How I Came to Sparkle Again Read Free Page B

dead. The other child appeared to have a punctured lung and probably internal bleeding. She was barely hanging on. With a dying little girl in the back of his aid car who would wake up without her family if she made it at all, he couldn’t help wondering where God was this time.
    It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn’t. There were those who had told him that we could not know the intention behind God’s plan for us—that we had to trust that we were in good hands and that maybe as our lives unfolded, we would see how something was for the best. And then there were the others who believed everything was a test, that God tried to protect us from the bad things, but sometimes Satan won and that Satan tried to do things to diminish our faith in God. Mike glanced back as he drove on and listened to John and Ben continuing to work to stabilize the girl. He did not see how the outcome of this accident would ever be for the best. And he did not see Satan, either. He saw only misfortune—human error and misfortune. It brought him the most peace to simply believe that people were imperfect, and life was imperfect, and sometimes bad things just happened. And if you were lucky, emergency services would show up in time to give you a second chance at life.
    He thought about all the times he’d saved someone’s life and the person had attributed this miracle to God. Part of him was always tempted to make a joke of it, something like No, that was my hand stopping the bleeding or No, God didn’t send me; the trucker with the cell phone did . Why, he wondered, was it so hard to see humankind as capable of creating miracles? Miracles were just second chances if you really thought about it—second chances when all hope was lost.
    But maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe there was more to it than that.
    Eight months ago, the day before he’d found out about Kate’s cancer, he went on a call that he thought about from time to time. A man had lost control of his car on the ice going down a long hill and plowed right into the back of another car. The front of his car was crushed, and his foot was caught on the gas pedal somehow. He said he saw flames creep out of the hood of the car and thought he was a goner. Then he noticed two identical tall, Nordic-looking men, one on the side of the road to his right and the other walking over to his door. Flames were now licking into the car around the edges of the fire wall. The twin on the side of the road disappeared, while the other opened his door, freed his foot, lifted him out of the car, and set him down on the side of the road. When a state patrol officer arrived shortly after, the man told him about the twins, wanting to thank the one who saved his life. The officer told him there was no one else at the scene besides the people in the car in front of him, and no one in the car in front had seen anybody. As Mike had driven him to the hospital to be checked, the man tried to understand how no one else could have seen them. He wondered out loud if they were angels.
    The next day when Kate’s doctor told Mike and her about the cancer, he wondered whether the man in the car accident and his angel story were sent to him to give him faith, faith that something would protect and strengthen his wife throughout her battle, that something would lovingly take her home when she died. He wanted to believe it. He did. But as time had gone on and he and his daughter, Cassie, witnessed unbearable and seemingly unending suffering, he couldn’t help wondering about the God that would not grant a miracle then. He saw no divinity in all that suffering. He saw no divinity in God taking his daughter’s mother. He saw no divinity in any of it. But he did see divinity in the outpouring of support for his family from the community.
    So at the end of the day, here was what Mike was able to believe in: people. It was people and their kindness that made him feel blessed. It