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The Place


It happened by accident.   I was driving to my friend’s new house, and one of the road signs grabbed me.  While we visited, I was turning the name over in my mind.  Could it be?  I thought the accident had happened much further down the highway.   My memory is muddled.   I said I would never drive that way again.  Never again see the place.  I had been with a group to tour my friend’s house a few weeks before she moved in, and I had been nauseous.  But I didn’t pay attention on the drive, and figured it was because I was close to the place.  As I packed my girls in the car to leave,  I took a deep breath to still the trembling inside.  Now I would be on the same side of the divided highway as that day...  Was this it?  I didn’t know another way home.  I would have to find out.  I drove slowly as if in a dream.  And then, suddenly, there they were just before the suspicious intersection- the skid marks, dark and hard, and then nothing.  The invisible mark where our car was torn from the road and my little, sweet one was catapulted into eternity.  Instantly, I was there.  The grass, the trees, the strangers’ arms,  their voices telling me not to look, the dripping,  people pulling me away, my hysterical voice piercing heavy air as I screamed into the phone to my Daddy that they were putting paddles on her chest.  Oh God!  It flashed in a second.  I had no time to prepare- to plan.  I am there.

Just before was a road named Legion.  I can’t help but picture hoards of demonic creatures cheering as in a Roman arena at the devouring of flesh.   Death.  That was their plan.  I feel smothered by darkness.  Then in the next second, I make a decision.  I cannot let them  win.  Here in this place of Death, I choose Life!  My lips, ignoring the sensation of horror, begin to pray.  And praise.  This is no light moment for me.  I have done those things only painstakingly, rarely, and with great effort the last 10 months.   But this time I barely think.  It is almost an impulse.  I can imagine that in the darkness of that day, as her body crumpled, there was a crack of piercing, radiant light torn through the black canvas of evil and she stepped into it in a flashing second.  Into the light.  The weighty glory.  The joy.  The promise.  The prize.  His love.    And the hoards remembered that their plan is foiled.  Oh death where is your sting?  Hell has been defeated.   The grave could not hold the King!  My shaking hands grip tight on the steering wheel.  I do not stop pointing my lips and thoughts to the throne as the next seconds pass and the place is gone.  Behind me.  The hurdle is crossed.  And I am still in the race.

Makiah died that day.  But she didn’t.  We have lost her, but He has not.  She is not all that died that day.  But the lightness in my heart, the turning I have felt for three days now since that moment, tells me that maybe, just maybe, a resurrection is in progress.

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