A Living Witness Story
~
Death never asked my permission. It came the way rivers rise, quietly at first, a little
more current than yesterday and a little less ground beneath my feet. I kept believing
that if I pushed harder I could still make the crossing. There were horses to feed, people
to love, bills to pay, children growing into adults, a wife carrying more than she should
have had to carry. There was a ministry that mattered. There were people hurting.
There was tomorrow. So I leaned harder into the weight.
The work was heavy. I knew it was heavy. I felt it in the pressure behind my eyes, in
the muscles that would not release, in the nights when my body lay down but nothing
in me rested. I felt it every time the phone rang and another need came through, every
time I opened the bank account and tried to make provision appear, every time a horse
needed feed or a man needed courage or my family needed a version of me I could no
longer find. I did not mistake the weight for lightness. I mistook it for love.
I thought I was helping my wife and my children. I thought I was helping men find
freedom, helping horses, helping build something that mattered. Much of it was good.
Marriages were healing. Men were finding courage they had forgotten they possessed.
Kids laughed again. Horses carried wounds that words could not reach. I watched
people walk into a round pen guarded and ashamed and leave with something alive in
their faces. I believed God was in it, and I still do. The lie was not that the work
mattered. The lie was that everything depended on my ability to keep carrying it.
That lie did not come wearing the face of arrogance. It hid inside responsibility and
wore the clothes of sacrifice. It spoke in the voices of people I loved. If I stopped, what
would happen to the horses? If I rested, who would find the money? If I did not answer
the call, make the plan, solve the problem, keep the peace and hold the line, who would
suffer for it? I called those questions leadership. I called the fear beneath them
faithfulness. Then I gave them another piece of my body.
The body answered before I did. My neck tightened around the cord. My arm began
slipping away from me. Strength became unpredictable, and my hand forgot things it
had known for decades. Cold water could take what little control remained. My nervous
system stopped trusting ordinary life. My guts turned against food, sleep, distance, work
and time. I could not depend on the body that had carried me into every fight, so I
fought the body too. Another doctor. Another treatment. Another supplement. Another
plan. I treated every symptom as an obstacle between me and the life I intended to
reclaim.
I have heard people speak of dying to self as though it were a weekend retreat, a
decision made in a worship song, a prayer spoken once and left behind. That was not
my death. Mine was slow enough for me to recognize every part of myself as it was
taken. The humor went first, then the wildness, then the easy belief that I could walk
into any room and meet whatever waited there. My mind began disappearing in the
middle of sentences. Sleep stopped restoring me. Fear no longer arrived because
something had happened; it was already in the room when I opened my eyes.
There were humiliations too small to explain to people and too large to ignore. I
would stand in the kitchen and forget why I was there. I would begin a thought and lose
the trail before the words reached my mouth. I would promise something on a day
when I felt almost normal, then wake the next morning unable to make my body keep
the promise. A few hours of strength could cost me days. The man who had lived by
keeping his word began to fear giving one. The man who had always found a way
began to understand that effort itself could become another weapon against him.
The money followed the body down. Bills did not become spiritual simply because I
prayed over them. The mortgage remained due. The vehicle fell behind. Feed still had to
be bought. My wife carried what I could not carry, and I watched the strain move
across her life. My children were old enough to see that something in their father was
disappearing and young enough to still need him. I could not protect them from the
sight of it. I could not even explain what they were seeing, because I did not understand
it myself.
Friends changed. Some left because suffering that does not end is hard to remain
near. Some stayed but could no longer find me inside the man they remembered. I could no longer find myself in the life I had built. The ranch, the work, the future, the
places where I had felt most alive, the husband my wife had married and the father I
wanted my children to remember were not lost in one clean moment. They bled out
over years. There was no single funeral. There was a trail.
I grieved all of it, but even grief became work because I was still trying to repair the
dead. I prayed for healing, and beneath the holy language I meant, Give me my old life
back. Give me the strength to provide again. Give me the mind that could build and
lead. Give me the body that could work until dark and wake before dawn. Let me
become powerful enough to carry what I was carrying before. I did not know I was
standing beside his grave, and Christ, in His unbearable kindness, never lied to me
about the smell.
For nothing? That question followed me through waiting rooms, sleepless nights,
pastures, parking lots and the long silence after prayer. Had the years been taken? Had
the work failed? Had the wounds won? Was the life I had given away simply gone? I
wanted an answer that would return the circumstances to me. I waited for the right
doctor, the right medicine, the right donor, the right door, the right morning when I
would wake and feel like myself again. I believed peace was standing somewhere
beyond the next solved problem.
Then the words of Jesus about treasure began to trouble me. I had read them as a
promise about things stored far away, somewhere called heaven, waiting for me after
physical death. But I was not reading them from a church seat anymore. I was reading
them while everything I could touch was being shaken. Strength could rust. A body
could fail. Work could burn. Money could disappear. A ranch could be lost. People could
change. Every earthly place where I had stored evidence that my life mattered could be
taken from me.
The Word did not argue with the loss. It looked directly at it. Moth and rust destroy.
