by Victoria -

Unconditional

This short post is based on a true story, and I’m pretty sure there are many very similar and tragic stories like this one.  Hold those you love closely, you never know, as someone has said, when God will want them back.

The phone call was still circling around in her mind like an endless roller coaster ride, when the baby was placed in her arms. Those awful words that had drawn a scream from her throat.

“You’re her grandparent, you can take her, right?

Jennifer looked down into the beautiful blue eyes of her young granddaughter and saw her dead child’s face gazing back at her. Fresh sobs shook her, and she had to quickly sit down before she collapsed to the floor, clutching little Ashley tightly to her chest, crying into her golden curls, rocking back and forth, in a futile attempt to comfort them both.

Jennifer and her husband were recently retired, planning on building a second home on their newly acquired land in Tennessee. It was twenty acres of serene, picturesque relaxation. They had sacrificed and saved up for this property where they would spend their golden years enjoying the lush green of the woods and rolling hills, reveling in each sunrise and sunset in their own little paradise.

No more. Jennifer went back to work and Gary stayed with Ashley. They enrolled her in preschool, fixed up a bedroom fit for a princess, and set about being parents of a toddler once again. There was little time to mourn their daughter’s tragically sudden death. The black hole in their lives was, at times, overwhelming. They wanted their daughter back. They wanted an answer to the question – why?

But God appeared silent and oblivious to their pain. Jennifer and Gary somehow got through each day, pouring their love into their precious granddaughter, exhausted with the responsibility of raising a toddler, and dealing with the grief of losing their child. Feelings of love and anger and loss mingled together to form a patchwork of suffering.

Several years went by filled with the day-to-day tasks of parenting a young child. There was laughter and tears, and lots of learning for everyone. Their love for Ashley grew in intensity as each day passed, as their grief over losing her mother softened just a bit, the knife edge of emptiness dulling over time, but never fully leaving, as any parent who has buried a child knows. And they began to see the daily graces God showered on them as they opened their eyes to His love.

“Mom and Dad,” said their oldest daughter, Amanda, one day, “would you consider letting me and David adopt Ashley? She would have two sisters, then, to grow up with. I think it would be good for her, and David and I are financially able to raise her.”

So now, Jennifer and Gary’s home is quiet again. No golden-haired toddler making messes and wreaking havoc. No bedtime stories and snuggles and fights over what she would wear. Their daughter is still gone, and now their granddaughter lives many miles away. Jennifer could retire again, and they could finally move to their paradise. But it doesn’t feel like fun anymore. Instead of one black hole of grief, now they have two.

Love makes us vulnerable and when we love deeply, as God tells us we must, we get hurt. But love also compels us to do what is best, even when it goes contrary to what we might selfishly desire.

Love holds tightly when it’s necessary, and releases when the timing is right.

But love, like Jennifer’s and Gary’s for their dead daughter and absent granddaughter, doesn’t fade over time. It remains, and God uses our memories of good times to bring us comfort, and the love of friends to keep us from feeling alone.

by Victoria -

Just a murderer

This post is written by my son.  Yes, he is in prison.  It doesn’t matter that he shouldn’t be there, because God has a reason.  I love how he has learned to see these men as human beings and not monsters.

By Jeremiah P. Cahours

I met a young man tonight serving the last seven months of a lengthy prison sentence. As is usual, this man’s story is quite different from what it looks like on paper. Through court and public records, you would see him as a menace to society, a murderer at a young age, and most likely deserving of what he got. And maybe you’d be right, but you’d also be uninformed and lacking in the complete story. What motivates some people to acts of heinous or extreme violence? Why do we, as a society, pass such easy judgment while not truly knowing or understanding what really happened and what motivated the acts that inexorably ended a life and destroyed many more?

The tragedy begins well before the trigger is ever pulled.

Chase was sentenced to 34 years in the Department of Corrections as a juvenile for first degree murder. This is his true story. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Chase grew up poor in a town somewhere in central Florida. Before getting into trouble, he lived in the projects with his mom and little sister and was generally a good kid. He and his best friend, Don, grew up together, eventually playing on the same high school football team. Chase related a lot to Don because he also came from a single-parent household and had a little sister. Don and his little sister, Tanya, were raised by their mom, a dope addict and a junkie. When Chase and Don were both 16, Don’s mom got in a little too deep with her dope dealer and couldn’t make good on the $2,000 she owed him.

