The phone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning, waking my wife and me from a restful holiday season slumber. Nothing good comes from that dreaded untimely phone call. The picking up of the receiver is always followed by either one cursing the thoughtless fool who has ruined your gentle sleep at the expense of a undeserving prank, or the cursing of your God for taking the life of a loved one.

How I wish I would have had the chance to curse the prankster that night instead.

The loved one was a nephew of the family, a 32-year-old young man whose aura always shone bright, whose love was always visible, and whose personal forecast always called for sunny days with a high of 72 degrees.

His medical career was blossoming and the road he traveled was paved with financial promise that would ensure the best in life in his later years. His social life was one that most of us would envy and his medical care-giving spirit touched the lives of many, so many in fact, that one wondered how the funeral home would be able to accommodate the throng of mourners.

In the group sharing exercise in which the instructor asks you which one of the 12 passengers on the ship deserve to receive one of the three life preservers, he would have unanimously been allotted one.

His life was taken by an unhuman-like vermin who doesn’t deserve another breath of life. This awful drama took place in the dark corner of a family restaurant in everyday suburbia. The initial plot of this drama was the attempted hijacking of my nephew’s car. Apparently my nephew denied this face of evil his car, thus the face of evil denied him his life with a bullet. The natural question in all of this is of course, why?

In high school literature we are taught the three types of literary drama, Man versus Man, Man versus Nature, Man versus Himself. In today’s high tech world in which we control our environment through the clicking of a remote control, enjoying the benefits of living in a peaceful sheltered nation in which life has become so predictable, we have forgotten about these dramas.

The hurricanes of 2005 showed us that nature indeed can be an overpowering adversary. The hundreds of new self-help books that are continually unveiled each year on the shelves illustrate that many of us continue to deal with our own internal struggles. The ringing of my phone loudly announced that the repercussions of Man versus Man are still prevalent even today.

There has always been a chaotic element of life. In previous centuries it showed its uninviting presence numerous times in the form of plagues, drought, tribal attacks, etc. The fact is that we cannot eliminate chaos from our lives. No matter how many programmers a company assigns to a new software release, there is always the presence of unwanted code which results in a system crash one day, or opens the door to a hacker.

Just as man will never be able to write computer code that is void of imperfection, he will never be able to eliminate the chaotic consequences of Man versus Man. What we can do is celebrate life. What we must do is not look for meaning from chaos, but continually look for and assign meaning to our present day lives. We must love and help to add meaning to the lives of those around us before chaos or the face of evil has the opportunity to implement its sinister plot.

And finally, if you have a nephew, give them a call today.

Brad Rudisail
Peachtree City, Ga.

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