Holding Hands with God in the Dark

Our friends, Ken and Cheryl Gates, lost their son, Reid--a high school senior-- last September in a senseless accident.  Ken tells their journey in this Baccalaureate address to Reid's classmates.  It is very moving and full of wisdom. I wanted to share it with you.  Please pray for this family as they continue to walk with God in the dark.

Cindy

CHS Baccalaureate Msg, 21 May 2014

June 9, 2014 at 11:41am

Cedaredge High School

Class of 2014

Baccalaureate, 21 May 2014

Ken Gates

            I thank the seniors that invited me here to speak tonight.

            I thank the Lord for giving me the gumption to accept the invite.

            This baccalaureate message is going to be different than the 37,000 other high school baccalaureate messages given this season - which is appropriate, because the year you seniors had is different from all the others.

            Many of you heard me share at Reid’s Memorial last Sept. I shared that I was puzzled that the Lord allowed Reid to die.

            Tonight I’m glad to be able to give a follow-up, share some of our journey with you, and to let you know where Cheryl and I are at after 8.5 months. We’re going to touch on knowledge and wisdom, and the difference.

            Some notes on our journey -

            Reid, our 17 year-old son just beginning his senior year, didn’t wake up 8 Sept 2013 due to carbon monoxide filling the camper he and two friends were sleeping in. Upon getting the news, we went in to crisis management mode. Step one was to get the prayer warriors in our lives activated. The first thing the doctor told me at the hospital was that it was very bad. But I knew that as long as Reid was breathing, God could fully restore him. In fact, even if he stopped breathing, I knew God could fully restore him. We prayed for a miracle. It didn’t happen. Reid was pronounced dead at 6:22 pm the next day. His salvageable organs were donated and serving other bodies within 24 hours.

            Our mission changed from rescue to memorial. We made the five-hour trip from Denver back to Cedaredge on Wednesday and I met with Principal Gardner and VP Milholland at the school that evening. The kids, staff, and community that supported our 250-student high school were in shock. Cheryl and I felt very strongly that how the week was handled would leave a life-long impression for many that were involved. We spoke with the volleyball team before their Thursday game, and the football team before the home opener Friday night. The Memorial was Saturday afternoon. All went very well from a mission perspective.

            Crisis management mode was not new for Cheryl and me. Twenty five years with the Air Force, at the Academy and on active duty, had allowed us to experience and work through plenty of crises. But it wasn’t military training that got us through the Memorial Week. It was the fact that our family had learned how to deal with trauma from a Godly perspective that helped us stay focused and see the big picture. We had significant experience in applying God’s word to trials and tribulations - I had even been through an intensive course on God’s presence during traumatic times, and I trained others on an overseas mission trip. Relying on God and an ocean of prayer, the week came to an end with a celebration of Reid’s life.

            Then our dual reality started. We allowed ourselves to begin mourning the day after the memorial, and we figured the mourning stage would last as long as it would last. That was 15 Sept. In many ways, our home life hasn’t changed much in the 8.5 months since. We remain in mourning. Yet I returned to the classroom a week later, put on my professional face, and carried on with the school year. Cheryl has been in public since, but avoids large gatherings. Obviously football games, basketball games, and track meets were large gatherings and somewhat difficult on a number of levels.

            The First Month of the journey was powerful in that we felt immersed in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Lord felt close, all day, every day. We were deep in sorrow. Not despair. Never through any of this have we felt despair. But the sorrow was emotionally, physically, and intellectually exhausting. We literally felt physically burdened. We weren’t thinking a whole lot on our own, but praying for God’s support to get out of bed in the morning. To get through the first hour of the day. Then the second. The one who is the great I AM was there. In the depth of our sorrow, when our hearts were broken and our loss was a fresh, open wound, when we lacked thought, words, or prayers, I AM was with us. And where He is, there is joy. There was joy in the depth of our sorrow. We knew it was going to be a rough path, but it was going to be OK. We had a strategy – Trust God.

            Church was hard. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe the emotion of being in God’s presence in community. The hymns were impossible. We just cried. Sometimes uncontrollable sobbing. Which is what we were doing at home, privately, but we really didn’t want to be a public spectacle. The hugs and support were nice. People making small talk wasn’t nice. We had little patience for small talk. Those that were fascinated by our journey and wanted to share it got to have coffee with Cheryl in one on one cases. Cheryl turned coffee dates into all morning, four-hour events.

            When we were home together we sat in the living room and read. There was consolation in sharing the journey with others willing to tell their stories. We were now members of a club no one wants to join and learning more about the club was useful. So much of what we read was right on target, speaking directly to our hearts. But it was tough to hear from others that the first year would be tough, the second not much better, and one father told me his sorrow remains heavy - 26 years later.

