613 Media — Telling the Story

I heard them screaming out in the hallway from my office. One of our xray technologists stumbled into my office crying and sobbing out loud. “They’re dead, Dr. Hennigan! They’ve been murdered! They’re all dead!”

She was so distraught I couldn’t understand what was happening until I walked past her out into the hallway. Over a dozen technologists work in our area in this hospital. They were all in the hallway in various stages of breakdown. I went and found the head of our department and learned the unthinkable. One of the technologists working at this hospital (One of four in the system) was married to another technologist working at another hospital in our system. They had a three year old son. It seemed the husband had killed the wife, the son, and then himself.

I felt my heart stop and an unspeakable dread gripped me. I was beyond shock. I had spoken to both of these technologists within the last twenty four hours while on call. They had both been kind, funny, reliable technologists. And, they had both been Christians.

To contemplate the remote possibility of this man committing a double murder and suicide was akin to watching that first plane crash into the World Trade Center and realizing it had been deliberate. For two hours, there was uncontested mayhem and confusion throughout all four hospitals. People wandered the hallways in a haze. Patients were slack jawed and confused about why nothing was happening as it should. But, they sensed that some great evil event had taken place.

I went back to my office and prepared for the inevitable questions. It seems that the books I had authored and the fact I am known as a Christian has produced a situation in which people come to me for answers to many of life’s tough questions. It is why I became an apologist. I had to know the answers for myself before I could even entertain answering them for other people. The fact is, I am woefully unprepared for most of these answers even after studying Christian apologetics (defending the faith) since 1998. All it takes is one simple question to make you realize that only God has all the answers. But, we are commanded to “be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within” us in 1 Peter 3:15.

As I watched the horror of this story unfold on the Internet and later on the evening news, I watched my city; my community recoil in horror and dismay. One local news channel actually interviewed three children living across the street from the house in which the deaths occurred! I couldn’t believe they would stoop to such a low as to place four and five year old children on the spot about this horrific tragedy.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept seeing both of these people in their work place. I saw them joking and smiling and treating their patients with great care and respect. I saw them sitting and talking to me about some of those tough issues of life. I had to ask myself as many will in the coming days: was there anything I could have done or said to change what happened? Did I answer a question wrongly? Am I in any way responsible for what happened?

Many people will want to do what we are best at and that is to blame God. It is an easy and convenient question to hide behind. God is always the big fall guy. After all, couldn’t He have stopped this from happening? I read an article recently by a man who recounted a horrific descent into sexual addiction. He related how his choices resulted in him losing several jobs, family relationships, friends, and ultimately his self esteem. I was sad to see that he attributed this problem to a sexual addiction “that I had no control over. This must have been in my genes. It was God who afflicted me with this terrible drive.” Nowhere in this article did this man admit that he made a choice. It is the choices that define us. It is the choices in life that make us human. Animals are programmed through instinct. But, humans are made in the image of God. Part of that image is the ability to have free will and to make a choice. When we blame God, we are, in fact, blaming the person staring back at us from the mirror. It is that person who makes the choices that leads us to doom or to ecstasy.

Why did this happen? Simple. Evil. It is real. It is personal. It is destructive. And, it only takes a moment of immersive evil to ruin not just one, but several lives. A moment to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. A moment to pull the trigger of a gun three times. A moment when our will and our choice eclipse the light of God and in the shadow of evil we commit horrific deeds. We can’t blame God. We can blame only ourselves. The ability to choose carries with it the inevitable outcome of wonderful, beautiful heights of human creativity and the horrific, macabre lows of human depravity. This knowledge doesn’t make the answers any easier to come by.

In these moments of great pain, explanations are desired but do not always bring comfort. The best we can do is to offer to “bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.” What is that law? I believe it is love.