Dear Friends,

Last week’s message on the San Bernardino massacre and its aftermath resulted in an outpouring responses grateful for words of kindness and hope after that horrific day. Thank You.

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John said, “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17b). Those words express love, both tender and tough, personified in the person and presence of Jesus Christ. We need this love. Indeed, we need a Savior.

The light of Christmas, the promise that “God is with us,” and “will save His people from their sins,” burns brightest in the dark and cold, when our need for illumination and warmth beyond our own capacities becomes undeniable. Such grace and truth pierce my heart each Christmas with a memory of a pain I observed which was beyond human healing.

Christmas morning was cold and still that year. Horn blasts from east-bound freight trains and the soft thwap-thwap-thwap of the wind machines in the lemon groves south of town were the only sounds of note when I stepped outside just before dawn for a look around. A crescent moon rode the dark ridge line beyond the groves.

A few blocks away, Alberto DeLeon lay dying alone. He was far from his village home in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico. His slowing breath reeked of the cheap malt liquor some new “friends” had shared with him. It was the super-potent PCP-laced cigarette they’d given the eighteen year-old that had destroyed his cerebral cortex. They left him on the sidewalk where he fell.

Alberto lay there for over twelve hours. Kids on new skateboards swerved around him. Their dads walking down to the 7-11 for coffee and the newspaper stepped over and ignored him as a sleeping drunk. At nightfall, a patrol car spotted him and called for an ambulance.

It was too late when he was brought into the emergency room. An EEG showed minimal brain activity even though his strong youthful heart kept beating on. He was transferred to the intensive care unit on artificial life support.

The hospital social worker tracked down his parents and a local church paid to have them flown in. That’s when I received the call as the hospital’s attorney.

The attending and consulting physicians recommended a “life-support termination conference” as we called them in those days. They’d determined that Alberto was being kept alive only by the artificial respirator breathing for him. He would never recover consciousness. It would be his parent’s decision as to whether or not the respirator was turned off. My role was to make sure that their decision met the requirements of law.

I walked from my office to the hospital on a bright sunny morning. I sat down with the internist, consulting neurologist, hospital administrator, social worker,and notary around the hospital library table. The chaplain ushered in the parents. They were tall and slender, with striking dark eyes.They both appeared to be in their late 30s, but it was hard to tell.

Both mother and father wore the clean, simple clothing of people who were used to working hard and taking care of themselves. I was impressed with their calm dignity even in their obvious, but tearless sorrow. Alberto was the oldest of their five children.

Speaking through a translator, the physicians described their son’s condition and hopeless prognosis. Then I took over with a smile of sympathy and told them I was very sorry about their son.  I informed them of their medical and legal options and apologized for having to ask them some difficult questions.

The translator put his hand on my arm to slow me down between sentences. The parents looked at me intently and answered my cold, but necessary legal questions with nods before responding in Spanish.

“Si,” they understood that their son would never again move, talk or even think.”

“Si,” they knew that the machine was keeping him alive by breathing for him.

“Si,” they knew that turning off the machine would mean he would stop breathing forever, his heart would stop and he would die. I was acutely, but oddly conscious of my Adam’s apple while asking such questions. It felt like it was going to fall out of my throat in reaction to  voicing such terrible, irrevocable truths.

“Si,” they wanted the machine turned off and would sign the paper consenting to this. I passed the consent form written in Spanish across the table to them. The father took it and read it slowly in the now silent room. Then he turned, took his wife’s hands in his own and murmured a few words to her. He turned back to the table and signed stoically,

I watched the mother. Her eyes were a maelstrom of disbelief, pain and sorrow as she signed and the notary added the finality of her seal.

“No one brings a child into the world for this,” I thought. “No woman could envision the child of her womb lying unconscious, abandoned and cold on a grimy sidewalk, far from home on Christmas morning.”

Inherent in the love which gave life to Alberto were his choices that ended it. True love, whether Divine or human, always involves the freedom of choice to live in the light of grateful acceptance or to wander off in the darkness on one’s own.

It was clear that this mom and dad loved their son and were people of virtue, but human love and virtue have their limitations. Try as they might, these parents could not save their son from his choices.

A love that insists on control of the beloved, even for the beloved’s safety, loses its integrity in coercion. “Love does not insist on its own way . . . It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:5-6). Because of this inherent freedom of choice, a life conceived and nurtured in love may end badly as Alberto’s did. Still, our Creator creates us in his risk of love that we will cherish and honor our lives as sacred gifts rather than waste and abuse them in selfishness.

My presence at the conference table with the grieving parents was a very human attempt to manage the consequences of this risk of love. I represented the law, but the fine print of regulation could not restore life to their boy.  The law is an exercise in fear management that seeks to control risk, if not eliminate it entirely. I could do no more than ensure that the paperwork was in order so that the hospital and the physicians could not be blamed for his death.

Love in a selfish world carries with it the shadow of disappointment and loss. Life in a sinful world is shadowed by death. The enemy of love is fear that desperately seeks to eliminate loss and death by restricting freedom. If one has no choices, one can not make a bad choice is the logic of the law. Yet, life and love achieve their shining significance in our freedom to choose and act.

The gifts of God’s Spirit, of which love is the first, are irrepressible and will not be constrained by the law (Gal 5:22-23). Horrible as it is to see the gifts of life and love marred and trashed by bad choices, it is no reason to withhold these gifts, refuse them, demand payment for them or hoard them in fear of loss. “Complete love” — the kind of love that is the very essence of God that sent Jesus to earth to share that sidewalk with Alberto DeLeon and ascend to the Cross for us all — “Complete love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). “Do not be afraid” the angels sang upon the arrival of Jesus (Luke 2:10). He’s never stopped saying this to us.

I watched the parents leave for Alberto’s bedside to be there when the machine was shut off. Then I walked out into the bright winter sunlight of Southern California. This was a tough situation and there was really no way to tie up its loose ends in a neat bow.

In my own suffering, I’d learned that God gives me himself, not answers. The same thing was true of the people who’d taught me this truth — they offered love and grace, not answers. Following their example, I’d offered Alberto’s parents compassionate competence. No one wants to hear about the theology of suffering in a life-support termination conference.

We live wrongheaded, hurtful and messy lives. None of us has a claim on righteousness or sufficient wisdom. Surprisingly, God’s response to this is to give more grace and offer his Son as our righteousness (Rom 5:20-21; 6:8-11).

I am the general counsel for the Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital and have worked with grieving parents for a long time now. It does not get any easier. The road from Bethlehem always leads through Calvary and there is no changing the route for comfort or convenience.

Later on, my wife, Patricia, and I, walked under the vault of deep blue night sky illumined by a full moon. She brought all of this into perspective for me. “I’m really tired of all this talk of Christmas as the time to treat each other better, be good and generous and forgiving and all that stuff. That’s not what the season is about at all. The season is about the cross. Christ came to save us because we are lost and dying. Everything else is delusion.”

Patricia’s observation is neither warm flannel nor neatly wrapped with tinsel and ribbon, but it is the grace and it is the truth of Jesus Christ. So we raise our eyes from the manger to the cross, and hope for eternal life.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8).
Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.