Alongside

Many of you were originally connected to the events of the last several days through an email chain. The news went from Michelle using Facebook on an iPhone… to me on my iPhone… to a growing list of people around the world via email. We then moved the updates to this site as a temporary location before we launch a new site for Steve.

I’ve known Michelle and Steve for about fifteen years. In fact, I essentially introduced them… gave the homily at their wedding… was there when Aidan and Jude were born. I met Steve at a gig when we were both musicians, years before he was a Pastor. I met Miche when she first moved to Seattle, traveling by this inexplicable faith after working tirelessly at an orphanage in Hong Kong. Together with my wife, Anita, we’ve all known and carried each other as friends through both shadow and pinnacle. They are our dearest friends. I know many of you have rich, special stories and memories with them, and that many of you also name them as and among your dearest friends. That’s who they are.

I live in Seattle, but over the last days have been getting the updates out while on the Oregon coast. I’m here with family to remember the 10th anniversary of my sisters death. She too was in a tragic accident on a paved road, at a tragically young age and time.

This effort, website, all of these prayers, are about and for Steve, Miche, the boys, and the Ruetschle and Van Leeuwen families. I know writing a glimpse of my story with the Ruetschle’s here is a bit of an indulgence, and I ask for forgiveness.

I know that many of you have felt grateful, impressed, and blessed by Michelle’s updates… her hope, grace, and reliance on God.

However, Miche also wrote me this afternoon, “I hope my posts are not too light-hearted. I am SHATTERED. Falling to pieces hourly. Cannot sleep. You may post that if you want. Faith, hope and love live alongside.”

My sister was named Aletha; a Greek word meaning ‘truth’. Remembering her while immersed in these days with Steve and Miche, I keep coming back to this one truth she taught me: Tragedy makes things transparent.

In the aftermath of tragedy some go to scripture… some to poetry, words… embraces… some to anger, rage, helplessness… and many to the perhaps deeper eloquence of silence and tears. In all of these outpourings we are made transparent. You see what you and others are made of. In a way that is almost unbearable things that are most essential can be seen and felt.

This is what Mike was saying in the below update from Miche; what David said and what Miche is saying. Among many things, “this is a life-altering event, a choice, a clarity and burning away of the chaff.”

Another thing that Aletha taught me and Steve now reminds me; this clarity and transparence is hard to sustain. There are stages of seeing. The lenses shift. But it is possible to live there over time. But how, how to sustain it? How to keep in reserve the light-filled experiences of outpoured love for the times when the light necessarily dims… or rather, when our capacity to see the Light dims.

I think in part it is possible to live there by not turning away. By not turning away from the horror AND the beauty with simple cliches and cheap words; by not dwelling too long in all-too-easy anger; in not finding prolonged, false comfort in helplessness. But instead, by facing all of it… turning into all of it.

What am I trying to say. Miche is SHATTERED. Most of us would agree that we’ve rarely if ever encountered a couple with the love and devotion that these two share for each other. Miche is naturally in her life what Steve is in his body. Shattered. The shards are piercing and they reflect everything that is most essential.

“Faith, hope, and love alongside,” Miche says.

I’ve heard people in the last days offer assurance that Steve will walk again. That glorious things will occur. Truth be told, I personally don’t “know” what is going to happen. I respect such faith, and yet today, now, mere “knowing” is not the point for me.

Faith is something other than mere ‘knowing’… the evidence of things unseen. Dark. Not sight. And faith in an unfathomable God leads me to hope in His power that I can barely endure, revealed and felt in all of the outpourings of love in the last days. And that hope in Him ultimately takes me to love.

Many years ago in one of Steve’s darkest moments I sat with him in a parked car, at night, and listened to him sob. He was in immense pain. And he said, “Sky, all I want to be in this life is a man who loves. A man who loves others, and who loves God.”

Steve repeated that over and over, that night and through the years. He has repeated that in his art; his music; in seminary; from the pulpit; in First Pres Bellevue, UPC, and for the last years at Union Church; he has repeated that in the play and strength of being PAPA (on this father’s day) to his boys… his boys; he has repeated that in his sweet and lovely marriage; and even in his words as he lay broken and transported to the hospital…

And no doubt, beneath the haze and dimness of medication and the choking pain… now. Right now. What is most transparent to me in this tragedy, what is most essential: Steve is a man of love. A man who loves us as he loves this unfathomable, unbearably beautiful God.

So I don’t quite ‘know’ what will happen in the next days. But what I can see in this transparency is a man who because of AND no matter the condition of his body — is a living force of “faith, hope, and love alongside.”

Sky Sean Dimond