A Long Day’s Journey into Night Part 2

As the antiquated ambulance sped me toward the hospital, I touched my cold, severed right foot lying beside me on my stretcher. As I gently wiped blood off my ankle I wept – not in pain, not in anger, but in incredulity, and profound grief. Incredulity because I could not believe that I would do such a stupid thing to myself; grief because I knew that I would never run on that foot again. My life was forever changed.

I felt like the poet James Dickey’s young girl injured in an auto accident:

“Her beauty gone, but to hover
Near for the rest of her life,
And good no nearer, but plainly
In sight, and the only way.
(from “The Scarred Girl”)

It was as though I woke up in a new world, a nightmarish world. As if all my life I had thought that God was good and that He loved me, etc. But now, in that ambulance speeding toward Pine Bluff, Arkansas, I suddenly discovered that things were different. I was reborn on September 11, 1975. And I thought that I could never love God again . . .

As I recovered in my windowless hospital room, I encountered an aspect of life that I innocently did not know existed. My 22 years on this earth had scarcely prepared me for the valley I now entered. For seven months I lay in traction and then in a full body cast. But, as my body healed my soul languished. The same God who had saved me and called me to the ministry now seemed to be destroying me. Surely I was in darkness–and in spite of the fact that I had known only light for over five years! Where was the God of my salvation?

Today, I look back at Sept. 11, 1975, as a watershed day in my life. Oh, I still feel the pain of my accident. And I have had, and may have even worse catastrophes in my life. But that time of sitting in darkness, that long days journey into night, has taught me a very important fact: God will never forsake or abandon me. He will deliver me. And He does even more. When I mess up my life, figuratively and literally, He will always be there to to help me sort it out. Sure, I walk with a limp. But He gave me the courage and strength to go on when I did not want to do so. And He took what should have been a disaster and made it a good thing in my life. God has a way to take the lemons I produce in my life and make them into lemonade. It is not that I grew accustomed to the darkness. It is that I have found a light that shines into every darkness I can experience or imagine.

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