“To be absent from the body is to be present with God.”
Scott Eizember’s final days were filled with talk of what was to come. While we both had questions, I have no doubt that we both had hope. I guess hope is often the best we can do. Of course, faith is the outcome of hope…even the assurance of things hoped for. In Scott’s final days, he developed hope…a lasting hope. So often, we try to make the hope of others match our hope. We want people to believe as we believe. We want people to pray as we pray. We want people to ascribe to the doctrines that what we ascribe to. The problem is that we is not me nor is we me. We are who we are. Everybody gets to hope on their own path. Above all else, the goal is to get there. Scott did.
“Imagine what it’s going to be like to see your mother.”
Scott Eizember’s mother committed suicide when he was 8 months old. To say that she left a gap in his life would be an understatement. For over six decades, Scott felt her absence. Every time a woman got close to him, Scott was terrified that she was going to leave him. Such terror filled him on a regular basis. He responded by consistently pushing women out of his life…sometimes in rageful ways. Even in his final days, I watched this juxtaposition play out. So, when we talked about him getting to meet his mother again. We weren’t just having a pie in the sky conversation. We were talking about the healing of the affliction that haunted him his entire life. When he was on the gurney, the thought of meeting his mother is one of the things that comforted him the most.
“Imagine what it’s going to be like…”
In addition to talking about Scott Eizember’s mother, we talked about the hope of interacting with his stepmother. After Scott’s mom died, his stepmother stepped in and became a pivotal maternal figure in his life. Unfortunately, Scott’s stepmother died when he was a teenager. This was another moment in his life where he felt abandoned by a pivotal woman in his life. After his stepmother’s death, Scott’s father started abusing him in increasingly violent ways. Over time, Scott had to run away from home. In the years after, his dad didn’t even look for him. It would seem that his dad didn’t even care. Before Scott was executed, I mentioned that he would get to see both his stepmother and his dad again as well. After a brief pause, Scott expressed his deep excitement about seeing his stepmother again. Then, he said he didn’t necessarily want to see his dad. Quickly, I added that the dad that he would meet wouldn’t be the same dad he left behind in his youth. I told him that all was going to be made well.
“I hope so.”
Not long after Scott was executed, someone who knew him in his early life sent me a picture of him when he was a kid. As I looked at the picture, I saw the same hope that I saw when I last saw him on the gurney. By now, I have no doubt that that hope has been made complete. Furthermore, I also have no doubt that my hope to see Scott made full will one day also be made complete. For hope never fails…
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