Star Tribune: Faith sustains police officer, family through his painful recovery
An uplifting story on the surface but their explanation of their faith doesn’t make sense to me and I think it’s harmful in the long run. The officer said, “I know that there has to be somebody that helped me, a superior being … I was saved for something.” His reaching out to others is giving his life meaning, and so his wife believes, according to the reporter, that “encouraging others in that way may be one reason her husband lived.”
This is backwards. Wrongheaded, even. If this is true, then God had no use for all the cops who were killed in the WTC attack. And if this guy dies from complications of being shot, it means God was done with him. And the spouse of the next cop who’s killed in the line of duty should presume that God considered only having them be injured but didn’t foresee that they’d live a life of ‘encouraging others’ so might as well let the poor sucker die.
A better approach is to say, “I somehow managed to live through this, so what gives my life meaning now is my outreach to others…. I feel God’s strength in a way I never felt before, He’s helping me learn to be different, to see things in a new light that I was blind to before…”