            The Second Month Cheryl became focused on Reid’s location. Where is his soul, right now? Where is heaven, what is heaven, is there a delay between death and heaven? Did Reid go to heaven? The desire to be sure about this became paramount. One can pore through the Bible in the academic detective mode and not find the definitive answer. I know. My wife is a smart woman and she tried. “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” (CS Lewis, A Grief Observed) The answer to these questions became like food and water to Cheryl, as she was going to have a hard time moving forward without resolution. She didn’t get the answers she wanted – but we decided to Trust God and move forward.

            Month Number Three is when the honeymoon felt over. As was absolutely appropriate, others got on with their lives. We continued receiving phone calls, cards, and social network messages letting us know we were prayed for. Which was great. But our personal loneliness didn’t have to do with our human relationships. It had to do with God’s presence. Cheryl was seeking answers to her profoundly spiritual questions, inhaling His Book, and getting…nothing. “Seek and ye shall find” didn’t pan out. It was more like seek and get more and more frustrated at the lack of communication. “Please God, please God, please God - just a sign that he is OK?” At the lack of input, we had to just...Trust God.

            Christmas was the big event of Month Four. Reid’s birthday had come and gone on 22 Nov, and with the holidays people were very sensitive toward our emotional stability. What few realized was that the specialness of the holidays was meaningless as emotional triggers for us. Those days were no worse than any others. Every day since 9 Sept had been bad. There were bad days and worse days. The depth of our sorrow was such that no holiday celebrations or memories would trigger anything worse. It was something unexpected that triggered a new dimension to our journey.

            Our daughter Jheri and husband Cody were supposed to come home for a couple of weeks. The Sunday before Christmas, day before they were due home, Jheri called and said she couldn’t do it. “Well, OK, come home when you can and we’ll celebrate Christmas when you get here.” Being at the house without Reid was going to be very difficult for her. Cheryl, Shane, and I had been dealing with this reality all along. But she had been in town for Memorial Week and then returned to Lawrence. Reid hadn’t been part of her daily life for some three years. She was as deeply sorrowed by his loss as us - but had been processing it differently, from a distance. Coming home meant “in your face” kind of reality. “Jheri, you’ll need to come home sometime, we’re not going to move,” I shared. Her response - “you should.” She wasn’t being flippant. I realized that I could lose my family. This was going to be one of the most challenging leadership tasks I had ever faced. I felt inadequate to the task. I was going to have to Trust God.

            The Fifth and Sixth Months, January and February, were dark and quiet as we continued searching for signs of peace. I began feeling less exhausted getting out of bed in the morning.

            Our faith in God did not falter. But we sure weren’t liking him much. The Sixth, Seventh Months found us questioning his wisdom. He messed up. The world needs people like Reid. He impacted many with his life and death, surely he would have impacted more with a longer life. But it happened, it’s over, so what are we supposed to do with it? What role are we supposed to play going forward? After months of intense Biblical and spiritual study, where are we supposed to go with this experience, where is the meaning in this, what is the meaning of life, give us some guidance, God! Life seems chaotic, why did you create us in the first place, what were you thinking?

            I ended up in The Book of Ecclesiastes - not by design, but because I was reading Knowing God, by J. I. Packer, and Packer’s direct approach about facing reality hit home. Made me laugh. Because Packer’s description of chasing understanding and knowledge, and facing reality, was a perfect summation of what Cheryl had been dwelling on for weeks.

            The Book of Ecclesiastes is attributed to King Solomon, it talks about chasing happiness and being disappointed, and it describes the life lived wisely. The passages that apply are worth reproducing in their entirety because they are perfect. Packer’s words follow:

                        As the sermon itself shows, the text is intended as a warning against the misconceived quest for understanding, for it states the despairing conclusion to which this quest, if honestly and realistically pursued, must at length lead. We may formulate the message of the sermon as follows:

                        Look (says the preacher) at the sort of world we live in. Take off your rose-colored glasses, rub your eyes and look at it long and hard. What do you see? You see life’s background set by aimlessly recurring cycles in nature (1:4-7). You see its shape fixed by times and circumstances over which we have no control (3:1-8; 9:11-12). You see death coming to everyone sooner or later, but coming haphazard; its coming bears no relation to whether it is deserved (7:15; 8:8). Humans die like beasts (3:19-20), good ones like bad, wise ones like fools (2:14, 16; 9:2-3). You see evil running rampant (3:16; 4:1; 5:8; 8:11; 9:3); the wicked prosper, the good don’t (8:14). Seeing all this, you realize that God’s ordering of events is inscrutable; much as you want to make it out, you cannot do so (3:11; 7:13-14; 8:17 RV; 11:5). The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed and oppressed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything, and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks.

