Not My Will

By Scott Myers

“I’ve been told that losing a child is the hardest event a person will ever have to endure.

I get why they say this. Death is hard enough to accept, even when a person who has lived a full life dies of old age. When we think someone was ‘taken before their time,’ it’s even harder. And it truly is difficult to lose a child. I mean, mind-numbing, soul-scrubbing hard. Trust me.”

— from Not My Will

At once vulnerable and compelling, this artfully crafted spiritual memoir offers fresh hope, challenge and inspiration in the midst of crushing grief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664261778

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Copyright © 2022 Scott Myers.

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of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author

and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of

the information contained in this book and in some cases, names

of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International

Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973 1978 1984 2011 by Biblica,

Inc. TM. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version® Copyright ©

1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6176-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6177-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022905737

WestBow Press rev. date: 4/25/2022

"Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me;

nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done."

¹

— Jesus

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1     The Seeds Of Thriving

Chapter 2     Overflowing Cups

Chapter 3     Wobbling

Chapter 4     Everything Is Not Ok

Chapter 5     Respite

Chapter 6     Uprooting

Chapter 7     Transplanting

Chapter 8     Waiting Rooms

Chapter 9     When Can We Go Home?

Chapter 10   Life’s Breath

Chapter 11   Descent Into Fog

Chapter 12   The Missing Man Formation

Chapter 13   The Light Of Day

Chapter 14   Rebuilding

Chapter 15   After-Action Report

Chapter 16   Angle Of Repose

Epilogue

Endnotes

Prologue

I wish you could have known my son, Will.

In fact, when I set out to tell this story, I thought it would be mostly about Will. Perhaps if I could tell you about him, you would have loved him too, and you would have celebrated him with us, and you would have been changed by him, like we were.

I wanted to tell you stories about an old soul who grasped faith better as a child than I do after five-plus decades.

Like the time we went to Sunday-after-church-dinner-with-friends at a local restaurant—Will was only three or four years old—and most of us sat together, as one would expect on such an occasion, but Will parked himself alone at a nearby table.

Will, Shelly called to him, you know you can sit over here with us, right?

I’m OK over here.

But we don’t want you to be all by yourself.

Mom, I am never alone. God is always with me.

What kind of kid says that kind of thing? My son. Or, perhaps more accurately than my son, the child entrusted to us for a time, so that we might know him and love him and be changed by him.

But as I began to write, I found myself falling desperately short in my attempt to tell Will’s story. I can only recount events as viewed from my own perspective, which necessarily means that I can really only tell my story, as it intersects with Will’s.

You should know, too, that my memory is not to be trusted; my hindsight is far worse than 20/20. I needed help in reconstructing events, and I seem to have lost the distinction between the internal and the external: Which things did I work out in only my mind? How many things passed between my God and me, but were never spoken aloud?

Having sufficiently warned you about my hindsight cataracts, let me tell you a story…

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The Seeds of Thriving

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? ²

— Leif Enger

Choosing a story’s beginning point is a little tricky. You can start when a kid is born, and track his life from his entry into the world, as marked by the violent beauty of childbirth. But everyone’s story goes back further than that.

You can start, I suppose, with a lineage, like some of the Gospel writers do. So-and-so begat thus-and-such, on down the line, or back up the line to Noah if you’re really ambitious and believe in that sort of thing.

But the seeds of Will’s story quite literally begin with how his parents met.

I was playing in a rock and roll band whose singular gig was a church youth rally. Granted, we rallied every Friday, so it was the steadiest unpaid gig we could have asked for. We played mostly cover tunes, and we considered ourselves pretty good, given the constraints of such inconveniences as real jobs.

After a particularly loud and rowdy set (by church standards), a girl came up and introduced herself to me. Nothing fancy, just Hi, I’m Shelly. I politely shook her hand, and immediately found something else to do. She was trouble.

Rule Number One for a single twenty-something working with church youth: don’t let yourself be attracted to any girl in the youth group. Should you find yourself in violation of Rule Number One, invoke Rule Number Two: don’t tell anyone. Certainly not the object of your infatuation.

Days later I took a tenuous step. So, I asked my friend Pat (who is still one of the best guitar players I know). This girl Shelly—is she new? I met her last week. You see how subtle I was.

Why? Do you like her? Apparently Pat did not appreciate my subtlety.

At this point we should skip over the hemming and hawing part, and the considerable mockery (at my expense) from Pat and the other guys in the band who knew what I did not: Shelly was NOT a high school student. She was in fact new to town, and an adult volunteer with the youth group, complete with a college degree and everything, and most importantly for the already-smitten—she was fair game.

So yes, Shelly and I first met at church. Fitting, you might say, considering the role God plays in this drama.

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Hit the fast forward button. That’s what Shelly and I did. We knew after a few weeks of dating that we were both all in. I proposed marriage on top of a castle (no, really), we married within the year (October 12, 1996), and before the next year had passed we had already graduated from Newlyweds to Parents.

Jake entered the world healthy and happy in August of 1997.

I have a photograph of us in the hospital birth center—mother, father, child. The picture has a classical quality to it, as though it could be the subject of a painting by one of the Old Masters. It would be oil on canvas, almost crèche-like, with hovering angels emphasizing the mythical, supernatural significance of the occasion.

One of the hovering angels is our pastor, a dear friend and mentor who visits us in the hospital because that’s the kind of guy he is, and he calls attention to the weight of the occasion:

Makes you see the Incarnation in a whole new way, doesn’t it?

I am only partially attuned to his meaning. I understand the Incarnation to indicate God becoming man, that God in perfect humility set aside all the trappings and benefits of eternal glory to enter into time and space as we know it, to be introduced into His beloved world in the same violently beautiful way as the rest of us: childbirth. The shunning of radiance in favor of the donning of skin.

But I’m not sure yet if my son’s birth has made me see the Incarnation in a whole new way. I do, however, begin to wonder if He feels about me the way I feel about my newborn son. And I feel the immediate weight of fatherhood—they’re going to let us take him HOME?

They do, and I, in a tradition observed by every new father, drive Jake and my wife to our humble home VERY slowly.

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Parenting was not nearly as difficult as everyone made it out to be. The initial stages of sleep deprivation tend to scare off many first-time parents, but this portion of Jake’s life lasted only a few weeks. He slept through the night at two months of age. We naturally attributed this to our exceptional parenting skills, but it turns out he was just good at sleeping. We used to brag that we could still go on movie dates—Jake simply went with us and slept in his ‘bucket.’

And as Shelly is fond of saying, the first baby has to be easy. That’s how you get suckered into wanting more babies.

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Some risks are worth taking, even when failure is probable. Bumps