What Could Have Been

An old friend of mine died this week. And when I say old, I mean I hadn't seen or spoken to Jack since I was 16 or 17. We were never even that good of friends. But nevertheless, I call him my friend.

I met him in the stage of my life where I was just beginning to find that people liked me, that I really enjoyed making new friends, and even that some of the male gender was attracted to me. Jack was one of this oddly, self-proclaimed cool crowd. Rebellious but somewhat charming. If he and his buddies started using a new phrase, everyone else did too. And everyone knew who they were.

One of his friends, a completely uninhibited guy who loved attention, decided he had a crush on me one summer. He didn't hide it by any means, but flattered and distracted me as often as possible. It was amusing to his friends, so Jack and his group tended to hang around me. Of course I was very different than them, and usually didn't know how to respond, so I laughed a lot. I was a "good girl" and they knew it, and loved to play it up. Say that I was too good for them. That that's why I wouldn't go out with his friend.

Of course, I did like the attention. And I liked what I saw when Jack and his friend let their guard down. When they weren't trying so hard to keep their too-cool-for-everything image, they were real people that cared about real things. It just didn't happen very often. They had been hurt too much to let their guard down, and no one had ever given them much to trust in.

I lost touch with Jack and his friend. Some of the others I heard about over the years and saw every now and then. Some of them grew up and realized the lifestyle they had been living wasn't the kind they wanted to live.

But it seems Jack never realized that. Or if he did, he was never able to leave that lifestyle. Maybe he never had enough people around him to tell him otherwise, to remind him of who he could be and the kind of life he could live, to love him and be worthy of his trust. Maybe he never understood the fullness of God's grace and love, and so he kept trying to fill his soul with anything else. Maybe he thought that was as good as life gets...

Right now people are sitting in church building, listening to someone talk about Jack. Maybe they're talking about that chraming smile. Maybe they're talking about the friends he left behind. Maybe they're cursing Satan for telling him the lies, for ensnaring him in the tangles of the drugs that took his life. Maybe they're wondering what could have been. Oh, what could have been.