                        But once you conclude that there really is no rhyme or reason in things, what “profit”-value, gain, point, purpose-can you find in any sort of constructive endeavor? (1:3, 2:11, 22; 3:9, 5:16). If life is senseless, then it is valueless; and in that case, what use is it working to create things, to build a business, to make money, even to seek wisdom-for none of this can do you any obvious good (2:15-16, 22-23; 5:11); it will only make you an object of envy (4:4); you can’t take any of it with you (2:18-21; 4:8; 5:15-16); and what you leave behind will probably be mismanaged after you have gone (2:19). What point is there, then, in sweating and toiling at anything? Must not all our work be judged “vanity [emptiness, frustration] and a striving after wind” (1:14 RV)?-activity that we cannot justify as being either significant in itself or worthwhile to us?

                        It is to this pessimistic conclusion, says the preacher, that optimistic expectations of finding the divine purpose of everything will ultimately lead you (1:17-18). And of course he is right. For the world we live in is in fact the sort of place that he has described. The God who rules it hides himself. Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it. Rarely does it appear that there is a rational power behind it at all. Often what is worthless survives, while what is valuable perishes. Be realistic, says the preacher; face these facts; see life as it is. You will have no true wisdom till you do. (pg 105-106)

            He continues:

                        For the truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives. “As thou knowest not what is the way of the wind, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child; even so thou knowest not the work of God who doeth all” (11:5 RV).

                        But what, in that case, is wisdom? The preacher has helped us to see what it is not; does he give us any guidance as to what it is?

                        Indeed he does, in outline at any rate; “Fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13); trust and obey him, reverence him, worship him, be humble before him, and never say more than you mean and will stand to when you pray to him (5:1-7); do good (3:12); remember that God will someday take account of you (11:9; 12:14), so eschew even in secret, things of which you will be ashamed when they come to light at God’s assizes (12:14). Live in the present, and and enjoy it thoroughly (7:14; 9;7-10; 11:9-10); present pleasures are God’s good gifts. Though Ecclesiastes condemns flippancy (7:4-6), he clearly has no time for the superspirituality which is too proud or too pious ever to laugh and have fun. Seek grace to work hard at whatever life calls you to do (9:10), and enjoy your work as you do it (2:24; 3:12-13; 5:18-20; 8:15). Leave to God its issues; let him measure its ultimate worth; your part is to use all the good sense and enterprise at your command in exploiting the opportunities that lie before you (11:1-6).

                        This is the way of wisdom. (pg 106-107)

            I’m going to detour a bit here, just to emphasize one of Solomon’s points, and to tie it to Reid. “Live in the present, and enjoy it thoroughly. Present pleasures are God’s good gifts.” There were many beautiful tributes to Reid last fall. Madison’s mosaic is one of our favorites. Another favorite is a blog post by Reid’s cousin Caroline, posted on her blog, “Arms are for Good.” She wrote it as a birthday message, and she shared direct memories of Reid enjoying the present. A portion of it goes like this:

                        “I have a distinct memory from that particular summer when you and Shane and I were all in WI together of laying on the raft looking at the stars. And not saying anything. But that moment was milked for life. Just as much as a moment airborne off a tubing raft…right before you careen off and under the waves.

                        You had 17 years and 9 months. But really you had so many moments. You had more moments of serious fun and seriously lived life than many 101 year olds (I know a lot of 101 year olds). You lived for centuries in moment-time. Sometimes you shared moments with your dorky city cousin who couldn’t get her nose out of a book. Thanks for that. Thanks for giving me some moments airborne above the tubing raft, and even thanks for those moments where I emerged dripping and bruised back to the boat to your smile and anxious hands grabbing for the life jacket off my back, ready for your turn - because there wasn’t a moment to lose.”

            There is a difference between chasing knowledge and seeking wisdom.

            Seniors, as of Friday you’ll be Grads. You’ve gained an awful lot of knowledge the last four years. My hunch is that many of you have searched out and found some wisdom over the last 8.5 months. You’ve all dealt with losing Reid in your own way, some more directly than others. Some of you had significant losses in your lives before this. Well, here’s the tough part. Every one of you will know significant loss, sometime, again. A main objective for Cheryl and me over the last 8.5 months has been to equip you, Reid’s classmates, with some tools and an example of how to deal with loss. Because you will know more loss. You will have your opportunity to be in the center of the storm.

            Knowledge doesn’t help much in the center of the storm. Wisdom does. The best wisdom I’ve found is in the Holy Bible, and it is best summarized in Ecclesiastes.

            God isn’t going to give me the knowledge of what is going on in the big picture of my life. What He does give me is guidance on how to live today. This day. He also gives me the assurance that I’m going to have a joyful reunion with my boy. That’s not something that’s written in pencil on my calendar, as a maybe. That’s an assurance that is made clear over and over again in this book, a consolidation of 66 different books written by 40 different authors over the span of 1500 years. God’s Holy Scriptures.

            As you head toward the work force, technical training, higher education, and you gain knowledge about making a living - be diligent and do well at that. Your teachers, your parents, your families, we all want that for you. But more importantly, learn how to live. Learning how to make a living - that is knowledge. Learning how to live - that is wisdom.

Thank you.