Provocations

By pbobby

The phone rang at 5:30 AM. It was my daughter-in-law Zaida calling from Corpus Christi, Texas. This alone was foreboding since it was always my son, Ray, who would call from Corpus.

"Ray has been missing since yesterday morning," she frantically blurted. This alone was not alarming, as I knew that the two of them were in the throes of a contentious divorce.

Ray and I had been hunting and fishing buddies since his early childhood, and golfing buddies for about seven years. We talked on the phone frequently every month and met at his place or mine in Cleburne three or four times each year for marathon golfing then fishing, then more golfing and fishing for up to a week at a time.

It is not with great pride that I tell you we consumed way too much beer on all those occasions. We laughed, caught oodles of 'specks' and red fish while netting ice chests full of large shrimp at night and played up to 56 holes of golf a day. Parting after our binges was always tearful. We truly loved each other and raucously celebrated life when we were together.

Four hours after that ominous call, my spirit was sorely bludgeoned with news that his body had been found in his pickup with the front and top of his head literally blown away. "Oh God!" erupted from my gut up through my choked vocal chords and throughout the whole of my house. I stood there trembling with the phone clunking to the floor as my senses fled me, leaving my soul in a severely concussed state of being.

This horror happened over fourteen years ago but is now vividly with me again as I write. The coroner ruled Ray's death a suicide. Two Texas Ranger investigations were conducted resulting in neither a conclusion of murder or suicide.

Guilt was my first returning emotion. Why had I only called all his other friends in Corpus for over six weeks to find and talk with him? Why had I not gone south to find him since he had not called? Where was I when he needed me most? I had just been working, and worrying why he had not called since he left home to avoid the tumultuous warring with Zaida.

So the "could of's" and "should of's" came first in the slow return of my senses to reality. The others would come later as the shock wore away leaving my ravished soul to cry, "Oh God! Where are You?"

Receiving no answer, I felt as though a cold wind was whistling through a jagged hole in my heart with the realization that I had not talked with God in quite some time. "Who am I to think that She should be just waiting by my side to see if I would speak to Her or snub Her presence once again?"

I now have come to believe that all that self-talk had nothing to do with why I could not feel God's presence when I needed Him. It's much more complex than our mortal minds can comprehend; but here is my best shot at how I think it is.

We often feel that it is time to find God for relief from our loneliness; for help with our pain and for guidance out of our confusion. Finding God in Her Timelessness when we feel that we need God now, at this very moment, in our Timed Existence is not within our control. God comes to us out of Her Eternity into our Mortality and graces us with Her presence and other gifts. When such occurs, we cannot understand; we can only be grateful for the transcendence.

We and God are of different realms; We of the Mortal, He of the Eternal. Only through grace are we blessed when He vaults the chasm that divides us, usually in our darkest moments. He can come to us and the sparrow. We cannot go to Him until death, when we enter God's realm of the Eternal.

I think it behooves us to keep our spiritual antenna finely tuned while we go about our be-ing with thanksgiving in our hearts always.