Free What Difference Do It Make? by Ron Hall Page B

that I love you.” Those were the people who climbed down with me into the pit of my grief and stayed with me. But the grief pit is a pretty nasty, slimy place, and most people don’t want to get down in it.
    To keep them from having to, I withdrew from everyone, even my friends. I just wanted to disappear. And at times, it seemed I was disappearing—literally. Inside of three weeks, I lost twenty-five pounds. The bones of my face cut sharp angles. My clothes flapped on my frame, an empty husk where a man used to be.
    I didn’t want anyone to see me, even if I had a decent day. I felt that if I looked happy, someone would mistake that for meaning I was doing well. I did not want to do well. I wanted my time in sackcloth and ashes and did not want to be robbed of it. I would go to the grocery store at two in the morning just so I wouldn’t have to see anyone.
    Psychologists like to talk about the stages of grief: anger, bargaining, denial, depression, acceptance. For a long time after Deborah died, I stayed stuck in anger like a tractor stuck in the mud on a Texas blackland farm after a pouring rain. To call it anger seems too mild. You can be angry over a broken dish or a lost football game. This was profound rage, and it had one primary target:
    As I fired arrows of blame—at the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, cancer researchers—clearly the bull’s-eye was God. It was He who had ripped a gaping and irreparable hole in my heart. Without a gun or mask, He robbed me of my wife and stole my children’s mother and my grandchildren’s grandmother. I had trusted Him, and He had failed me.
    I was afraid to be real about that. I knew most of my Christian friends would not understand my anger. They all wanted me to take a different path than I took, to praise God for His divine plan, to resign myself to His will.
    Instead, I sat in my room alone, screaming at Him, “If that’s what You do to the people who love You most, I don’t want to love You!”
    Sometimes I wished one of my Christian friends would just be real with me. That one of them would say something like, “Can you believe what God did? It doesn’t seem fair!”
    It might have comforted me if they’d said that. Since Deborah’s death, I try never to mute another person’s grief with some kind of verbal anesthetic. Instead, I try to just cry with them and sometimes even to simply say, “Yeah, that stinks.”
    But even as I wished someone would be that real with me in my grief, a truth nagged at the back of my mind. It percolated way down in the blue pool of my soul, where there lay a small inlet somehow unfouled by rage: God did the same thing to His own son—ordained for him an excruciatingly painful death.
    And Jesus said, “No servant is better than his Master.”
    If anyone I had ever known was a servant of God, it was my wife. She did not want to die, but she did want to serve God. And she had, serving Him—through serving the homeless—right up until the moment when her body would no longer allow it.
    Shortly after Deborah died, her best friend, Mary Ellen, shared with me that verse from the gospel of John that I mentioned ear-lier: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
    Within weeks of Deborah’s death, more than half a million dollars had poured into the Union Gospel Mission—money designated to build a chapel and state-of-the-art facility that would help homeless men, women, and children in Deborah’s name. By 2009, Deborah’s story had raised more than thirty million dollars for homeless shelters around America.
    Do I wish God could’ve managed to help the homeless without taking my wife?
    Absolutely.
    Do I believe Deborah, if she could now see the fruit, would want to come back?
    Absolutely not.
    The pain of losing her still