An Ordinary Life, an Extraordinary God: Is Anybody Really Listening?

By Paul C. Hale

Do you ever wonder, somewhere deep in your heart, if all those things the nuns or your Sunday school teacher taught you are really true? Does doubt ever taunt you, whispering in the silence, I just dont believe all that stuff anymore? Do you hold close the unspoken worry of what will really happen to you when you die?

It is easy to feel God in the flowers of spring, the solitude of a world blanketed in snow, or the laughter of children at play. It is never hard to imagine the hand of our Creator in the sunrise over the ocean, the majesty of the Rockies, or the billions of stars visible on a clear night in the country.

What of the dark times, though? Where is God when your business fails, or you lose your job, or a loved one is injured in an accident or diagnosed with cancer and dies? Is God there when you struggle to make ends meet, when your child is hurt in a fall or, when you think yourself alone and abandoned?

When Jesus said, With God all things are possible, He meant it. We pray that by sharing our ordinary lives, our extraordinary God will bless and encourage you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781490815961

Paul C. Hale

Cherie and Paul Hale were married at eighteen, parents at nineteen, and born again at twenty; they have seen all nine of their children attend college. They credit the success of their forty-two year marriage and their family—which now numbers thirty—entirely to God’s grace and mercy. They currently live in Atlanta.

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PROLOGUE: THE ACCIDENT

May 1995

Kansas City, MO

There are very few certainties that touch us all in this mortal experience, but one of the absolutes is that we will experience hardship and stress at some point.

—Dr. James Dobson

Paul! My dispatcher, Carl, cupped the phone’s receiver in his hands. There’s been an accident!

Where? Is anyone hurt? I asked him as I let up on the button of the radio in dispatch. We had no cell phones in 1995.

This day had begun badly, and it was only getting worse. The thunderstorms of spring had started before dawn, and I already had one school bus driver, Tanya, on the radio. She had driven into an area with flash flooding. Worse than that, she still had kids on her bus and was close to panicking. Now Carl was telling me there was a second accident.

It had been almost a year since I had accepted the position of managing a school bus terminal that served the Kansas City public schools. There were about three hundred drivers, bus monitors, dispatchers, and safety trainers working for me, and most of us had grown up in Kansas City’s inner city.

This was our neighborhood, our community—a black community for the most part. Being white, I was the exception in our terminal, just as my family had been in the black neighborhood of my youth. At age forty-one, I had accepted this job as a chance to help my city’s struggling public school system in some small way. It was, I thought, the culmination of my life experience, a position for which God alone could have prepared me.

However, since the Christmas break, it seemed that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. I had been a vocal critic of some of the school district’s transportation policies—policies I considered unsafe. When my concerns were ignored, I put them in a formal letter to the district. As a consequence, I had made a few enemies in powerful positions.

For several months now, I had suffered their retribution. The responsibilities of my job were stealing nearly every waking hour. The stress was incredible, and I felt close to the breaking point. But it was May, and I calculated that I would only have to make it two more weeks until school would be out for summer vacation. I had already determined I would find other employment and had told my vice president so.

Today, though, my only problem—or so I thought—was nature with its heavy rain and flash flooding.

The rain had stopped almost an hour earlier, but streets flooded with a foot or so of water delayed the buses. This prompted more calls than usual from anxious parents to the organized chaos that was dispatch. Tanya, young and less experienced, added to the chaos when she tried to drive her bus through one of those flooded streets.

My dispatchers were overloaded, so as manager I stepped in to help. While we did not have cell phones, all of the buses were equipped with radios to communicate with the dispatchers.

While I was dealing with Tanya, the second incident Carl was telling me about was still undefined. He was back on the phone with someone. I couldn’t hear his conversation. Carl, I asked him again, is anyone hurt?

He held up a hand while he listened intently. Then he said, I don’t know yet. I’m trying to find out. I think they might be. And he returned to the phone.

In the meantime, Tanya, my first-year driver, was close to panicking. Her voice squawked through the dispatch radio, There’s water in the bus, Paul! What am I supposed to do? The youngsters on the bus were quickly picking up her fear.

Where, Carl? I asked my dispatcher again. Who’s had an accident and where is it? Tanya whined again in my ear. I mashed the button on the microphone to respond to her. Tanya, are the kids okay?

Yeah, she said, but there’s—

I interrupted her, Is the water rising?

No, but—

Okay, Tanya, just hang on and calm down. If you can’t back out of it, stop where you are. I have Elmer on the way! I let up on the button again.

