Dark Friday Reflections

This is a special tribute to one of my son's best friends, Ethan, who left this earth too soon in a tragic motorcycle accident exactly three years ago today.

Today, my message, through tears, is to love loudly like Ethan.

Many of you hold painful places in your hearts for people you loved and lost too. This is an appropriate week to grieve...and then hope again.

 It’s Good Friday this week.

It feels like Dark Friday. Cold Friday. Desperate. Deep. Dark Friday.

I remember this day, three years ago, my son and I hearing the news a few minutes after it happened. Both of us dropped to the floor, with that deep kind of heart-sobbing, on our knees, pleading with God to bring him back.

We greived with our hearts split open, bleeding out our tears with no words, a constant, heavy pain in our chest.

Three years later, my head cannot still comprehend that he’s gone from this world.

In one minute. Without warning.

Just the other day, thinking about March 25th coming up and listening to Shane and Shane’s Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, the tears erupted from deep in my being and wouldn’t stop—thinking about his mom, his dad, his sister, thinking about Ethan.

Ethan, who loved loudly.

For some reason, the "cool kids" liked to tease my happy-go-lucky son, barely reaching five feet in high school. Ethan didn't let them. With his wide grin, he would make a joke, stand in the way of those bigger kids, and turn everything alright with firm assurance and an offer of better fun and friendship.

My son felt loved loudly by Ethan. At his memorial, we found out he made a lot of people feel loved loudly.

I want to be that way too. Do people know that I love them loudly? That I'd stand proudly between my friend and the bullies. That I'd be a best friend no matter what, offering to make duct tape wallets together, and go camping, and flick bandanas under the desks during school (they don't pass notes anymore).

It’s Good Friday this week.

It feels like Dark Friday. Cold Friday. Desperate. Deep. Dark Friday.

I know we will see him again. He loved God and people loudly and knew Jesus since he was a little boy.

But the Saturday after Friday—before their Easter—is going to be silently long for his mom, his dad, and his sister. It could be fifty earth years before they laugh at that impish grin, get wrapped in his strong arms again, and tell him they love him to the moon and back a million times.

The only hope is that there IS an Easter.

The only hope is that Jesus Christ of Nazareth defeated death by surrendering to die. The only hope is that God raised Jesus to life in a glorious heaven-body, strong, mighty, powerful, flying-free—and made him the kind of King that could transform death to eternal life forever for citizens of his Kingdom.

The kind of King that put his Spirit in my son’s friend long ago.

And on that Dark Friday when he died, time blurred past Saturday, and Jesus saw His Spirit, a deposit that made him a true citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven—and he raised my son’s friend to life again with a glorious heaven-body.

Time is not the same in heaven. To my son’s friend, it may only seem a moment until he sees his mom, his dad, his sister—his friends—again.

I can see him muscle-punching my son good-naturedly like he always did, and demanding, “Hey! Where ya been!? Come on, let’s eat up!” and leading him over to that big ‘old banquet table Jesus promised us.

It makes me grieve for the billions…the THREE billion people…living on this earth without that hope.

Simply because they don’t know.

No one ever told them that Dark Friday was actually Good Friday—because it turned into Easter.

They might never get a chance to hear about the kind of King that can raise dead people to life—and make them live forever. And there’s a banquet waiting. And full-on joy-fest reunions of his citizens. And a new earth to live on and explore and be with your loved ones forever.

No one ever went and told them.

PS: How can you love someone else loudly like Ethan today? On that day three years ago, we decided to love loudly like Ethan and sponsor a young man about his age in Malawi, Africa to go to college. He’s in year three, and I have a feeling, he’s going to change the world, like Ethan would have, like Ethan did, and still is.