“What do you mean? I don’t understand!” I stood in the Costco parking lot with my cell phone pressed to my ear, shaking my head as if that would clear the confusion away. Daniel had just called from Iraq and told me his roommate Tyler had been killed in action.
“No, no, no,” I kept repeating, “It just can’t be.”
But it was and at Daniel’s request, I drove to Atlanta, two hours from where I had been living in Birmingham with my sister, to take his condolences to Tyler’s family. I arrived just hours after they heard the news.
Will they be angry? I wondered as I rang the doorbell.
Tyler’s brother opened the door and graciously escorted me through the crowd of friends and family already filling the house and introduced me to his parents.
They took me into another room and gathered Tyler’s siblings and their spouses. Mrs. Brown just held my hands as I haltingly shared with them Daniel’s condolences and offered to try to answer their questions from my limited information.
“Was there anyone else?” They wanted to know.
“No, he was the only one killed that day,” I had to tell them. It was so difficult. It’s hard to know your loved one was singled out, yet you’re glad that no one else was killed.
Looking into Mrs. Brown’s tear-stained face, my eyes were opened to a terrifying possibility. I thought to myself, God allowed Tyler to go home, and this was a Christian man with great potential. He was a great leader. He had an opportunity to do something much grander and safer, and he chose to be with his soldiers and he lost his life. God doesn’t love Tyler’s parents any less than he loves me. So just because Daniel loves God and loves us, and I really, really, really want him to be my husband and Anna Grace’s daddy, I don’t have any guarantee that that is God’s plan. It sent the message to my heart that this was about God’s glory, not about us.
Lord, show me how to use my present circumstances to reflect your glory to those around me.
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.” (Romans 11:36)