This is another hard one to write, and again, I’ve resisted for quite a while. Actually, I’ve been ordering my thoughts because they are still evolving. Originally, it was just “Fall? Pushed?” because of a dream I had and a death that traumatized me. A few more funerals and it came to me: Fall? Pushed? Jumped?

There are no such things as accidents, only setups. Our enemy, Satan, sets us up. It takes him awhile, he can’t just outright kill us, or he already would have. So he has to wait until we get careless, preoccupied, busy. Then he lays the trap, and we step right into it because we are careless, preoccupied, busy, so much so that we don’t hear that still small voice of God. We look for the spectacular from God, when it’s the little things He uses to warn and direct our paths. It’s in the quiet time he speaks, and most of us have precious little of that.

My dad died from a fall. He was careless, preoccupied, busy, got on a roof on a very windy day taking sheets of tin off. Somehow, no one was around, he fell. The sheet of tin was wrapped around him. Several weeks before, I dreamed something, I didn’t remember the details when I awoke, but I did remember these words, “Did she fall or was she pushed?” After he died, I remembered this and wondered if the two were related. A hurricane had ripped through our part of the country and caused massive damage to his rental properties. He was frantic to get things fixed as quickly as possible. So when it happened, I wondered: Did he fall? Or was he pushed? Was it really an accident or was it a setup? Had he let his carelessness, preoccupation, busyness get him pushed by unseen forces to his death? That was two years ago, and I continued to ponder: fall or pushed? Or did he just make a stupid mistake and die for his error?

Recently I attended the funeral of a young man. He mixed alcohol and pain meds one night and never woke up. At his funeral, I added the third category – jumped. You have to wonder, why do people do this to themselves? Why do they take these chances? His parents were divorced. He spent many years estranged from his mother. Had he just had enough? Enough pain? Enough rejection? Enough of trying? Enough of looking for the answer? But he couldn’t commit suicide, that would be a sin, right? So he did the next best thing, he jumped. Jumped into the oblivion of drugs and allowed them to take their predetermined course. It didn’t take much effort at all on his part, just follow the path of least resistance, and let that river take him where many drug users end up.

And so I returned to my dad’s death and wondered: Did he fall? Was he pushed? Or did he jump? Did he jump because he didn’t want to fool with all the work that lay before him? Did he jump because he didn’t want to make some decisions that needed to be made? Like who to leave his estate to? His first family or his second? Should he leave a sizable chunk to his biological children because he neglected them to earn all this wealth? Or should he leave it to his second family because they were nice to him when we couldn’t be? No decision is a decision.

So now the battle rages over that money. And still I wonder: Did he fall? Was he pushed? Or did he jump?