On a tragic, balmy fall afternoon, Chase and Don were in Don’s living room, sitting on the stained, sagging couch, playing video games when 9-year-old Tanya came stumbling in the front door, screaming and crying. Her face was streaked with pain and dirt, and the front of her little outfit was covered in blood. It took a while to calm her down enough for an explanation. The dope dealer, in a senseless act of vengeance, had extracted his payment by raping an innocent 9-year-old little girl. Anguish and rage do not begin to describe what Tanya’s big brother, Don, and his best friend, Chase, felt. How is one supposed to feel, knowing that, because of the lack of a father, and the emotional and physical absenteeism of a mother, they have been tasked with the care and upbringing of a little sister. Her safety was his responsibility, and he’d failed!

Unsure what to do, Chase and Don decided to go right to the source of the problem and contact the dope dealer directly. When they got him on the phone, he told them to tell Don’s mom not to worry about the money he was owed. “We’re even”, he said.

The genesis of a bad idea is often so tragically convoluted.

“So, we’re all good?” they asked.

“Yeah, that’s squashed,” came the reply.

“So, you straight?”

“Just reupped, man.”

“We comin’ by to get a rock. Cool?”

“Sure thing, bro.”

Don’s mom had a little .25 handgun, so they grabbed it and Chase took his mom’s chrome .357 Magnum and stuffed it in his waistband. On the way to the dealer’s they decided that, since he had a bunch of dope and money, they were going rob him.

Flash to the scene in the dope dealer’s living room where Don is standing across the coffee table from him, and Chase is standing to the side of the couch. The box the dealer uses to hold his product is on the coffee table in front of them. Don has his mom’s gun out, pointed at the dealer’s head. He’s snarling and spitting hatred and revenge.

In Chase’s own words:

“I was yelling at him (Don) to just shoot him, ’cause I knew that he (dope dealer) had a piece in his box, but he (Don) just kept yelling and shoving his gun in his face. He (dealer) wasn’t really paying
attention to me ’cause he didn’t know I was packing a cannon. He started to lift the lid of the box, and as soon as I saw the shine of the chrome…”

Chase quickly drew the .357 and shot the dope dealer once in the head and once in the neck, killing him and irrevocably changing his own life in an instant.

Violence begets violence begets violence.

“I immediately knew I’d f—ed up” he said. They decided they had to get rid of the body, so they rolled it up in a rug and stuck it in Chase’s dad’s boat. They hooked up the boat trailer to his dad’s truck and drove it to the boat ramp and rolled the body into the water. “It was dark, and we didn’t even think about weighing it down with anything”, he says.

They got caught because the body was found the next morning floating against the shore, not far from the boat ramp, and a subsequent review of the boat ramp’s security cameras showed the body being rolled out of the boat, and the truck’s plates could clearly be seen.

Chase tells me he hates what prison has turned him into. He’s been stabbed, shot, had to have his jaw rebuilt, and been in countless fights. He is a violent man, in an environment that made him feel he had to conform to survive. He told me that murdering that guy haunts him to this day. Not because he feels bad about a dope dealer and rapist, but because he hates what he’s forced the people who knew and loved that dope dealer to go through.

Was Tonya the only victim in this tragedy?

We rarely have all the right answers, and things are almost never simply black and white. I’m not telling you this to justify or argue against any of it. I’m telling this because too often we only look at things on the surface. Through police blurbs and mugshots. Through our shallow, uninformed knowledge of actual circumstances.

In his book, If God Is Good, author Randy Alcorn says “I am part of the same human race…Apart from Christ, I am [Chase]. I am Osama Bin Laden. I am Hitler. Only by virtue of Christ can I stand forgiven before a Holy God. This isn’t hyperbole, it’s biblical truth…We’ll never appreciate God’s grace so long as we hold on to the proud illusion that we’re better than we are. We flatter ourselves when we look at evil acts and say, ‘I would NEVER do that.’ Given our evil natures, and similar backgrounds, resources, and opportunities, we would.”

I tend to agree.