The Weight of The Cross

This is not an essay about guilt or regret; it is an essay about understanding and love. Christ has paid the price for our forgiveness; past, present, and future. It is through the acceptance of His forgiveness that I have gotten past guilt and regret to love and understanding.

When I was going to special weapons training in 1975 I was stationed at NAS North Island in San Diego, California. An acquaintance from the barracks and I were swimming off of Coronado Beach when we found ourselves near the last sand bar, shooting the breeze. As each wave would pick our feet off of the bottom, we would tread water for a minute or so until we could touch bottom again and stand on our tip toes. We were face to face about ten feet apart and not really paying attention to our surroundings. Both being in the Navy and being good swimmers, we never even noticed when we could no longer touch the bottom and just kept treading water and shooting the breeze without a care in the world. I don’t even remember what we were talking about, probably girls or beer. Anyway, a bit of time had passed when I finally looked back towards the beach. I don’t know how much time had passed, but it must have been a while. When I looked back at the beach, all I could see was the top floor of a three story A-frame concessions building on the horizon. If it wasn’t for the third floor of that building, I wouldn’t even have known what direction the beach was in. A strong riptide had carried us out to sea and I am guessing that we were well over two miles out. I knew that we had to act quickly and I immediately said, “I was an endurance swimmer in high school. Follow me. I’ll set a pace that will overcome the current and get us back to the beach. Just follow me and keep the pace I set,” or something very similar. The guy who was with me whose name I am ashamed to confess I no longer remember said, “OK” and we started swimming.

By the time we could see the beach and the little people in the distance my friend was starting to fade and calling to me for help. By then, we were both exhausted and I knew he only had another few minutes in him. He wasn’t frantic yet; just saying, “I don’t think I can make it Dave.” When he first called for help I rolled over on my side and looked back to see where he was. He was about twenty feet behind me and still swimming, only sloppy and tired now. Many things went through my mind. I thought if I went back to try to save him he would surely pull me under and we would both drown. Even if we tried to float the current would carry us both back out to sea. I thought that if I could just stand up on that last sand bar again and show him that he only had a short distance left to swim, it would give him that last boost of energy he needed to make it in. I stopped swimming and pushed myself down feet first to see where the bottom was. The bottom was another ten foot below my feet. I came up and started swimming to reach the sandbar. My friend’s voice became more frantic and now included spitting and gasping. I looked back and saw that he was now about forty feet behind me. Then it happened. I said to myself, “If I cannot make it to a sandbar and rest, I am going to have to let my friend die.” After I digested that thought and contemplated what I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life, all the time knowing that I was strong enough to make it to the beach by myself, a Navy Seal who had seen my friend struggling from the beach came swimming past me like a bullet. That was enough to keep my friend on top of the waves until the Navy Seal reached him. I finally made it in and by the time I could walk in the shallows, the Navy Seal and my friend were already on the beach.

After my friend recovered, he could not stop thanking the Navy Seal who had saved his life and wanted his name so that he could nominate him for some kind of citation or something. The Navy Seal being a Navy Seal would not give him his name. He said if you really want to thank me, leave us alone so that my wife and children and I can just enjoy a nice quiet picnic together. We left after that and I never told my buddy from the barracks that I was preparing to let him die; only God and I knew that.

Several years later when I was in my thirties and working at a nuclear power plant in New York, I was driving home one night after work during a surprise snow storm. I say it was a surprise because I am from New York and usually prepared for such things. It was extremely cold and all I was wearing a windbreaker and a new pair of flat soul dress shoes. I didn’t even have a pair of gloves with me. I had the windows up and the heater going full blast in my truck. As I drove home on the same back roads I took every night with my wipers on high and leaning forward to try to see the road in front of me, I saw the glimpse of some red lights in my peripheral vision, far off to my right as I drove by. Two-hundred feet down the road I remembered that there was only an open field where I saw the lights off to my right. I figured someone must have driven off the road and I backed up to see if I could help. I parked along the side of the road, put my flashers on and walked out in the field towards the lights. As I got closer, I realized that it was actually a car upside-down in a farmer’s pond. Only the trunk was sticking out of the water and from the looks of the broken ice the accident just happened.

