Our Story

Love anything and your heart
will be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact
you must give it to no one, not even an animal.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Deep Calls to Deep

Anyone with sufficient knowledge can write a technical manual about topics for which they have no personal experience and rightly so. We would be foolish indeed to insist that every physicist have personal experience of black holes, supernovas, or space flight for their theories to be sound. It is altogether different with matters of the heart. No armchair philosophy or textbook theology will satisfy our rightful insistence that those who presume to lead us into the depths have gone through them themselves.

My wife June and I once served as missionaries in Honduras a country whose name means depths. The Lord broke open hidden depths in both of us that year which took many more years to unpack. We had not even known that they were there. Before Honduras I had known what it was to be broken. That harrowing ordeal is told in Rescued from Hell, available at Amazon. I naively thought I had learned the hard way all that brokenness had to teach me. How wrong I was! It took Honduras to teach me about being broken open to the Light of Christ and open to His mending.

I placed our personal story here for several reasons. You have a right to know something about the one trying to lead you through grief. You need to know that I have been through the depths of it in order to risk trusting your heart to what I'm telling you is a good (I would say great) way to go through it. Also, by now you may be curious and simply want to know something of our story. Such normal human curiosity deserves to be answered and it gives me a wonderful opportunity to introduce you to the incredible person I had the good fortune to love and to marry.

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. Psalm 42:7-8 ESV

List of Articles

June's Obituary  This will give you your first glimpse of her the butterfly in a windstorm.

A Cry for Help  As soon as I could manage it (later in the day), I sent out a brief desperate email asking for prayer. This is a follow-up (three days later) to let our friends and family know all that had transpired.

Remembering June  I wasn't sure I wanted to say anything at June's memorial service, or even if I could, but then this literally downloaded into me during the wee hours the night before.

Two Poles of Grief  One of the most extraordinary things for me was the unexpected pole swing going on inside me between massive cascades of sorrow and miniature fountains of joy. I certainly didn't expect anything like it.

My Motivation List  I had learned in the aftermath of our difficult missionary experience in Honduras how necessary it is, when our heart is in the tank, to have clear, uncompromising motivations close at hand.

What the Lord Asked  In the hour before I learned that June was making a suicide attempt, the Lord riveted my attention with these questions and promises. I include them here because they show God's strange but helpful ways with us, as well as the possibilities of our own response.

Not Death But Life  Our friend David Kelly writes movingly about June and of the hope we all share for that greater reunion our Lord intends.