Given for You
Bob Wickizer
Isaiah 50:4-9
Many of us remember our first childhood best friend. For me it was my neighbor on the other side of this enormously tall five-foot-high board fence. Paul and I were about five when his family moved in next door. We played endlessly in the neighborhood including eating grapes in the shadow of the grapevines of a vineyard nearby. Then his three-year-old sister became very sick and eventually died of leukemia. Children don't really understand death but they certainly experience loss. I don't know if I formed the question then or whether it was a question later in life that we all ask. Why?
Then there was the small car with five high school friends after football practice on a beautiful fall day. They ran into the back of an illegally parked construction truck. They all died within two minutes. Like the images that haunt our veterans from the battlefields, there are some images you never forget. The question on the minds of a thousand students and their families that week was the same one we ask in any senseless, seemingly random tragedy. Why?
There were more deaths of friends and family from accidents and disease and old age. We all attend our share of funerals before we're 21. When I was in grad school ''doing physics'' as they call it, the driver from my high school rock band died of alcohol related disease; one of the musicians became a lifelong psychiatric case from an overdose; another one committed suicide. Life had been hard in college and beyond. By the time we had small children in California, an old high school friend back in Missouri went out to get the paper one morning, slipped on the ice, broke his neck and died. I had seen plenty of death before 40 but the same question kept popping up without any answers. Why?
So in seminary we had two years of theology classes. Somewhere I developed a spreadsheet about Christ's death. I marched through all the classic theological arguments with each one taking a ...
Bob Wickizer
Isaiah 50:4-9
Many of us remember our first childhood best friend. For me it was my neighbor on the other side of this enormously tall five-foot-high board fence. Paul and I were about five when his family moved in next door. We played endlessly in the neighborhood including eating grapes in the shadow of the grapevines of a vineyard nearby. Then his three-year-old sister became very sick and eventually died of leukemia. Children don't really understand death but they certainly experience loss. I don't know if I formed the question then or whether it was a question later in life that we all ask. Why?
Then there was the small car with five high school friends after football practice on a beautiful fall day. They ran into the back of an illegally parked construction truck. They all died within two minutes. Like the images that haunt our veterans from the battlefields, there are some images you never forget. The question on the minds of a thousand students and their families that week was the same one we ask in any senseless, seemingly random tragedy. Why?
There were more deaths of friends and family from accidents and disease and old age. We all attend our share of funerals before we're 21. When I was in grad school ''doing physics'' as they call it, the driver from my high school rock band died of alcohol related disease; one of the musicians became a lifelong psychiatric case from an overdose; another one committed suicide. Life had been hard in college and beyond. By the time we had small children in California, an old high school friend back in Missouri went out to get the paper one morning, slipped on the ice, broke his neck and died. I had seen plenty of death before 40 but the same question kept popping up without any answers. Why?
So in seminary we had two years of theology classes. Somewhere I developed a spreadsheet about Christ's death. I marched through all the classic theological arguments with each one taking a ...
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