Live for the Truth

We didn’t have a sunrise service at church this morning, so I woke up with the resurrection on my mind. As the sun broke I wondered what it would have been like to actually be there that morning. I’ve heard a hundred different interpretations of the events of that morning. Fact is, we can’t know exactly how things went down on the most significant morning in history. We all have a vision in our minds of how everything must have looked. But our visions have been influenced by movies and other people’s interpretation of the scriptures. I would just like to see exactly what it was like that morning, when Jesus rose from the dead. I want to see the angels. I want to see Mary when she arrived at the tomb. I want to see how the burial cloth looked lying there empty. I want to see John outrun everyone one the way back to the tomb. I want to see Peter rush in first. (Who’d have thought Peter would be the first?) I want to see the guards waking up to realize that Jesus was gone. I want to see what Jesus looked like, and understand why Mary didn’t recognize him. Do you think we’ll ever get to see these things? Will it be revealed to us in Heaven? I wonder if there will be something like a movie theater where we’ll be able to sit down and watch the events of the morning that Christ rose from the dead? I wonder.

Recently a fellow blogger wrote about how cruel school children could be. Reading this reminded me of when I was a teenager in high school. At the time I didn’t realize just how much you could affect someone by your actions towards them. But I learned a lesson that I will always be able to use to teach my children the pain that you cause when you are cruel to other kids.

When I was a senior in high school I was chosen to be one of the guys who would help build our school’s bonfire and stand guard the night before the homecoming pep rally, guarding it from rival schools. The bonfire had to be guarded because it was the ‘in thing’ to ignite the other school’s bonfire in the middle of the night, so they would have to cancel the homecoming festivities. Anyway, there were about ten to twelve of us chosen that particular year. Everyone chosen was part of our ‘inner circle’ of friends, except one kid, Henry. I really don’t know why Henry was chosen, unless someone thought that we might actually do the ‘right thing’ and recognize that Henry was a kid in need of friendship, and accept him into our ‘gang’.
What could they have been thinking? Henry obviously came from a very poor family. He wore old ratty shirts with holes in them. All of his blue jeans came above his ankles. We used to ask him if he was expecting a flood.
We got out of school the whole day prior to the bonfire. Several semi-trucks came and dumped big piles of wooden pallets on the ground. Our job was to stack these pallets into a small mountain for the bonfire. (approx. 30ft high) During the day we began working hard, ignoring Henry except when we needed him to help us. Henry would jump right in, eager to be one of the guys. That afternoon, after school had let out, we sent one of our guys to go buy some beer, like everyone would have expected us to do. We began drinking and ‘partying’ in a friends van. Henry didn’t drink or ‘party’, not that we asked him to, so we made him continue to work on the bonfire. Every time he would stop working we would tell him that he was going to have to go home if he didn’t get back to work. That night after the sun went down, word got out about the party and things got pretty wild. Henry had never been to any of our parties, so he must have really been feeling out of place. So we tried to make him feel welcome. One of the guys, one who you would expect to do such a thing, started to pick on Henry in front of everyone. He kept on until even Henry felt the need to stand up for himself. When he did, the guy promptly put Henry in his place by punching him in the nose. Henry hit the ground, got up, and ran off crying. We don’t really know where Henry went, my guess is that he ran all the way home. The following night the bonfire went off perfect, thanks to our dedication and school spirit. The rest of the weekend came and went.
On Monday morning we received word that Henry had committed suicide over the weekend. He used his belt to hang himself from the ceiling fan in his room. Wouldn’t you think that we all would have fallen to our knees with feelings of guilt and shame? You would have, but that’s not how it happened. We had no idea that we had done anything wrong. Henry was a weird kid, he was probably having problems at home, and that’s what led him to do such a thing. I remember jokes about Henry being so skinny that a ceiling fan would hold him up.
The whole school attended Henry’s funeral a couple of days later. I remember standing in front of Henry’s casket, when one of my friends replied that his neck didn’t look any longer. Of course I found this inappropriate, but obviously not too much so since I remember laughing about it later.
It never really sunk in until a few years later. I’m not one to believe in ghosts. In fact, I still don’t to this day. But late one school night, while we were cruising around town ‘partying’, we passed a hitchhiker on the side of the road. When we passed the hitchhiker I thought to myself, “That looked just like Henry.” I wasn’t going to say anything, and didn’t have to. One of my friends yelled out “Holy shit, that dude looked like that guy that hung himself.” Then another guy in the car, along with myself, agreed with him. We did a 180 in the middle of the road to go back and take a second look. We were never able to find the hitchhiker again. We looped around a couple of times, looked in the ditch with the headlights, but no hitchhiker. We were pretty freaked out about the whole event. We told the rest of the guys about what we had seen, then went on about our ways. I can’t explain, unless it was someone who just happened to look like Henry, got scared when they saw us turn around, and ran and hid in the field next to the road. I’m going to guess that is what happened. But Henry has haunted me, in the true sense of the word, every since.
I pray that Henry will forgive me someday. Any one of us who was picking on Henry should have died, not Henry. How could we have been so cruel? We didn’t see ourselves as bad kids, but obviously we were.
I’ve used this story, without some of the details, to demonstrate to kids just how your actions can affect others.

Father, please forgive me.


Note: I just spoke to a friend who asked me if this story were true. He said it sounded like one of those snopes.com stories. You won't find this on snopes, because it isn't fiction. Sad, but true, everything I wrote actually happened.