Yesterday I attended the funeral of Barbara Comp.  She was the widow of  Gerald Comp, the preacher of my hometown church whose tragic passing at the church’s homecoming picnic was discussed in the first chapter of my new book, Acts of God- Why Does God Allow So Much Pain?.  It has been 46 years since that heart-breaking tragedy.  Now Barbara is in the presence of the Lord Jesus and finally reunited with the only man she ever loved.  And, thankfully, God has wiped away all tears from her eyes. 

The following is an excerpt from that first chapter.  The book is dedicated to the memory of Gerald Comp and I hope this post will serve as a tribute to him and the God he served…a God who still keeps His promises even though we don’t always understand His ways.

Excerpt from Acts of God, Chapter 1:

I’ll never forget my first truly devastating experience with the Question.

It was the afternoon of homecoming at my home church, the happiest of happy days in congregational life. Homecoming is a great reunion, a joining of church present with church past. The prodigals return, and the pews are full. The aromas of home cooking drift through the building.

I was in my mid-twenties then, back for a visit; I was preaching at another church on most Sundays. It felt good to be home. We’d had a joyful worship service that morning, and people sang the hymns with gusto, though their voices were mingled with the rumblings of their stomachs. Incredible feats of cooking awaited, and everyone knew it.

It was a lovely day outdoors. We ate, we laughed, we played, and we swapped old church memories. The sounds of children’s shouts rang through the air. Then those shouts—well, their tone changed. They became screams.

We came running and discovered the ghastly news. Our preacher, Gerald Comp, had dived deep into the frigid swimming hole while playing tag with some of the kids. One of the kids wanted to know why he didn’t come up.

Life simply stopped. It felt that way to everyone. One moment, there had been laughter and play, the next it was as if death has stolen in, easily overcoming the sum of our joy.

Even now, I can close my eyes and recall the image of Gerald’s wife Barbara, and their two teenage daughters, standing with pale faces as his lifeless body was pulled from the waters. Some wept, some prayed, but most of us did both. We fell to our knees and pled with God, passionately, desperately, to glorify his name through the healing of Gerald Comp.

A group of men went about the business of resuscitation. It all came to nothing. There was our pastor, our man of God, a lifeless shell. He was having his own homecoming, death’s mockery of our church’s day.

Never before that moment had I ever seen my father cry.

Why, God? Why Gerald? Why our church? Were our prayers not sincere enough? Were our tears not wet enough?

Gerald Comp was a 38-year-old man, a revered pastor, a model husband and father, and a spiritual leader abounding in fruitfulness. If God wanted to remove one of his most effective servants from the earth, well, he’d certainly done that. How could there even be a reason?

From Gerald’s very mouth we had heard sermons on Romans 8:28, telling us that all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose. Many of us could rattle the words off our tongues without thinking. But now those words had real weight; now they had implications. The apostle Paul’s math seemed like an imbalanced equation—theology that didn’t add up.

As the ambulance came, and the rest of us stood huddled in one another’s arms, we whispered about what came next. The name Greg was among those whispers. Who will tell Greg?

Greg Comp, the pastor’s 14-year-old son, was home with the flu; he could have no idea that his life had changed forever, that in some mundane moment, he had lost something that could never be replaced.

Someone had to go and bring the news to Greg.

Thirty minutes later, a friend and I were heading for the Comp home. I couldn’t imagine what I was going to say or do, how I was going to be the harshest messenger of his life.

I was no more than a decade older than Greg. I thought about my own father, and tried to imagine myself in this position. Where would I be now if I had been deprived of my dad at 14 years old? What might my life be like?

As I realized the struggles in store for Greg Comp, I felt so many things: speechless, confused, spiritually disarmed, upset. What words could I possibly say that would not come across as unfeeling platitudes?

In the end, I think I realized that any words I chose, other than the information I bore, were next to irrelevant. Most of the point was simply to be there, to share an unthinkable moment. There were no magic expressions or potions to dull his pain.

And yes, I asked it, within myself: Where were you, God? Why did you let this happen? How is this family supposed to bear up? 

And from heaven came a profound silence—or so it seemed to me.

Why, God?

I sat and talked with Greg, and saw the shock roll across him, slowly preparing him to take on the long siege of grief that would follow. Our church, too, had a period of mourning. As a matter of fact, a strange thing transpired through our sadness: Our relationships deepened. We learned to depend upon each other, to minister to each other through our personal gifts, in ways that frankly wouldn’t have come about otherwise. Most of the people ultimately turned from their anger at God, simply because they needed the comfort only he could offer. They went deeper with him not in spite of their pain, but because of it. And they went deeper in their fellowship together as his children.

The day came when we reflected on our little group, no more than 150 members, and realized that we had somehow produced dozens of preachers, missionaries, and powerful servants of Christ, each of whom impacted larger circles of humanity for the sake of God’s kingdom. Among those servants is Greg Comp, who at one time would pastor the same church in which his dad spent his final days. To the world at large, that would seem more than peculiar. Greg would be expected to get as far away as he could from such a tragic place that dealt him such a blow; many would predict him to walk away from God himself.

Greg sees it differently. He is his father’s last and most significant gift. Gerald’s life was too short, but his legacy is deep and wide and full and nowhere close to its conclusion.

That’s how God does things. If you come to be a member of Greg’s church, and you experience some kind of emotional turmoil, Greg can minister to you with a power and a sensitivity only available to those who have known what it is to suffer, to ask the questions, and to grow in the faith even when the answers didn’t come easily.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose^” (Romans 8:28).