May 17th 2006
2 a.m.
The ceiling faded to black as my mind clawed backward, through blood-soaked clothes and flashing lights, through the sound of gunshots and the silence that followed. The room around me was cold and too bright in places, dim in others. That strange hospital half-light that makes you feel both watched and forgotten.
My face felt wrong. The right side of my head and jaw had gone heavy with swelling, as if it belonged to someone else. Without my glasses, what little I could see was fuzzy and unrecognizable. Even the ceiling above me was only a blur.
And I was alone.
Cousin Mike slept somewhere nearby, but the distance between sleep and waking felt immeasurable. In that quiet room, something in me broke open.
I remembered a time before Dale Eagle became a threat. Before the restraining orders. Before the dread. A time when my parents still asked me to come help on the farm. When their voices filled our house. When I thought we had time.
I lay there unmoving. No tears at first. No shaking. Just silence and a single thought spinning like a loose gear:
How did it come to this?
The shooting replayed in my mind without warning, over and over, a broken film reel I could not shut off. Every sound, every movement, every moment my life ruptured and split into a before and an after. I tried to slow it down. Tried to rewind it far enough to stop it. Tried to make sense of something senseless.
My mind finally reached a point where it no longer wanted to deal with the natural. The facts were what they were, and the weight of them left me hollow. The morphine did almost nothing. My head throbbed, but I was too tired to call for a nurse.
I wanted my mom and dad. That was all. Just my mom and dad.
Tears slid down the side of my face, first the left, then the right. It was the only motion my battered awareness could track. And beneath everything else, one question kept rising, sharp enough to cut through the pain:
Why, God? Why?
We did everything right. We read our Bibles and prayed. We were in church every Sunday. We placed our faith, hope, and trust in God. That was enough for us.
So why were we not protected?
Why were my parents murdered?
Why was I lying here in this bed, swollen, one-eyed, broken, barely able to move?
My chest tightened. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw something. I wanted to tear the room apart. But my body would not move. My mouth would not open.
Verses came to mind the way reflexes do, uninvited and automatic.
For we know that for those who love God all things work together for good…
For I know the plans I have for you…
I can do all things through Christ…
I tried to push them away. They felt cheap and irrelevant to what had just happened. They gave no comfort at all. Instead, they felt like broken promises I had been handed years ago and told to trust.
My mind turned on me instead.
Me and Mom and Dad were a team. We should have gone out together. I should have seen the warning signs. I let them believe we were safe.
I hated myself for living when they did not. I did not want to be here. Later someone would tell me the term was survivor’s guilt, but in that moment it had no name. It was just accusation, heavy and relentless.
And the longer I sat in that thought, the more everything I believed began to tilt. I did not just question whether I was a Christian. I questioned if God existed at all.
Then my mind drifted again, not to comfort, but to scripture in a way I did not expect.
Out of nowhere, I thought of Job.
I would not have thought of Job on my own. That much I knew. It felt like something breaking in from outside of me.
Most people know the nursery version of Job. A good man who suffered, refused to curse God, and was eventually blessed. But that is not the lived story. What most do not realize is that Job gets the chance to ask God why he suffered, and God actually answers him.
But He does not answer the question Job asked.
God does not tell him why he suffered.
Instead, God makes a point.
In Job 38, God confronts him with His sovereignty.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?
Question after question follows. Questions with no human answer. Not to shame him, but to reorient him. To move him from argument into relationship.
I did not have anything memorized from Job. I had barely read it. But one passage surfaced, sharp and clear, as if something in me had been holding on to it for this exact night:
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
Those words felt aimed straight at me.
Gates of the deepest darkness.
I had stood close to them. Lying on the ground after the gunfire, hearing my own heartbeat roar in my ears, not knowing if the next second would be my last. I had been in the hallway outside death’s gate. God was saying He stood on both sides of it. That He governed what I feared most.
This did not feel like God silencing me or scolding me. It felt like God sitting beside me, confronting me in the way serious conversations do. Not as an accusation, but as a reckoning.
Job wanted explanation.
God gave him encounter.
Job wanted reasons.
God gave him presence.
And lying in that hospital bed, I understood in a way I never had before that God was not answering my questions with logic. He was answering them with Himself.
Do you know Me?
Do you trust Me where you cannot see?
Will you walk with Me when your world stops making sense?
God was not saying I could not question Him.
He was saying there were places I could not go alone. And I did not have to.
My anger loosened. My breath slowly deepened. The room did not get brighter, and nothing suddenly made sense. But something in me steadied.
I had seen the gates of darkness.
But I had not stood there alone.
There were still so many questions waiting for me in the years ahead. But that night one question mattered more than all the others.
After everything I had just seen and lived through, could I still honestly say that I believed God was real?
Quietly, without certainty, without confidence, without strength, I said yes.
That was when the real spiritual surgery began.
The events of the shooting replayed again in my mind, but this time something was different. A strange calm was woven through the images. Scripture came not as explanation, but as companion.
Joseph appeared in my thoughts, sold into slavery by his own brothers and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Years later, standing before the very men who betrayed him, he said, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”
Evil had been done to my parents. That much was undeniable.
But what good could possibly come from this?
Then another passage followed, the parable of the unforgiving debtor. A servant is forgiven an impossible debt, yet he refuses to forgive the much smaller debt owed to him by another. Because he will not forgive, he is delivered to judgment.
We are all sinners, each of us carrying a debt we could never satisfy. On the cross, Jesus Christ bore that debt. He bled and died as the perfect sacrifice, paying in full the penalty of sin. We deserve death. Christ offers life.
Measured against that eternal transaction, forgiving a murderer felt impossibly heavy and yet strangely small.
Part of me resisted. He did not deserve forgiveness. He hurt my mom and dad. I had every right to be angry. I had every right not to forgive.
And yet.
My debt had been forgiven.
Now I was being asked to forgive the debt Dale owed me.
It happened silently. No words out loud. No ceremony. No rush of feeling. Only a quiet, costly decision made in the dark of a hospital room.
That night, in that bed, I forgave my parents’ murderer.
There were no spiritual fireworks. No sudden victory. Only a steady, settled peace. The sense that the Creator of the universe had leaned close for a moment and let me know that somehow, some way, it was going to be okay.
Exhaustion finally overtook me, but not like before. My body had not been able to sleep earlier. Now my soul was giving it permission.
And with that peace, I closed my eyes and went to sleep.