Death has a way of waking you out of a slumber. It jolts you out of a nestled feeling, of that cozy place where your head is formed to the pillow beneath. You go to sleep with a safe, comfortable warmth, thinking all is well, but when you awake you realize the nightmare just began, At least that has been my experience.
In May I found out that while I had concluded a routine day of work, my friend and co-worker’s life had been brutally ended some 18 hours earlier in a domestic murder. Those 18 hours haunt me. They make me feel helpless, as if in a black hole where I cannot take back the emptiness. Her death came and went without my knowledge, and I could not undo the events, nor turn back the clock and prevent it.
One thing in particular brings a conflict to my soul. Knowing that as the daybreak was upon her my friend’s world became night, and as I was sleeping comfortably in my bed, her bed was the cold floor of her garage.
It was God who stayed up nights with me as I struggled with that reality. Over and over my mind retraced those 18 hours, and specifically the fact that no neighbors responded to her cries for help; she died alone knowing no one would come to her aid. I mourned her last moments, and my mind raced along in a movement going nowhere.
Then slowly my mind drifted to the God who never sleeps. I became more acutely aware of His presence and help. He, I knew, had heard her cries and attended to her soul. He, too, knew personal betrayal and indifference when His own life was ending.
I cannot undo this loss, but I can and do cherish the fact that God is the answer to calls uttered in the night. Nor do I know why some people are saved and others aren’t, but I have read too many accounts of people who were upheld by God in near-death experiences not to believe that He isn’t with us in our last moments. And that knowledge helps me cope.
God who never sleeps, please draw us into Your loving arms and hold us tight.