Store Up Today for Tomorrow’s Crisis
By Trevin Wax, TGC.
In 2008, tragedy struck the family of Christian singer-songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman when one of his teenage sons arrived home, turned the corner of the driveway, and didn’t see his 5-year-old sister Maria Sue, who had darted directly into the path of his SUV.
Chapman saw the accident take place from the front porch, but he doesn’t remember much about the immediate aftermath. “I do remember running around to the back of the house and finding my wife, of course, just in hysterics,” he said. “It was a lot of blood.”
Chapman also doesn’t remember something that others witnessed in that horrible moment. As he was leaving the scene to go to the hospital (where little Maria would be pronounced dead on arrival), he looked over and saw his son crumpled up in a ball on the ground, his older brother on top of him, holding him and praying for him. At that moment, Steven told the driver to stop. He rolled down the window and called out, “Will Franklin, your father loves you.”
That scene chokes me up every time I imagine it. To think of a father, in the throes of shock and grief, in that terrible fog of horror and chaos, instinctively assuring his son of unconditional love instead of casting blame or bowing to bitterness—the moment says something about the character of a man. Out of the overflow of a heart smitten by hardship comes a word of consolation.
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