Most of my employees were part-time—retirees and moms who took the responsibility of transporting their children safely to and from school very seriously, despite the meager wages the jobs offered. However, Elmer was a full-time employee, one of four safety trainers with years of experience in the school bus industry.

Another safety trainer, James, was out helping yet another driver when Carl got the address of the accident. On Thirtieth Street, just west of Cleveland! he called to me. James isn’t too far away. He’s heading there now.

Good! I affirmed. Let me know as soon as he calls back in.

Thirtieth and Cleveland was an address I knew intimately. It was the street where I had spent the first sixteen years of my life: the street where I played with my friends, rode my tricycle, learned to ride a bike, and later a skateboard. It was also the street where my brother and I encountered our first gang and were robbed, where we stopped a kid who pulled a knife on my little sister, and where we watched rioters in cars from our bedroom window during the spring of 1968.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

—Aristotle

I kept Tanya on the radio, electronically holding her hand, knowing my safety man, Elmer, should be there in about five minutes.

It seemed only moments later when James called in from the second accident. He needed to speak with me. I handed off Tanya’s problems to Carl, swapping my radio mic for the phone he held.

It’s bad, Paul. James voice was grave. It’s really bad.

A chill ran up my spine as I asked, How bad, James?

You better get here as fast as you can. James was shaken.

On my way! As I headed for the door, I yelled to Carl, You’re in charge. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s going on. It was a call I would never make.

As I drove to meet James, I could only think of the conversation I’d had a year earlier during my interview with Gary, the vice president of the company. Gary was a tall, thin, clean-shaven fellow who still enjoyed his nicotine. As Gary and I talked about the special characteristics of the school bus industry, I asked him what he thought would be the most difficult aspect of this job, were I to accept his offer.

The worst thing, the absolute worst thing that could ever happen, would be to lose a child, Gary responded.

It was a more extreme response than I had expected, and my face betrayed my surprise.

Gary quickly added, Understand, it is a very rare thing to have a child killed during the simple process of taking them back and forth to school. But it does happen. Seeing my concern, he continued, However, it really is extremely unlikely, and few managers have ever had to face such a tragedy.

You? I asked.

Gary’s answer was an immediate, No, thank God, as he shook his head, mashing out the stub of his cigarette.

I passed the little church on Cleveland that had replaced the house of my childhood and turned west onto Thirtieth. The school bus and several police cars were stopped about halfway up the hill. I pulled over. The accident scene was just ahead.

There were no other emergency vehicles. I could see that my driver was still in his seat, and there were kids still on the bus. The safety trainer, James, had been speaking with the kids. James had the body of a linebacker, but his manner was gentle and his voice invited trust. When he saw me pull up, he quickly exited the bus and jogged down the short hill to meet me.

Between us, a deep red and much too large pool of blood lay near the middle of the street.

I stared in horror, asking James, What’s happened?

It’s really bad, Paul. James’s voice was low. We ran over a kid. A little boy. We ran over him. That’s his blood. James nodded at the pool.

Is he dead? I asked, fearing the worst.

I don’t know. The ambulance got here really quick, and they’ve taken him to Truman Medical. But, man, that’s a lot of blood. James stared at the crimson glistening on the concrete.

I hurried back my car, calling to James, Stay with the driver and help out however you can. You know what to do. I’ve got to get to the hospital. Are you sure it was Truman?

Yeah, James affirmed.

As I hopped in the driver’s seat, I shouted back, Call Carl. Tell him what’s going on! Then I sped down the street.

O God, do not remain silent; 

do not turn a deaf ear,

do not stand aloof, O God.

—Psalm 83:1 NIV

Truman Medical Center was ten minutes away. Throughout my short drive, I begged God over and over to save this child. For more than twenty years, my wife, Cherie, and I had been Christians, and prayer was as much a part of our lives as eating and breathing. Our Father had taken us through the roller coaster of both good and difficult times, but always He was there.

My prayer at this time was one of desperation. Please, Lord, please don’t let him die. Please, God, please. Oh please, God, don’t take this little boy.

I parked my car at the first available spot on the street, jumped out, and ran for the emergency room. I saw our local safety director exiting those doors, and when our eyes met, I knew my worst fears had been realized.

She stopped me in the middle of the street and said quietly, You can’t go in there, Paul. I can’t allow you.

Is he— I started.

"He’s dead, Paul. He didn’t have a chance. You have to come with me. You cannot go in there." She spoke firmly as she held me by the arm.

My whole body shuddered and my eyes welled with tears. How could this be? How could such a stupid accident happen? How could a school bus run over a kid? A kid who had just gotten off the bus? Why did God allow this to happen? Why? Why?

