Sucker Punched Online
I was looking around to see if our family names were available as URLs (www.yournamehere.com) and I noticed that www.maegan.com was already taken. As I typed my daughter’s name into the browser, I was curious to see what kind of playful, digital vanity someone took the time to create and pay the required fees to have online for all the world to see. I was not expecting to have my heart sink to the depths that we try so hard to avoid on a daily basis.
We have just gotten the latest pictures back from a professional photographer that took some studio shots of us as a family and of Maegan to match the pictures we have of Camryn. I have one at my desk that I love because it’s compositionally beautiful and it also captures the hearts of my children as they play together. What a contrast of emotions pictures like these must bring up for this man?
I wonder how he is doing. I wonder how any of his Christian friends may have reacted. Did they surround him with love, tears, and compassion? Or did they try to explain something like this away saying, “Don’t worry, God is in control”? This is something I do not understand — I hope that God will never make me understand it. And as I write, I realize that God understands it and empathizes with it more than we think He does.
August 2nd, 2005 at 4:38 pm
And it just keeps coming.
Or you can just focus on what really matters.
August 2nd, 2005 at 7:26 pm
Heavy stuff. It’s the reality of this type of sadness that causes me to look past the mere fact that “God is in control,” which in and of itself is little comfort in the midst of such tragedy to the hope of the Christian… that Jesus is coming back to make things right again and recreate a world without the ravages of sin. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
August 2nd, 2005 at 8:14 pm
wow, that’s heart wrenching stuff. suicide is such a selfish act; and then add the taking of a young innocent little girl’s life to the act, it just makes me mad!
August 2nd, 2005 at 9:23 pm
you can mix pitt with africa hunger at one.org! Apparently they are going to solve world hunger tomorrow. *sarcasm*
August 3rd, 2005 at 9:53 am
Me? At this point I’m only talk. Maybe I think that if I expect “the other shoe to drop” then hopefully it never will. Here is a man that is living it now. No he’s not some anonymous blogger online but someone I met in highschool and met up with again later at Fellowship Bible Church.
Media (TV, Web, Radio) makes a good barrier for us to distance ourselves from tragedy but the stories they tell are real people, with real familes, and with real souls — and there is so much more that never makes the headlines.