By now another truck had stopped behind me and some guy was running out towards me in the field. I yelled to him, “Go and call an ambulance. I am going in and see if I can get whoever is in the car out.” I was already freezing and knew that I would certainly ruin my new shoes and probably get frostbite; but that an ambulance would soon be there and I would be fine. He replied, “No, don’t go in the water. I got a chain. I’ll pull the car out with my truck.” That’s all it took to keep me from going into the water.

He ran back to his truck for what seemed like a very long time and I waited back at the pond to hook the chain on the back of the car. I assumed he would be driving his truck out in the field any second, but that never happened. I yelled back to the other man, “Where is the chain? He responded, “My chain is too short!” This was at a time before everybody and their brother had a cell phone. I being one of the last of the Mohicans didn’t have one and I yelled back, “Have you called an ambulance yet?” He responded, “No, I don’t have my phone with me. I am going to the farmhouse up the road and see if I can get a longer chain.” I responded, “OK, but have them call an ambulance.” It seemed another long five or ten minutes before the stranger returned to say, “I couldn’t find another chain, but the ambulance and the police are on their way.” We heard the sirens within two or three minutes and I at last felt a brief sigh of relief.

As it turned out, we had at least four police cars and two other ambulances at the scene before the rescue vehicle with the divers arrived. I was sure that the man in the pond would be getting some help now. Unfortunately, nobody was going in the water before the drivers and the divers weren’t going in until they first put on their wetsuits. When the divers were finally geared-up, one tied a rope to the other who waded in the water. After a few brief attempts to open the back upside down driver’s side door, the diver climbed on top of the trunk and yelled for somebody to get something to knock out the window.

Somebody ran back to the rescue vehicle and got the diver a tool in short order. They tossed it to the diver and he jumped back in the water in short order and managed to break the window out after two or three tries. He pulled a now limp heavy set man in his mid fifties feet first from the backseat and drug him to shore where other responders rushed him back to the shoulder of the road. The diver went back to check the car and verified that nobody else was in it. By now, one of the responders noticed that I was freezing, wrapped a blanket around me, and sat me in the back of the heated response vehicle. As they walked me to the response vehicle, I could see another responder performing CPR on the man just pulled from the submerged car.

I was in the back of the response vehicle for maybe fifteen minutes when the ambulance took off and a policeman came to talk to me. I asked the policeman if the man in the car was going to make it. He said, “I don’t know; they finally got a heart beat back just before the ambulance pulled out.” I briefly told the policeman how I had stumbled onto the accident and what had transpired before the police and rescue vehicles arrived. He asked me to stop at the Police Station in Fulton, New York, and fill out a statement before I went home which I did. At the Police Station, I later learned that the man pulled from car had died.

That is when it hit me. It had probably been thirty minutes from the time I arrived on scene until the man was extracted from the car. The accident had just occurred when I arrived and he had been alive in the ice cold water, sucking air out of a bubble in the back window. The man was known to have had a bad heart and it was later reported that a small heart attack had probably caused him to swerve off the road. He was coming from the direction of the farmhouse and his tracks were almost covered in fresh snow when I arrived. I until this day have no question in my mind that the man in the car would have survived with only a severe case of hypothermia if I had gone into the water and attempted to rescue him when I first arrived. Sadly, the recognition of the cold and the shouts of a stranger were enough to keep me out of the water.

The next morning a good friend of mine from work came over to talk with me. He said that he had heard that I was at an accident where his father-in-law had died the previous night and he wanted to know what I could tell him about it. I immediately broke down and began to weep. My friend’s father-in-law was now dead and a better man might well have been able to prevent it.

Ten years ago, my father died of Cirrhosis of the liver and Hepatitis “C.” My father always went to work sober and was sober for the greater portion of my memories as a child, but there were those times. My dad was a Korean War Veteran that worked as a prison guard at Attica who later in life raised a disrespectful son who was always getting into trouble. When my father drank, he was a serious drinker and he had some steam to blow off. He didn’t drink one beer without drinking twelve. Fortunately, he was one of them loving drunks that just wanted to kiss my mom and dance and sing when he got drunk. I can remember dressing him up, putting my mom’s wigs and sunglasses on him when he passed out on the couch. Oh, how funny I thought that was. Anyway, the point being, he started having problems with his liver in his fifties and doctors told him to stop drinking and for the most part he did; however, he brought the Cirrhosis onto himself.