I stood in the middle of the street, frozen in place and looked to heaven. WHY? Frustrated and angry, I screamed at God at the top of my lungs, WHY? I don’t understand! I don’t understand!

The safety director tugged at my arm, but I couldn’t move. Why? I sobbed.

But I heard nothing. God was silent.

Or so I felt at that moment.

A single act of inattention by an experienced driver cost a family their son that afternoon. I wasn’t there. In fact, I was miles away when the accident happened. I didn’t know the family or the boy. I barely knew the driver.

Yet the ramifications of this tragedy did not stop with those at the scene.

Within just a few short weeks, much like Job, my wife, our nine children, and I lost everything we held dear—our home, our neighborhood, our friends and family. All that we had known our whole lives.

As always, God was at work, but how, I wondered, had we gotten here?

Pay heed, Job, listen to me;

be silent, and I will speak.

—Job 33:31 NRSVCE

PART I

FROM BIRTH TO REBIRTH

CHAPTER 1

GOD OUR FOUNDATION: AS SIMPLE AS BLACK AND WHITE?

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

The year was 1961. My younger brother John and I sat wide-eyed next to our father, Buddy, as he spoke with his old friend Monsignor Michael Francis McAuliffe. We sat in the rectory of St. Theresa Little Flower Church. The monsignor presented an imposing figure to two boys, aged seven and eight.

With all of its Irish, Italian, Mexican, and Polish residents, Kansas City, Missouri, has a large Catholic population; parishes abound across the city. In 1960 the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph had over eighty parishes, almost half of them in the county where we lived. Furthermore, most of these supported parochial grade schools.

With such an abundance of church and school opportunities, the rules for Catholics were simple: you attended the church and school in your neighborhood parish. In more universal terms, if you lived in Corinth, you did not attend the church in Ephesus.

Our parish was Annunciation, close to Thirty-First Street, and the parish we visited with my dad, St. Theresa Little Flower, was on Fifty-Seventh—five miles from where we lived, quite a distance in Kansas City terms. However, our dad’s friend was the pastor of St. Theresa’s, and I surmised many years later that Dad had brought John and me as leverage to strengthen his argument.

I know I’m asking you to bend the rules, Mike, my father pleaded, but I’m begging you to let my kids attend your school. No, we’re not moving into the parish. We’ll still be living in Annunciation.

What had brought my father to this plea were a couple of incidents that had taken place during the previous eighteen months.

In the late fifties, the first black family had moved into our neighborhood—a strange sight for a five-year-old who had never seen anyone who wasn’t white. My parents welcomed the young family and invited them to our church, and their kids quickly became our friends.

Our neighborhood, though, was immediately redlined. Economic and racist fears prompted for-sale signs across the landscape. My parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince their white friends not to run scared.

In the fall of 1959, I started first grade at Annunciation with a class that was about two-thirds white and one-third black. Just a year later, in the fall of 1960, I was the only white child in my second grade class. However, as a child, this didn’t bother me or any of my new friends at all. Kids simply don’t see color the way adults do.

But that brings us to the primary incident that prompted my dad’s actions.

A child does not have to be taught how to be happy or the ways of love. It is fear, hatred, and prejudice that have to be taught. And from the condition of the world we can see that unfortunately there are some very good teachers.

—Unknown

Annunciation was just half a mile from our house, and we walked it every day—snow, rain, or shine. In the spring of my second-grade year, five of my nine siblings made the daily trek. John was in first grade, two of our older sisters were in the fifth and sixth grades, and my brother, Joe, an eighth grader, was in charge of our group.

Our normal route was along Linwood Boulevard between Central High School, which my dad had attended many years earlier, and Central Park. As the neighborhood so quickly changed, so did the student population of the public high school. On one particular spring day, a fair number of the black high school boys leaving class at Central took exception to a group of white kids walking on the sidewalk.

I didn’t understand why these kids, much bigger and older than all of us, even my brother Joe, circled around us and why they were saying the things they were to my brother, but my eyes were wide with curiosity. Joe huddled us around and told us to keep walking. Then, one of the older boys hit Joe—hard. He was bleeding when he yelled at my sisters to take John and me and run!

We ran the three remaining blocks to our house as fast as we could. I looked back to see those boys continuing to hit my brother while he, greatly outnumbered, did his best to defend himself.

Now here we were, John and I, just weeks later, sitting in the rectory of St. Theresa’s, listening to our father sell his case.

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.

