Waking up

What's the best part of a nightmare?  Waking up.  No question.

Some of them fade as soon as you realize they were some bizarre figment of whatever part of your mind sets those things off in the first place.  Others linger.  Your heart pounds, and you try to catch your breath.  You can't focus around the room.  Your mind grasps that the images of moments ago were not real, but like cobwebs stuck to your face, you cannot rid yourself of them.

When tragedy visits you, real tragedy, you wake in the middle of the night hoping that the memories will fade like a nightmare.  As the sobriety of consciousness settles in, the images do not fade.  No, it's not necessarily the terror of a nightmare.  It's an absolute grief over a reality that cannot be changed.

In the dark.

We all know someone who has had to endure such waking moments.  Over time, the grief is perhaps not as stark, but with open eyes and a determined will, you get out of bed knowing that that which consumes your thought is not a dream.

A few days ago, a local sportswriter noted that there was a victim to a local tragedy that did not get a lot of press (here).  A guy who received no pleas for prayer.  The guy?  The cause of the accident.

Let me stop for a minute and focus on that last word, accident.  Terri Otto's death was an accident.  You or I could have been behind the wheel of the truck on that dark, foggy, drizzly morning.  He was.  No alcohol.  No drugs.  I don't think he was texting or on his cell phone at 6 a.m.  Just a guy going to work.  An accident in the purest sense of the word.

I don't know his name, but put yourself in his shoes for a moment.  Imagine if every time you turned around in the press you heard about what an extraordinary, God-annointed, God-appointed woman Terri was (here, in case you missed it).  And you were behind the wheel of the vehicle that robbed her husband and children of her tender presence.  Imagine.  Any idea what mornings would be like?  Ponder the utter silence that abounds at 2 a.m.

Few can.  I can't.  And so I pray.  Nothing in life could heal such a wound.  I can't.  You can't, either.  800 packing a church can't.  But there is One who can.  God saw fit within his Law to Israel to provide a place where folks could go who caused accidental deaths, a place where they would be free from prosecution.  This man will not be prosecuted.  He shouldn't be.  But the accuser of men, Satan, will attempt to torment this man to his destruction.  Jesus Christ came that man might have life to the full.  That includes the truck's driver.

Please pray that this man would cast his burdens upon the One, Jesus Christ, who aches to carry his burdens.  Pray that one day in the future he might rise to a day with a smile at the corner of his mouth instead of anguish tarnishing his heart.

Please, please pray for him.