Boston Marathon bombs: praying for Jeff Bauman Junior
YOU can see the photos from the Boston bombings here. We saw the AP’s picture of one man’s injuries. Not every publication thought it too much. You can see our cropped version of the man as he’s helped by first repsonders and Carlos Arredono.
And now some good news. Well, better news. The man was rushed to the Boston Medical Center ER. His name is Jeff Bauman Junior. He’s lost both of his legs. His father, Jeff Bauman Senior, writes:
“Can everyone pray for my son Jeff Jr.? I just can’t explain what’s wrong with people today to do this to people. I’m really starting to lose faith in our country.”
He adds:
Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, they did help greatly. Unfortunately my son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to have both lower limbs removed due to the extensive vascular and bone damage. I was with him last night and am heading back down to Boston – Boston Medical Center to be with him today. He went back into surgery last night at midnight for exploratory due to fluid in his abdomen. He came out at 2:30 and doctors informed us he was doing better. Thanks again to all you guys and girl
You can help Jeff here.
When people say they are praying for someone, it can sound glib. Tony Woodlief helps :
Sometimes I wake up in a hotel bed or my apartment and I forget where I am, what bed this is and what city this is. I shower and sometimes I shave and I mutter sentences that have no meaning because they are not in the right place. They are divorced from all place, these words like I don’t understand this and I can’t do this and Please help me. I mutter these sentences and I stop, the washrag over my face or the blade to my neck, and I wonder where the words came from, and who they are for, and why I am saying them, and if only God understands why we talk to ourselves in the bleary dark morning hours.
Only God understands if they are prayers or laments, and how words can be both, how every sentence spoken out of place is really just another way of saying: Where am I to go?
Heather MacDonald does not believe:
I take it that believers do not ascribe such inconsistent results to capriciousness on God’s part, but rather to their own limited capacities to understand God’s ways: “Thy Will be done.” But why continue directing any psychic energy to a being so lacking in sympathetic correspondence to human needs and values. It will not do to say: “God does respond to our prayers, but in ways that we cannot fathom.” Saving a child from cancer and letting a child die from cancer cannot both be a sympathetic response to prayer; if we had wanted a stricken child to die in order to secure an earlier entry to heaven, we would have said so. And if premature death from cancer is such a boon, why doesn’t a loving God provide it to one and all?It is humans who work with passion and commitment every day to try to save their fellows (and a range of other creatures) from suffering and sorrow. Emergency room medicine is constantly evolving to try to ensure that gun shot victims and people crushed by cars survive. Doctors and hospital staff work frantically throughout the night to try to revive a failing heart or a shattered brain. They do so out of love and compassion, while God, who could restart an exhausted heart in an instant, demurs. The only source of love on earth is human empathy. Transferring our own admirable traits onto a constructed deity just obscures the real human condition: we are all we have, but that is saying a lot.
If you can’t pray for Jeff Bauman, we can at least contemplate what it means to be him.
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comments (3) | TrackBack | Permalink