—Barbara Sher

Entering St. Theresa Little Flower as a third grader opened up a whole new world for me. My daily life as a white boy in an otherwise all-black neighborhood was very different from that of the white middle-class kids who were my new classmates. But I had good friends, close friends, in both of my worlds, and for me color was inconsequential.

I spent all of my weekends, summers, and time after school playing in the neighborhood, as all kids do: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, tag, snowball fights, hide-and-go-seek. As we got older, we spent more time riding bikes and skateboards and playing baseball, basketball, and football in our spacious yard. The fact that John and I were white and all our neighbors were black was not remarkable for us or our friends.

In our other world, we had school, recess, and school activities such as Boy Scouts with our white classmates. This was my world of study, Scout camp, spelling bees, being editor of the school paper, and trick-or-treating where greater affluence made the candy more generous.

It was not lost on me that with only two exceptions throughout my six years at St. Theresa’s, my classmates’ parents would not allow their sons to come over to our house to play. However, we could always go to their houses, and on some occasions we did.

Our church life was equally divided. As altar boys, we served Sunday Mass at either Annunciation, where our family attended, or at the chapel of St. Joseph’s Hospital. We preferred the chapel because altar boys were given a free breakfast in the cafeteria after Mass. In our other life, holy days with the processions and candles, weekday Masses before school, and especially funerals—which actually paid a bit of money—were at St. Theresa’s.

Living as a white family in a black world did entail certain unwritten rules for John and me. For example, we could walk unhindered to and from the church or hospital as long as we walked around Central Park and not through it. We understood that walking through the park made us fair game for the local gangs.

Gangs in the sixties were small, disorganized groups of kids our age and older. There were no gang signs or colors yet, only a reputation for getting into trouble. We had our run-ins, which cost both of us some pain, but we learned, as all kids growing up in our neighborhood did, that there was a time to fight and a time to run. Stay alert and measure your odds.

It was also okay for us to walk the half mile to the grocery store or to any of our nearby friends’ houses. We could not, however, randomly wander through the neighborhood, or we would face the consequences.

I was robbed for the first time when I was just ten, and I can’t really count the threats we faced. But those were never from our friends, only thugs who didn’t know us. Rather than scare me, those incidents made me angry. I was no different than they were, so I didn’t understand why my being white bothered them so much.

Our white world also had its challenges, but they were very different ones. St. Theresa’s was five miles from our home and we only had one car, which my dad took to work. My mother never learned to drive. Thus, our daily trip to school for most of the six years I attended was by city bus. We caught the Thirty-First Street bus in front of the bar at the end of our block and transferred to the Prospect bus in front of the St. Vincent de Paul store near St. Joseph’s Hospital.

By the mid-sixties, black Muslims often stood near the bus stop at Thirty-First and Prospect to hand out literature. We found it amusing, even as kids, that the sharply dressed young men shunned our white faces as if we didn’t exist. We made a point of smiling at them to see if we could get them to look at us.

We exited the Prospect bus at Fifty-Seventh Street and walked the remaining half mile to school, which meant that rainy and cold days were unwelcome sights. The distance also meant, aside from Scouts and church activities, that we didn’t participate in any organized sports or other extracurricular activities with those friends. Nor did we have ready access to the same summer activities, such as swimming and other water sports, as our white friends did.

My worlds were separate but equal for me, like parallel universes. I navigated through each with comfort and confidence. That was, until the end of my last year at St. Theresa’s, when both St. Theresa Little Flower and Annunciation scheduled their school picnics for the same day at the same place, which included the zoo at Swope Park.

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, Are you for us or for our enemies? Neither," he replied.

—Joshua 5:13–14 NIV

The day was warm and sunny, a perfect day for a school picnic. For those of us in eighth grade, it would be our last gathering together. Just as Kansas City had many parochial schools, so at that time there were many Catholic high schools scattered throughout the city. Unlike the parish schools, a student could choose his high school. I was going to Bishop Lillis High where my sisters attended, a classmate bound for the priesthood enrolled in St. John’s Seminary, two others to the nearby co-ed Bishop Hogan, another two to the all-boys Jesuit education of DeLaSalle, one to the prestigious Rockhurst, and so forth.

The picnic had started no differently than those in earlier years. I was walking through the zoo, a favorite place of mine, when I heard someone yelling, Fight! Fight! I went to investigate the commotion only to find a group of kids, divided by race, crowded around two boys, one white and one black, who were slugging it out. I recognized all of them as my friends.

I stared in disbelief.

I had been blind, perhaps intentionally, to the bigotry of my friends—those who were white and those who were black. Now, as my worlds erupted in the chaos of conflict, I couldn’t