Celebration of the Life

The church was packed.  Family, friends, neighbors, teachers, classmates, Cub Scouts, you name it. 

This was a boy, and a family, that people know.  Knew.  That people are glad to know; to have known. 

One uncle's comments in celebration of Luke's life included these words:  "It was a freak accident; it was nobody's fault.  I bear no anger toward anybody about this."  And you could tell he meant it. 

Here's what the mom and dad had to say, in today's local paper.

http://www.salinereporter.com/stories/090408/loc_20080904001.shtml

And she means it too.  She's just that kind of person.  She truly, truly wants people to pray for and forgive the man who killed her son. 

Because it WAS a freak accident.

High noon, not a cloud in the sky, no drugs or alcohol involved, a 40-year-old man, father of a 7-year-old boy of his own, plowed into the back of their stopped minivan.  At high speed.  Until today I was racking my brain trying to understand how on earth this could have happened.  He was a local; it's not like he couldn't have known that was a 4-way stop.  Why wasn't he at least slowing down as he apprached the intersection? 

Here's how.  I heard about it this evening.

He had just given blood, and was feeling lightheaded, and stepped on the gas instead of the brake, approaching that 4-way stop. 

Here was a man trying to do the right thing, giving blood; and he killed a boy.  A boy his own son's age. 

Can you imagine what he is going through right now? 

So seriously.  Pray for him, forgive him, cover him with love, too. 

And the parents. 

Early Sunday morning, their beloved son was taken off the ventilator, and wheeled into an operating room, where doctors did everything they could...  to make sure OTHER children would live.  They donated their child's organs. 

The dad was reported to have said, in making this decision, "I'm not sure this is what I want to do... but it's what Luke would have wanted to have done.  He would have wanted to know that other children could live, even if he couldn't." 

Who knows why?  Who knows why?

The web of our lives is woven together more intricately than we can know.

But that's love.  That's love.  To take your own family's tragedy, and answer the prayers of other families whom you will never meet.  To offer prayers and care to the man who killed your child.  That's IT; that's what it's all about.

That's love.

Go hug your children.  Kiss your spouse.  Smile at a stranger on the street.

Love one another.