Opinion: What I Saw On the Banks of the Jordan

I wrote this piece two weeks after the tragic loss of the Cruce family. Michael Cruce was the Youth Pastor at Rosebower Baptist Church and a major influence on my son's life and his answer to the call of ministry. I run it again today, on the one year anniversary of their accident, in tribute to them. Many thanks to West Kentucky Star for allowing me to depart from my usual topics and to share from my heart.

will see you on the other side of Jordan
I am laying down the cross I’ve carried here
Keep your hand in the hand of our Redeemer
And we will meet again I know up there

Last week my family and my church experienced tragedy that we could barely conceive when we lost our youth pastor Michael Cruce, his wife Monica, and their two teen sons Joshua and Caleb. I’ll not reiterate the details here as that certainly has been done enough, and perhaps too much, but because of the importance these people had in the lives my own family, the pain was nothing short of breathtaking. The experience has been unlike any other I have experienced in my fifty one years, it will remain for a very long time. It may never fully go away. Yet almost immediately there began to be a balm.

Miracles are not always a parting of the sea. Sometimes God performs more personal, intimate, miracles. Miracles began within an instant of the accident. I witnessed a little girl in foster care that the family had taken into their home over a year ago and who they had loved so dearly and sweetly, not traveling with them. The foster care service had to place her with another family during the Cruce’s vacation time. The center unknowingly placed her with close friends of Michael and Monica, friends the little girl had known and loved. She is with them still.

Having been asked to serve as media spokesman, I witnessed miracles when individuals in the media were so touched by the story that these professionals who cover tragedy daily, cried as we spoke. When I returned to work, there were conversations with a co-workers, more intimate and real than any that had occurred during our previous years of working together. There was the eye contact with a deputy who led the funeral procession in which he projected great compassion and sympathy. And there were the emails and heartfelt messages, thousands and thousands of them, from around the nation and around the world. And perhaps most significantly, at the funeral, I talked to so many people whose lives had been deeply touched, in some cases their whole lives changed for the better, by the Cruces. 

People die every day in this sometimes cruel world, so why did these four touch so many on such a deep level in both life and death? Others, celebrities perhaps, have received a higher number of expressions I suppose, but never have I witnessed such profound empathy from so many. Never have I heard and read accounts that seemed to emanate from deep in the heart.

One might guess that it was because they were nice people who did good deeds. One might suppose that it was because they genuinely cared about people. Both those statements would be true, but it was more than that. Or perhaps a connection was made because they were innocent victims. Yet tens of thousands of innocents die daily now in wars and conquests and still this loss of life doesn’t seem to connect strangers across space and time. The loss of this family did. How could the pain of this horrible tragedy be constantly interrupted by the beauty of love that this family gave or received? The answer is right before us. 

Suppose for a moment that what Michael, Monica, and the boys believed were true. Suppose that the primary ethic that they dedicated every waking hour to wasn’t just their opinion, or their way of making sense of it all, or their selection from a cornucopia of hundreds of supposedly equivalent belief systems? Instead what if what they believed was really, really, real? What if, rather than having simply chosen a path, The Cruces had instead reached a point where they grasped the ultimate reality of the universe as it exists? 

What if there really was a God, a benevolent, creator, God instead of the angry deity, ready to rain down punishment that some belief systems speak of. This God doesn’t cause car wrecks that kill, or diseases that ravage, instead, he had created a paradise for humans, his creatures, to thrive in. But something went horribly wrong and a contagion called sin entered the heart of created man in and rapidly degraded the paradise. What if, as Natalie Grant brilliantly wrote in her lyrics, the sacred had been torn away from us yet we had all survived. What if a vast chasm had be rent between we the creatures and the Holy Creator? Chesterton likened our time here on earth as Robinson Crusoe. We are forced to make do as best we can with the good things that were left behind from the ship, from the paradise. At the same time, a loving God made further provision by giving us a connection across the chasm so that, if we accept this provision, his son Jesus Christ, we can relate to him and communicate with him from where we are. If all that were the case we would be still be shipwrecked here, far from home, but we would have been given more than enough good provisions and given the opportunity to connect with God back home so that we might survive and in some things prosper.

If all that were true, then that might explain eighteen thousand social media messages from around the world. If we were all created by the same God and in His image, if we all sensed for those few days that we were shipwrecked here together, then the heartfelt connections that many of us experienced with strangers this past week make perfect sense. 

With all of that in mind, then the compassion from a deputy, the kinship with a reporter as tears streamed down our faces, the sympathies of a man in Norway, would be much more than just expressions of empathy. Instead they would be deep connections that all of us, the created, share. This passing reminded us of our morality but more than that it reminded us of a common past and a potential future. At the same time the beauty of these connections, and the balm they provided in the midst of great pain, were gifts that allowed us to have a peek back toward the home intended for us. They allowed us a glimmer of what paradise will be like.

C.S. Lewis wrote of these moments. I conclude with his words: 
In speaking of this desire for our own faroff
country, which we find in ourselves
even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am
almost committing an indecency. I am
trying to rip open the inconsolable secret
in each one of you—the secret which hurts
so much that you take your revenge on it
by calling it names like Nostalgia…
the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that
when, in very intimate conversation, the
mention of it becomes imminent, we grow
awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves;
Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty 
and behave as if that had settled the matter.

The moments of compassion in which we
thought the beauty was located will betray us if
we trust to them. The beauty was not in them it only
came through them. And what came through them was longing.
longing for the scent of a flower we have not yet found
for the echo of a tune we have not yet heard
longing for a country that we have not yet visited.

Chris Skates is a Paducah resident, columnist and novelist who won the best historical fiction award from the Christian Writers Association for his first novel entitled The Rain. His second novel Going Green was compared by one critic to Grisham and Clancy. Chris has worked and traveled in an Al Quieda dominated region and was greatly enlightened during a private meeting with the son of the founder of Hamas Mossab Hassan Yousef. Chris is available to speak and can be reached at chris@chrisskates.com.