It was with surprise that I picked up a copy of the March 28 issue of The Alabama Baptist and found reference to my wedding to Patricia Creel Hart on the front page of the paper. I had been told a picture of the wedding would be in the paper but had no idea how the event would be reported.
That the wedding was judged worthy of reporting at all is a testimony to the grace Alabama Baptists have extended to me these past years as I have walked the path of loss. Your love and support during those terrible months following the accident in Durban, South Africa, helped me believe I could still have a ministry.
During the following years you allowed me to share what God was teaching me amid the pain of my wife’s death.
Then you joined the celebration as God worked in dramatic fashion to bring Pat and me together. Since the announcement of our engagement in late November, the congratulatory e-mails, cards and personal expressions have been overwhelming.
On March 22, it was humbling to look into the congregation and see 600–700 people assembled to worship God with us in the celebration of our marriage vows.
The experience has taught me much about the love and faithfulness of Alabama Baptists. It has also taught me much about the love and faithfulness of God.
In those days immediately following Eleanor’s death, as I was recuperating at home from my surgeries, a pastor friend attempted to comfort me by quoting Romans 8:28. The New International Version reads, “And we know that in all things God works for good to those who love God, who have been called according to His purpose.”
The pastor friend said God caused Eleanor’s death because God had something better for me. His words infuriated me. His conclusion that God caused the terrible accident that claimed my wife’s life failed to take seriously the role of sin in the world, the role of evil in the accident.
Under the belief in the sovereignty of God, it is tempting to blame God for everything that happens in our world and in our lives. Then mankind is not responsible. God is. But man is responsible for his choices. God made him so. Man is free to choose a relationship with God or to spurn Him. Man is free to walk lovingly and obediently before God or to live in rebellion. Man is free to love his neighbor or to hate him.
My pastor friend’s description of God as the source of all that takes place would make God a kind of Being to be avoided, not One to be loved with heart and soul, with mind and strength. Yes, God is sovereign but there is a difference between the perfect will of God and the permissive will of God. Just because God allows something like a deadly accident to occur does not mean He is the source of it.
The words infuriated me, too, because they reduced the value of my wife. The words made her a commodity to be replaced rather than a deeply fulfilling love that gave meaning to life. This pastor friend had never suffered loss. He did not understand. He was talking out of head knowledge, not heart knowledge.
In the nearly four years since that conversation, the promises of God found in Romans 8:28 have become increasingly precious to me as I have come to understand them with my heart. That is why I can attest to their truth with my head and my heart and point to personal experience as demonstration of their validity.
God did not cause the shattering experience of Durban. Evil did that. Evil created chaos that claimed Eleanor’s life and threatened to pull me into a chaos from which I could not escape.
But God is faithful. God would not allow the chaos of evil to triumph. When evil claimed Eleanor’s physical life, God was there to rescue her from death’s icy grasp. God welcomed her into the everlasting life which was hers from the moment she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Savior.
When chaos swirled around me, God was present through His people and through special people He brought into my life. God’s love would not let me go. He worked amid my personal chaos to create order just as He did in the beginning of time. God took the shattered pieces and began restoring wholeness.
In the fullness of His time, God brought Pat Hart into my life. Through her, love and life and joy returned. Pat is not a replacement. She is never to be compared to Eleanor. Pat is a gift of God to be loved and cherished for herself. She is a part of the new wholeness God has restored and I am grateful.
Romans 8:28 never promised that I would love again or be loved again by another human being. It did promise something more important. It promised that I would always be loved by God. It did promise that God would never abandon me to the chaos of evil. It did promise that I would know wholeness with or without another spouse.
Romans 8:28 did promise that God would work in my personal chaos to bring order, to bring about something good. That is God’s promise for all of His children.
That is God’s promise to you. God does not create the chaos that so often engulfs us. But, if we allow Him, God does come into our chaos to create order, to bring about something good. That is why we know “that in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him.”
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