O my son! My son, my son! If only I had died instead of you—O my son!
King David
“Where are you?”
It was about 10:00 a.m. on July 24, 2008. Greg was texting his son, Christopher, again, even though he’d just called him. Cathe had called Christopher as well; so had Brittany, his wife. All Brittany knew was that Christopher had left their home in Orange County at his usual time, and headed on the 91 freeway on his way to work at the Harvest church in Riverside. His station wagon was loaded with flats of water bottles, soft drinks, and other supplies for their two-year-old daughter’s birthday party that weekend. He was running a little bit late.
That Thursday morning, Cathe was leading a Bible study with Brittany and her mother, Sheryll. They were both new believers, and had been meeting weekly with Cathe for a couple of months, discussing the book of Philippians.
Greg was upstairs babysitting toddler Stella. They were playing on the floor with blocks, but Greg was preoccupied.
Where was his son?
Then he and Cathe started getting phone calls, but not from Christopher. From people at church telling them to just stay put. It was confusing. And ominous.
Thirty-five miles away, eastbound drivers on the 91 freeway honked their horns and strained to peer past the endless lines of cars in front of them. The rush-hour traffic, always heavy, was at a standstill. Sirens wailed as police cars and rescue vehicles tried to make their way toward the epicenter of the chaos. Helicopters spun low as traffic reporters relayed the news: there had been a terrible accident. A Dodge Magnum station wagon moving at a high rate of speed had rear-ended a slow-moving state highway truck clearing debris from the carpool lane in Corona. Smoke rose over the sweltering, gridlocked freeway.
One of the first responders to the crash scene found the driver’s license of the car’s sole occupant, and he recognized the last name of the victim. The emergency worker called the Harvest church . . . and now the only thing that Greg and Cathe knew was that some of their closest friends, the other pastors from the church in Riverside, were on their way to the Lauries’ home in Newport Beach.
Brittany called the California Highway Patrol, asking if there had been an accident on the 91 freeway. Maybe Christopher had just gotten caught in a huge traffic jam on his way to work. Brittany was put on hold. Then the dispatcher clicked back on and asked her to describe her husband’s car. When he heard her say it was a Dodge Magnum station wagon, all he told her was that yes, there had been an accident.
Still, the little group at Greg’s house hoped. Maybe he was just injured. Maybe it wasn’t what they feared. Maybe things would be okay.
Brittany grabbed her purse and headed out the front door; she said she had to drive to the freeway, now, and find her husband. Greg and the others rushed out with her, trying to stop her from driving when she was so distraught. Then they all saw a car approach and glide next to the curb in front of the house. It was the pastors from Riverside. They parked and walked slowly toward the porch.
Pastor Jeff Lasseigne led the way. His eyes filled with tears. He gently took Brittany’s arm, and then he managed one short sentence: “Christopher is with the Lord.”
In his catastrophic collision with the thirty-thousand-pound highway maintenance truck, Christopher had suffered devastating injuries to his head and chest. He had died instantly.
Greg fell in a crumpled heap on the porch, weeping. Cathe fell with him, her arms around him. Brittany was vomiting into the bushes as her mother tried to hold and steady her.
Devastation.
The next few days kaleidoscoped into a blur of old memories and breaking waves of fresh pain. Brittany’s health and pregnancy were the major concern. No one could sleep or eat or process the fact that Christopher—husband, father, brother, friend, son—was so abruptly gone.
Greg and Cathe wept, hugged, read Scripture out loud, prayed, and cried some more.
The days that followed were months long. Christopher’s funeral. Huge church services full of truth, tears, and praise to the God who walks with the grieving through the valley of the shadow. And sadly, because of the Lauries’ public profile, there was a lot of media coverage of Christopher’s death. It brought a new level of pain.
Reporters researched details about Christopher’s life that no one would want exposed on the front pages of a newspaper. They published parts of his driving record, which was less than pristine. They reported that Christopher had committed a felony: possession of Ecstasy, a controlled substance.
Bloggers got into the act, spewing hate. Greg made the mistake of reading their comments. The kinder ones blamed Christopher for his own death, said they were glad he died, and called him a privileged idiot, part of a hypocritical religious empire.
Greg felt like he’d been shot, then stabbed over and over and over.
