When our Truth Falls to Pieces

By pbobby

My God died in July of 1960. He was feeling a bit under the weather early in 1959 when Danny Martin was smashed by a speeding automobile in front of his home.

Danny, his mother, Bessie, and father, Bob, lived only four miles from the parsonage in a small Illinois township with a population of approximately 1200. Bessie Martin was a recent convert from Catholicism, and was an enthusiastic and very active member of our church.

I received Bessie’s frantic call right after the accident.

"Brother Bob help me! Danny’s been run over by a car!"

I felt a red hot poker searing and piercing deep into my heart, and an adrenaline surge throbbing through my body.

"I’m on the way!"

I raced to the Martin home on a country road to find Bessie sitting on its shoulder, cradling Danny’s bloody, shapeless body in her arms and screaming, "Danny, Danny, my Danny!"

I helped Bessie to her feet and into my ‘59 Chevrolet Kingswood nine-passenger station wagon. The dangerous race to the Western Kentucky Baptist Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, took us over the narrowest three-mile bridge that crosses the Ohio River. As I drove furiously to the hospital, I could hear her in the back seat repeating wishfully, "Danny, we will be at the hospital quickly, and you will be all right, Baby."

She could not believe that he was as dead as one can get. Her grief that followed was excruciating for almost a year. Slowly she was getting it together.

However, God’s condition continued to worsen as my loving Christian parishioners had determined, indubitably, the reason this precious little four-year-old, had been killed. It was so obvious! His father had refused to make a profession of faith and join the church with Bessie, so God was bringing him to his knees.

I was infuriated as words to this nature filtered into me from those who loved and supported Barbara and Bob during this dreadful time. I was to learn that far too many sanctimonious members of this ‘loving body of sanctified believers’ were fueling the fires of vicious condemnation of Bob.

They did not know the source of Bob’s disdain for churches in general. His Father had been a Baptist preacher who had deserted him and his mother to run off and marry the church secretary when Bob was in elementary school. Bob and no one in the congregation knew that Bessie had shared this information with me when I asked her if she thought I should approach Bob about joining our church.

Bob couldn’t talk about Danny’s death when I visited, so I just helped him stack hay and save newborn piglets from Bob’s sow that raced around the pen in a pained panic while dropping a total of eleven babies. Getting in, grabbing a piglet and getting out uninjured, was an athletic challenge; but we did save all of them and ourselves from injury. Bob and I had become real friends. We could talk about any and everything except Danny’s death. That, I respected, and allowed him do his grief work in his own private way.

Some months later, Bob would suffer a life threatening injury as he was bush-hogging his pasture. While traversing a gully, the PTO coupling snapped, and the spinning rotor speared him in the rectum, practically disemboweling him.

Again I received a panicked call from Bessie. This time she said, "Bob’s bad hurt out in the pasture. Help me!" I was there before he could make it to the house. I drove out to him as he was stumbling toward the house holding his intestines in his hands, and helped him into my wagon. I was haunted by the previous race to the hospital as I drove Bob and Bessie to the hospital. Bob got the medical attention necessary to save his life. We were to grow closer together as he slowly made a full recovery.

So the congregational tongues began to waggle even more after Bob’s accident, saying, "So what’s it going to take for Bob Martin to realize that he had better get right with God?" My heart was literally being torn apart. My mind and spirit were crying to God to explain all this to me. My parents had taught me that God had all power, knew everything and loved us all. The emotional ferment within my soul brought me to tears and sheer confusion more than once.

"God, if you love us, why are you letting all this tragedy fall upon one family, and why are you letting the people who call themselves Christians be so verbally vicious? What can I possibly say to them that will bring about a change in their hearts? How can I help them learn how to love rather than condemn? God, I have been serving You and Your people as a minister for over six years now; and I just don’t know what to think or do. Please help me!"

God was silent, totally silent.

Maybe God ain’t what He’s cracked up to be, swirled in my head with great fear and trembling for weeks on end.

When I confided my fears, confusion and doubt with a Baptist Minister, many years my senior, he responded piously, "Bob, God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform."

That was all I could take as I exclaimed, "That’s bullshit!" and left his study having moved from confusion to unadulterated anger.

Back at home, the phone rang. It was my wife, Sarah, calling from Texas, where she and my six children were visiting her mother, on whom she was emotionally dependent for her identity. I asked how everyone was doing. My question went unanswered as she told me in no uncertain terms, that she and the kids were never returning to Illinois. I was stunned, to say the least as Sarah said, “If you ever want to see your children again, you will have to do so in Texas.”

My next few days were spent in deeply painful rumination. I seriously considered a divorce, because Sarah, in my mind, had deserted me and stolen my precious children from me. They were so special and such a delight to me; I could not even imagine any meaning in my life without them. Ultimately, It came clear that, for now, the only thing to do was to go to my children.

Compounding my predicament was the knowledge that no Baptist church would ever accept a divorced man as its pastor. With great agony, I decided to leave the ministry and make a living in whatever way was yet to be found. It was really scary since I had been a minister all my adult life. Some of the pain was alleviated as I remembered how tired I was of the mean-spirited attitudes of so many in my congregation.

I tendered my resignation, rented a U-Haul trailer, and contracted with an auctioneer to sell what I could not load into it and headed for Texas. However, before I left I did find time to prepare my last sermon for those I thought needed it, and poured it on them all--even the loving souls who had supported Bessie since day one of the triggering accident. In my anger, I became as mean-spirited as the members whose attitudes I detested.

The sermon was entitled, If this is your God, You can have Him. So it was in the angst of that moment, My God died.

Author’s Note, September 1999:
Names have been changed to protect the families from this true story.
Additionally, I must assure you that my God who died in this recounting, was really the God my parents had ‘given’ me, limited and limiting ...and the God now authoring my life, is much healthier, indeed in fine condition, encouraging mine and other’s growth and Faith.