Stick to the Roadmap!

Disclaimer: these are personal thoughts and opinions, and while I invite commentary, this is not an open forum for debate on the finer points of theology. Please respect this, as I know you will.

...if only...

I had in my head the outlines of a wonderful article on why it's important to stick to the roadmap in life, and it was good. But my peace was quickly and utterly shattered and the point driven home in  a far more emphatic way than I ever could.

I had a phone conversation with a friend and inquired about another friend. He replied "he doesn't have a phone right now". Later in the conversation, when I asked if he could get ahold of him, the story came out.

This friend had dealt with addiction in the past. He went back to the bottle, unfortunately, and his wife left him. In an all too familiar story, he went to the home where she was staying, and killed the man she was with (not sure of their relationship; it's immaterial at this point), and seriously injured her.

But this wasn't some gothic tale of woe. This was a friend who I had had many meals with. I knew both him and his wife fairly well, and had several very good discussions with them.

It is an unfortunate reality that none of our discussions centered seriously around the person and work of Jesus Christ.

...if only...

In the wake of this news (which is a few months old, but first I heard of it), so little else matters. My problems are now trivial, and two people I truly loved will have to live with the physical and emotional scars of what happened. And a victim's family will forever have to live with the actions.

The media, the press, and the prosecutor will call him a monster, but I call him my friend. A friendship that will not end at the jailhouse door, and that cannot be quenched by his actions, no matter how detestable. And in all of this, I wonder.

I wonder if things might have been different had I "stuck to the path". Maybe if our discussions had centered around the reality and the love of Christ rather than politics and other things that now seem to matter in the big picture, something could have reached him, could have changed him and given him a hope that turned him somewhere other than the bottle.

I cannot possibly accept the guilt for what my friend did. It is his cross to bear and his alone, but I cannot help but wonder if, through my words and actions, I might have been able to make things different for three people whose paths were irreversibly altered on that night.

This will be hard, as there is much to deal with for him and his ex wife. And I don't know what the future holds for any of them, but I do know this: that his only hope and future now rests in the hands of a just and merciful God, and not in the hands of the state of Texas, which is notably short of compassion for such crimes. And I do know what the task ahead for me is.

...if only...