As Greg grieved, he talked with a close friend, Jon Courson. Jon had lost his wife in a car accident when his children were very young; then, when his oldest daughter was sixteen, she too was killed in a car crash. Jon had been through the deep valley of the shadow. He knew the crushing grief of sudden loss.
“I’ll never have another son,” Greg told his old friend. “Brittany will eventually have a new husband; she’s young, and life will go on. But I’ll never have a new Christopher.”
“That’s true,” Jon told him. “But you will have a new Jonathan.”
He went on to say how Jonathan had always been in Christopher’s shadow, like a younger tree under a big oak. Now the Lord had removed the big tree . . . and Jonathan was going to flourish.
On the day of Christopher’s death, twenty-three-year-old Jonathan Laurie arrived home from work soon after his parents and sister-in-law had been told of his brother’s passing. A leader from the church had come to his office and told him what had happened. He was in a fog. He kept running his hands through his long blond hair, shaking his head. All he could hear in his mind was Christopher’s voice.
“When are you going to quit the double life?” he’d asked Jonathan. “When are you going to stop partying and come back to your faith? What’s it going to take?”
Jonathan knew his older brother was right. He thought of all the times he’d tried to stop drinking and smoking dope. He’d throw his stash out of the car window, resolving never to use again. The next day he’d be out in the street looking for the baggie he’d tossed. It might have been run over by a car, crushed and dirty, but he’d still use it. Like a dog going back to its vomit. Day after day after day. He was so tired and disgusted. But he could not stop.
The night before Christopher’s death, Jonathan had been out with friends, doing the party thing. On his blurry way home, he thought—again—about how miserable he really was.
Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow after I get off work, I’ll go talk with Christopher about all this.
Now it was tomorrow. And his brother was gone.
“What’s it going to take?”
Evidently, it had taken Christopher’s death.
Jonathan sat on his bed in his room, looking at pictures of his brother. He wept. Then he tore through the room, grabbing up all the drugs he’d hidden there, all the paraphernalia, the porn, and other stuff. He made a pile on the bed and got on his knees.
“God,” he said. “I am so sorry! You know that I’ve proven to You and myself that I’m incapable of doing this on my own. I can’t stop using this stuff in my own strength, so You’re going to have to help me. But I want to follow You and serve You for the rest of my life, however long that is.”
Jonathan would go on to a new life, his own Jesus Revolution, really. It started with repentance and a tearing down of the old. Then God built him up new. Jonathan married and had a family. He began to work at Harvest, doing anything he could to help build up the fellowship there. He’d heard the Bible all his life, but now he found that he could not study the Word of God enough; it was like he had a brand-new hunger for truth, at all costs. He began to teach small groups and meet with people who were struggling with their faith. His quiet steadiness was a comfort to many. And to his own surprise, like his father before him, people spontaneously began to call him “Pastor.”
Even as he celebrated the “new” Jonathan, Greg still grieved the loss of his older son. He often saw a montage of pictures in his head, seasons over the course of Christopher’s life. Some had been hard. But all of it, Greg knew, had been under the big umbrella of God’s grace.
Greg remembered six-year-old Christopher riding the waves on his miniature surfboard, his eyes huge at the sight of the surf. Christopher building towns made of LEGOs and coloring endless pages of drawings. Christopher playing on the floor with his GI Joe aircraft carrier, landing little jets on its plastic deck. Greg thought of the hard times, of rousing his son from a druggy sleep or pulling him out of some stupid bar.
And he thought of his son getting baptized in the Sea of Galilee just two months earlier during a church trip to Israel. Greg and the other Harvest pastors had been baptizing new believers one by one by one, and Christopher had been shooting photographs. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Greg saw Christopher hand his camera to someone else and wade over to Greg’s colleague, Pastor Jeff Lasseigne.
“I want to be baptized,” Christopher had told Jeff. He’d felt like since he had truly surrendered everything to Christ, he wanted to make a public affirmation that he had decided to follow Jesus for the rest of his life.
No one had known, of course, how short a time that would be.
“Buried in the likeness of Christ’s death,” Pastor Jeff had said back then, grinning as he put his arm around Christopher and dunked him into the ancient waters of the Sea of Galilee.
Then he had lifted him up, the sunlight shining on Christopher’s streaming head and the huge smile on his shining face.
“And raised in the likeness of His resurrection!”