I feel so unqualified to comment on it all, being such a sudden, tragic, life-changing event. Maybe the thing I can identify with most is just how hard it is for those closest to Kevin, because I watched my dad break his back in a jet skiing accident years ago, and saw my brother break his back and leg in a downhill snow skiing crash (both of them recovered, miraculously I might add). On the subject of sympathy for people, Charles Spurgeon pointed out something of value:

“There is no learning sympathy except by suffering. It cannot be studied in a book, it must be written on the heart. You must go through the fire if you would have sympathy with others who tread the glowing coals. You must yourself bear the cross if you would feel for those whose life is a burden to them.”

I’m sure he didn’t mean that you have to endure that specific situation, but merely that in order to care about someone who is hurting, to some degree you need to know what it’s like to be hurting. Another statement from Spurgeon, “Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties,” can be seen in a very hopeful light if you consider that what results from the suffering can be very beneficial in the end. That might be a greater resolve and strengthened character that the “victim” would not have developed without the circumstances they were put through. Three words pretty much sum it up for the Christian: God is good.

Amidst tragedy is often when you find out what you really believe. You might even find out that what you believed was true. Those are two related but different things. By finding out what you believe, I mean that you can look back on your initial reactions to a situation and have a pretty good guess about what concerned you most in the situation and what it was you did in order to get through that situation. As a Christian, I would either discover that I had little-to-no deep-seated trust in the God I claimed to believe in if my reaction was to completely panic, or I might discover that my trust in that God was there under the surface ready to swing into action in this situation that hit me. That second part that might happen, finding truth after finding out what I believed, is where the good stuff is at. Certainly you can’t stop at just having what you personally believe, because that doesn’t always match up with the truth (take for example people like George Sodini and his gym class massacre last night in Pennsylvania that ended in suicide; he may have known his view on women but he didn’t have the truth about the value of each life he wrongly took).  I can’t help but suggest that truth comes back around in some way to truth about God. I can say that in those few occasions where I do get to later look back on an extended, rough circumstance and see meaning, it’s both comforting and indescribably exciting.