Reporting on an Unusual Week

I wrote a teaser on June 6. Thought by the weekend, surely, I'd have a new post up. Little did I know what kind of week I was about to enter.

The following piece of news from our little community actually went world wide:

On Friday, June 8, as children showed up for the last night of vacation Bible school (VBS), they began to play in the church cemetery. Like many small, country churches, the cemetery is located near to the church building with no fences or boundary markers of any kind. Anyone at any time can simply stroll through the monuments. A freak accident occurred and a twelve hundred pound, stone cross broke off the top of its monument and fell upon one four-year-old little girl. She didn't survive the trauma.

This child was the second child of one of my former students. The former student is from a family my wife and I have been friends with for over thirty years. In fact, the precious child who died so suddenly came to Christmas dinner at our house as a swaddled infant when our two families gathered to share a holiday meal--a tradition we had kept for one and half decades.

This event wrenched our hearts and commanded our thoughts and prayers for many days.

The day after the funeral, we received a call that my wife's mom had been admitted to a local hospital for emergency angioplasty. This was her second such operation in a little over a year. We packed and left for Clayton on Wednesday. I am happy to report my mother-in-law is doing well and getting better. The operation turned out to be needed to fix the first stent.

Friday, as we worked around Mom's and Dad's house for a few days, we heard the news from our hometown that a sixteen-year-old boy had been killed in an auto accident Thursday night. Once he had been identified, I learned he and the boy driving the truck were both former students of mine. Their faces were easy to connect to their names in my mind's eye.

I have been thinking much about death this week. Not morbidly or even sadly, though two of the events mentioned here are horribly sad for the families involved. I just find myself thinking it over.