A chill ran down my spine as I yelled through our house. It would be one of his last conversations with his only child--my mother--as he was calling to say he was having a heart attack that would, a week later, take his life.
My high school self thanked God a thousand times that I wasn't chatting on our only phone line (this was the late 1960's) and kept father-daughter from this critical conversation.
I was spared--in this instance--from a lifetime of wrestling with optional guilt.
Too often, however, circumstances turn out for the tragic.
A young man on an outing with his family is killed on his four-wheeler.
A brother commits suicide soon after his sister doesn't get to answer his call to her cellphone.
Replay begins.
What if they hadn't gone on the outing?
What if she had answered her phone?
The code name for optional guilt is what if?
Every mishap, every tragedy, every outcome that breaks our heart can be replayed to have a different ending.
Is there any way to stop the replay? Where is God when our string of events plays out for the worse?
One of history's greatest heartbreaks was Mary watching her son die a body-bludgeoning death on the cross. This was her baby, her firstborn son.
Besides being conceived in her virgin womb, he had probably been a mystery to her since he stayed back at the Temple at age 12, scaring his traveling parents to death, seemingly nonchalant that they were frantically searching for him.
Now, at the foot of the cross--his 33 years too brief on this earth--how could she not replay what if while watching his bloody body breathe its last?
Would her racing mind have gone something like this:
What if God hadn't asked this of me? My heart would not be breaking now.Why does God ask us to travel through heartbreak? What is our hedge against the optional guilt of replaying a "better ending?"
Tomorrow: the road through the heartache of "what is."