The Hepatitis “C” on the other hand, was a different story. Some of the worst inmates at Attica were in the habit of throwing feces at the guards when they didn’t get their way. It was a common known fact and more than a few prison guards had contracted Hepatitis just in such a manner.

My mother had already passed away by the time my father got into real trouble with his health. By the time he was sixty-two, my dad was on a liver transplant list and no longer capable of processing the poisons in his system. He began having to go to a hospital several hours away to have the fluids removed from his abdomen with a syringe. It made me mad to see the actor, Gomer Pyle being diagnosed with Cirrhosis of the liver two months after my father and receiving a liver transplant within a month. My father and I surmised that he probably built a new wing on the hospital with his Hollywood money. I prayed for my father a lot and found myself thinking, if only it had been a kidney, I could have given him a kidney.

Shortly before my father died I went down to visit him and give him a ride over to the hospital to again have the fluids removed from his abdomen with a syringe. When we returned back to his cabin, my dad took me into his barn and asked me to sort through his tools and take what I wanted. I knew then that he was giving up his fight and I had no intention of taking his tools. Besides, there were plenty of greedy relatives to do that if the time ever came. I told him that I didn’t want his tools. I wanted him around more than his tools. I said, “I wished that it had been a kidney. Then I could have given you one.” Then my father said something that surprised me, “They only need a piece of a liver. The liver is the only organ the regenerates itself. A piece of a liver will grow into an entire liver in just a few years.” That took me by surprise. As I thought about why my father hadn’t told me this before, I knew. My father was a prideful man and so was I, struggling with my pride for most of my life. I needed to get my arms around this.

That night my father asked me to sort through an old trunk of family pictures and take what I wanted. That didn’t hit me as hard as the tools and I did sort through the pictures and take a few, which I was glad I did later. That was a Saturday and I was leaving the next morning. Sunday morning some salesman showed up, my father told him that he wasn’t interested, and the salesman said, “I’ll stop back some other time.” My father said, “Don’t bother; I’ll be dead by the time you stop back!” With that, the salesman stopped his pitch and left.  I was mad that anybody even let him into the cabin. By then, I had thought about it all night and I knew that I wanted to give my father a piece of my liver. I just needed a couple of days to get my head wrapped around it.

When I left to go home that afternoon, I was sure that I would be calling my father the following weekend to tell him that we needed to make arrangements for a liver transplant. I shook his hand, said goodbye and drove off. My father died in bed three days later. Until this day, I know that my father died disappointed. My dad told me that he was giving up and I didn’t tell him not to. If only I had told him that I was anticipating giving him a piece of my liver before I drove off. I know in my heart of hearts that he could have made it.

As I said in the beginning, this is not an essay about guilt or regret; it is an essay about understanding and love. As painful and sad as these three stories are to recall, I share them so that you will know that there is nothing beyond Christ’s forgiveness. Christ has paid the price for our forgiveness; past, present, and future. It is through the acceptance of His forgiveness that I have gotten past guilt and regret to love and understanding.

Though we are imperfect and sinful creatures, the Lord meets us and loves us where we are. When I let my pride rest, I see my imperfections and I understand why I so desperately need the Lord’s forgiveness. The more I understand my need for forgiveness, the more I appreciate the Lord’s gift of forgiveness and the more I appreciate the Lord’s gift of forgiveness, the more I love the Lord. I cannot possibly regret that which brings me closer the Lord. My acceptance of Christ’s forgiveness has replaced my guilt with understanding; my regret with love; and my desperation with a peace that surpasses understanding;

Christ tells us to take up our cross and to follow him. Three times (at least) Christ has asked me to take up just a corner of His cross (when a life was at stake) and three times (at least) I failed Him. The weight of His cross is enormous and I dare not take it lightly. When we begin to see and understand the enormous weight of His cross, we begin to see and understand. What the pure lamb has suffered and accomplished for so many undeserving souls is beyond comprehension. I fall at our Lord’s feet in praise and awe.