Remembering the Chaos of Ten Years Ago this Month

Every year the month of June makes me uniquely reflective. My mind cannot help but revisit the chaotic events which occurred back in that month of 2016.

There was individual chaos in my health. Just a little more than three months earlier I underwent an eight-hour surgical reconstruction of my jaw. I posted often about that challenge beginning with A View from the Hospital.

There was relational chaos in my marriage. On May 31, 2016, I lost Nancy, the beloved wife of my youth, to an eighteen-month battle with ovarian cancer. At 5:50 PM that evening I became a widower. I posted often about my journey through the valley of the shadow (Psalm 23:4) beginning with Sad News about My Nancy.

And then there was cultural chaos in my city. On June 12, 2016, 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded 58 in a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The news that weekend left me and the nation shocked at the latest occurrence of murderous madness in America.

The following day, Sunday, June 13, I received a call from longtime close friend, Frank Reed. At the time Frank co-hosted the morning show at 94.9 KTLY, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas. Like the rest of us, Frank, a onetime resident of Central Florida, suffered from the aftershocks of the Pulse shooting. Beyond that he wondered how they might address the crisis on the air the next day.

He suggested we record an interview about the shooting that they might include in their programming. Imagine my surprise. I swallowed hard but agreed to give it a shot. Not everything I said in the recording made it on air, but what did can be heard at the less than five-minute interview here.

Please remember my title of this post if you care to listen to the interview. I sought to make some sense of the chaos–to offer some comfort to the listeners. More could be and has been said about such tragedies by wiser and better pastor/theologians than I. Still, I trust that some perspective proved better than none for coping with hope through the heartbreaking futility (Romans 8:18-25) of our broken world in seasons like June of 2016.