One Year Later

On April 26, it will be one year since Brad Larson and 4 others from Taylor University died in a horrific accident involving a school van and semi-trailer that flew across the highway median. This year has made me think more about death than any other year, and I randomly yet regularly continue to find myself confronted with thoughts I simply don’t know what to do with. I don’t know how to best comfort those who were much closer to Brad than I. I don’t know how to even try to understand what God was doing. I don’t know how my tears lead to questions which sometimes lead to worship and sometimes just lead to more questions. I don’t know how to have hope when there is clearly still so much despair. And at the very same time, hope is all I do have.

On Easter Sunday, my mind was continually distracted as I thought about Brad, his family, his friends. Joy and I were at a service with twelve-thousand others filling up the Sears Center near Chicago, a wonderfully joyous and reflective service. And in the vastness of the auditorium, my mind kept returning to thoughts of Brad.

It was on Easter Sunday in Boston last year that I last saw Brad. There was a large group of us in Boston together, and it was a wonderful several days. On Saturday night, Easter Eve, I became quite sick, and returned early from the events of the day to lie down. Because I was so sick, I didn’t go to church last Easter: I was in bed hoping for my fever and chills to subside. And although I don’t want to imply that my friends who were there didn’t care that I was sick or didn’t ask how I was feeling, I distinctly remembering Brad being the one who visibly and tangibly showed that he cared. He would regularly come back to the room where I was sleeping, ask how I was feeling, ask what he could do to help me feel better. On Easter Sunday, it was Brad who asked if he could bring me back something for lunch. He brought me a salad, and he was thoughtful enough to have the dressing for the salad put on the side, just in case it might upset my stomach.

Brad was killed about one week later, and since that time, my mind has gone in all sorts of directions. Many times, it just seems wrong to me that he was worried about getting me a salad with dressing on the side when he could have shared his last Easter with his family. And yet, my strongest memory of Brad is one of him serving, one of him checking the bathroom to see if I’d thrown up again or asking if I needed another blanket, and I don’t want to take that memory away.

This year, I found myself thinking over and over about Brad, and my mind instantly turns to thinking of his family and his many friends much closer than I. And as I tried to engage in the service I was in, I began to think about that hope that we do have. And it hit me hard: This year, Brad wasn’t in some Easter service in Boston or India or Wisconsin, but was actually worshipping in Jesus’ presence. It is in this thought that there is hope in despair, and it was this thought that allowed me to engage in a purer worship. I used to think worship only involved me and the Godhead. But what if worship is more? What if it is so much more beautiful and mysterious? What if worship means bringing everything—our memories, our weaknesses, our insufficiencies, our despair, our relationships—as we seek to enter into the mysterious process of knowing Christ more intimately?

In the final pages of Thomas Merton’s book No Man is an Island, Merton writes regarding silence and death: “If, at the moment of death, death comes to us as an unwelcome stranger, it will be because Christ also has always been to us an unwelcome stranger.”

I have no doubt that death did not come to Brad as an unwelcome stranger because Christ was not an unwelcome stranger in Brad’s life. It is with tears that I remember and know that while Brad’s death was an unwelcome stranger to those around him, to Brad death brought forth his presence into eternal glory with a Savior he knew and pursued quite intimately. He is now in the presence of that Glory, in the presence of the Risen Christ.