Silvia's Faith Journey Part 5

Hi everyone! We are back to my faith journey. To me, some of the hardest things about this season of my life was being stuck with all the “whys” and “what ifs” and not allowing God in my life to help me through. I think those two questions are ones that can paralyze us if we focus on them for too long. In this part of my faith journey, and other parts where he is spoken of, I am refraining from using the name of the drunk driver that killed Jared. Though I do not know for certain, I hope that his path is much better now, so I do not want to “lock” his name in association with something I hope God has redeemed in his life. I pray that God has transformed his life and used his past to be a part of a powerful testimony to move others.

After Jared was killed, I was a “highly functional” depressed person.  To the outside world I was achieving many things, but in reality I was very hollow and empty inside.  I began coming to work at 4A.M. each day.  It was not so I could leave early, in fact my days stretched out longer and longer, but rather because I was too weary to contain myself in the mornings and it took me time to pull myself together.  My daily routine was to get up, be at work by 4A.M., and start my experiments while crying continuously for hours.  It is a weird image I suppose…me sitting at the tissue culture hood pipetting and weeping while trying not to contaminate anything, but that was my reality.  My face was a snotty, puffy mess (I was an ugly crier!), so when 8A.M. rolled around, I would force myself to stop crying so I would have an hour for my face to return to a relatively normal color before anyone else arrived at work.  I did not want anyone to witness those early morning tears.

I suspect people observed that I was quieter than before Jared’s death, but no one knew how deep the pain was, that I kept to myself.  I already struggled because I had no control over who knew about what happened to Jared.   The accident was reported on the news and the knowledge of Jared’s death spread throughout the scientific community.  There was no way to pretend it did not happen or determine who would ask me about it.  So, at the very least, I tried to control who would know how much I was hurting.  It felt like self-preservation in a way. 

Oddly enough, even though I knew the reality of what happened, whenever more details of the accident would emerge it would shock me every time.  Each piece of information was like another blow to my heart.  I knew that Jared had been killed and yet I imagined in my head that it was a death that did not mar him physically in any way.  It was too much to think about. 

As the bits and pieces of that night were reconstructed over time, the whys and what ifs began to build.

It was a Sunday night when Jared was killed.  He was leaving work after staying late to write a research grant.  Sometime after 10 P.M. he pulled his car out of the parking lot and was stopped at the red light located on the road just around the corner from the research institute.  The road had three lanes going one direction, another two to three going the opposite direction and no one was on the road.  It was quiet.  What other scenario would seem more innocuous?

That night a man who was a bartender by trade would be serving as the “designated driver” for a friend (obviously I use that term loosely).  He had left a work holiday party and had invited others over to continue the party at his house.  Despite that, he got into his car drunk, to drive his friend, who was apparently even more inebriated, somewhere.  He was driving over 100 MPH in a zone that was approximately 45 MPH.  The defense attorney would try to convince others that it was only 85 MPH, but was that really any better?  The driver was so inebriated that he was not able to stop or even to swerve into one of the many open lanes to avoid hitting the small VW Jetta that was sitting at a red light. 

He hit Jared’s VW so hard that both cars caught on fire and Jared’s car was pushed off the road.  The only consolation I took was when my friend, Nadia, who was an M.D. told me that the impact would have killed Jared instantaneously and he would not have suffered being burned to death.  A groundskeeper at a nearby university heard the crash and arrived at the accident sight.  He did not see Jared’s car because it was knocked off the road from the impact, but he saw the drunk driver’s car and was able to pull both the drunk driver and his passenger out of their burning car to safety.  Both drunk men survived with minor injuries, and yet Jared lost his life.  All the details I will not share, but I think there is enough for you to understand all they “whys” that would emerge. 

In my struggle to understand things it was as if I had hoped that if I could answer the “whys” I would somehow feel better.  Spoiler alert, there were no answers and as I focused in on the whys, they would only torment me.

Why did Jared have to be killed?  Why was the driver so drunk that he was unable to move just one little lane over and no one would have been hurt?  In fact, why would he fool himself into thinking he was able to drive in that condition at all?  Why did the driver have to leave a party at his own house to drive someone else somewhere?  Why did the light have to be red and why did Jared’s car have to be there?   

And then the partner of the “whys”, the “what ifs” appeared.  I began to believe that somehow, I could have changed the situation.  What if I had just called Jared that evening and delayed him just one minute?  Or what if my conversation with him that afternoon had been 5 minutes longer or 5 minutes shorter?  Then perhaps he would not have been hit and he would be alive.  What if we were not doing long distance?  The list goes on.

And then the big whys?  Why would God allow Jared to die?  Why would God not even give him have a chance at surviving?  Why was Jared killed and yet the person that killed him walked away with minor injuries?  Why would God allow bad things to happen to good people?  

How could I believe that God loved me when He allowed this to happen?  At the time, I answered that question myself and I had decided that it was not possible.

To make things worse, instead of seeing how God was providing for me during that time, I would envision how God was punishing me for things that made no sense.  I recalled watching a television show where someone was in court and thinking to myself, “I wonder how I would hold myself in court if someone hurt someone I love?”, and now there I was, in a situation where I was going to have to attend a sentencing hearing and stand up in court to face the person who had killed Jared.  Surely, this was God punishing me and taunting me for ever having that thought.  It felt like God was saying, “You wondered how you would hold yourself while standing in court?  Well, here is your opportunity to find out. Too bad you had that thought and made it come to fruition. It is your fault really for having that thought years ago.” XOXO God.

Okay, I realize how ridiculous that was, but at the time, you could not convince me otherwise.  I truly did not understand God’s nature.  I heard this statement at church, “our faithlessness does not change God’s faithfulness.”  It is true.  Thank God that He continued to stand in the gap of my faithlessness and never gave up on me even when I could not see Him clearly.