Thieves break in and steal. Bodies return to dust. Lazarus had been dead four days, and
Martha did not offer Jesus a clean metaphor. She warned Him of the odor. Scripture did
not turn its face from decay, and slowly I stopped asking it to turn its face from mine. I
began to wonder whether treasure in heaven was not merely what waited after death,
but what had already passed through death and could no longer be taken.
The love had not disappeared because my strength did. The moments in the round
pen were not erased because the organization struggled. The years were not empty because they had wounded me. Nothing truly given to Christ had fallen into a void. I
had been looking at my empty hands and calling myself ruined while the Word called
me rich. I could not see where the treasure was, but I began to understand why I could
no longer possess it the way I once had. It had gone through a gate I could not follow
with clenched hands.
Still, I fought. I kept trying to return to the man who could hold everything up
because I believed my wife and children needed him. I believed Broken Arrow needed
him. I believed the horses, the men, the work and the future needed him. There was
love in that desire, but there was blood on it too. Somewhere inside my devotion lived
the conviction that God had entrusted the world to me and was waiting to see whether I
would be strong enough to save it.
Then the last strength gave way. I could not hold up the life I had promised my
family. I could not hold up the ministry, the money, my body or the image of the man I
believed I had to be. There was no strength left to make surrender look noble. There
was mud in it. There was anger, fear, shame and the sickening knowledge that people I
loved were living with the consequences of my collapse. There were prayers that
sounded less like faith than accusation. There were days when I did not want a lesson
from God. I wanted relief.
That was my death. Not a poetic death that could be admired from a safe distance,
but the full dismantling of the life I knew how to live. The provider died. The rescuer
died. The leader who could always find another gear died. The man who could outwork
fear and make provision appear died. Even the man who imagined he would surrender
beautifully died. Nothing remained untouched. The blood, the trail, the pain and the
odor belonged in the story because they belonged to the grave.
I had thought death would be a doorway I crossed once. Instead it was a country I
lived in. Every morning I woke inside the same failing body, surrounded by the same
unsolved needs, without knowing whether resurrection would arrive as healing,
provision, restored work, or something I had not yet learned to recognize. This is where
I am tempted to rush the story and tell you what it all meant. But there were long
stretches when it meant nothing I could name. There was only the tomb and the fact
that Christ had not left.
The Gospels gave me permission to remain there. Jesus knew what He would do for
Lazarus, yet He wept. He did not correct the mourners for grieving. He did not stand at the entrance and explain resurrection as a principle. He entered their sorrow, asked
where the body had been laid, and allowed Himself to be led to the place that smelled of
death. The Word was not standing beyond the grave calling me to hurry. The Word was
beside me, weeping.
Something began to change there, though none of the circumstances changed
enough for me to call it rescue. I stopped asking pain to leave so that I could become
powerful again. I began to admit that I could not save the people I loved by destroying
myself. I saw that the man I kept begging God to restore was still built around the belief
that he could carry what belonged to God. Some of what I had called love was love.
Some of it was fear. Some of it was spiritual pride with blood on its hands.
The wounds stopped me. My neck stopped me. My arm and hand stopped me. My
nervous system, my guts, the sleepless nights and the loss of my own familiar
personality stopped me. I had prayed for deliverance from them because I believed
they were blocking the road home. Slowly, terribly, they became the road that kept me
from going back. I am not saying pain is holy or that God delights in a broken body. I
am saying Christ met me where my strength could no longer carry the lie.
The words I had read for years began to open from the inside. You have died, and
your life is hidden with Christ in God. Raised with Him. Seated with Him. Passed from
death into life. I had treated them as promises waiting somewhere beyond my last
breath, but they began speaking in the present tense while I was still lying among the
ruins. The death I feared was not only approaching. In Christ, death had already taken
what it was permitted to take, and the life beneath it did not belong to death.
I was still trying to live below, still trying to build permanence from things that
could be shaken, still asking the ground to become heaven. The wound would not let
me. It opened the veil between what I could lose and what had already been secured in
Christ. Beneath the body I could not command, the work I could not save, the money I
could not produce and the future I could not control, there was a life I had not created
and therefore could not destroy.
I do not know how all of this ends. I still wake in the body. There are still bills,
symptoms, uncertainty, grief and people I love whom I cannot protect from every
wound. Resurrection has not arrived as a clean reversal of everything that died.
Perhaps that is why I can only speak as a witness. I cannot offer a system for escaping
the grave. I can only tell you that I found Christ inside mine, not waiting at a distance for me to become faithful enough, but holding what remained when I could no longer
hold anything.
I thought brokenness proved that I had failed. It became the place where the false
burden finally fell. I thought I had lost everything, but nothing given to Christ was gone.
I thought death was coming for me, and in every human sense it was. Yet the man who
had to be enough could not survive the tomb. The life that remains is not mine to
manufacture, defend or perform. It is hidden with Christ, and I am still learning what it
means to live from a place death cannot reach.
This is not the ending. It is where I am standing. There is mud on my boots and
blood on the trail behind me. Some mornings the tomb still smells close enough to
touch. But the stone is no longer the only thing I see. The Word is here. He has not
explained every wound or returned every loss, but He has spoken my name in places I
believed had become uninhabitable. I am not the Light. I am a witness to the Light, and
this is what I saw: Christ did not abandon me in my death. He entered it, wept there,
and began calling life out of the grave.
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