t know I wanted to be.

Emily happened.