Father, Son, and Brother

By Gary R. Hoffman

Yet if there is an angel at their side, a messenger, one out of a thousand, sent to tell them how to be upright.

~Job 33:23

My son Mike and I had a rather tumultuous relationship ever since the day my ex-wife called and said, "Come get him. I can't do a thing with him."

I was thrilled to get my son back and looked forward to using my own parenting methods on him. Mike had gotten into trouble with the law on several occasions. On the day I picked him up, I told him I would not tolerate such things. If he got into trouble with the law while he lived with me, I would let the law handle it. Of course, being fourteen years old and knowing all there was to know about the world, he didn't believe me. After living with me for two months, he found himself incarcerated in a juvenile facility in our county.

This started a long string of events where he would promise to stay out of trouble and then go right back to his old ways. We had some great times together and some times of terrible grief. When he was thirty years old, he was working for a man who cut logs for a living. One night Mike took off in the man's pickup truck that had two chainsaws in the back along with some other logging equipment. None of us had any idea where he went. Word was put out to law enforcement agencies, but Mike and the truck could not be located.

My lifestyle had changed for the better, and I was traveling in a motor home and selling jewelry at various events to make a living. While I was selling at an event in Quartzsite, Arizona, I got word through a long grapevine that Mike had been killed in an accident in California. I found out he had married a woman who had two children, and they had another child of their own. The youngest baby had stayed with her grandparents while her daddy, mom, and two brothers went to the store. All four of them lost a battle with a train at an unmarked crossing on their way home. I had a granddaughter I had never met or even knew existed. And she was an orphan.

I was about seven hundred miles away from where my son was going to be buried, so I took off the next morning to attend the funeral. I got into the small town on the morning of the second day of my trip, arriving just forty-five minutes before the funeral was to start. A man met me at the door of the church and explained that he was an assistant pastor for the church and folks called him Brother Bob. He said my son's wife's family had requested that he help me through the whole process since I had never met any of these people and certainly didn't know them. I hadn't even know until three days before that my son had gotten married and was a father.

The coffins were in a side room off the main sanctuary of the church. They were left there so the family could spend some time alone with their loved ones before the main service. Brother Bob was a rather short, stout man, but he did manage to hold up my three-hundred-pound body when I almost collapsed at the first sight of Mike in a coffin.

He knew a great deal about Mike's past. The one thing I remember him telling me was not to beat myself up over everything that had happened in our relationship. There were many other factors that led to this moment, and all of them were not my fault. He quoted several passages from the Bible that were comforting, and he prayed with me. He got me seated in the sanctuary before the service started and then left to attend to some other duties.

After the service in the church, we all went to the cemetery for a graveside ceremony. After that, we returned to the church for a huge meal that had been prepared by volunteers. After I finished eating, I sought Pastor Paul Simmons and thanked him for the services he had performed. I asked him where I might find Brother Bob so I could thank him for his help. He got a quizzical look on his face. "Who?" he said.

"Your assistant pastor, Brother Bob."

"I'm sorry, but we only have one assistant pastor here, Brother Luke. He's a young, tall man with sandy red hair."

I went to each member of the family and asked if they had seen this man who called himself Brother Bob. I said he was short, stout and wearing a black suit, white shirt, and a black, string western-style tie. He was also balding. None could remember seeing him and none of them said they asked anyone to be there to specifically help me. I told all of them I was talking with him in the side room off the sanctuary before the service. Still no one remembered seeing him. I guess I was the only one, but he was as real to me as this keyboard I'm typing on.

On my way back to Quartzsite, I had a lot of time to think. I came to one conclusion. All of my son's in-laws had been friendly and helpful, but Brother Bob was sent especially to help me through this whole horrible process. I guess angels come in all shapes and sizes. They don't have to have wings or golden halos. They can be short, stout, and balding, but they can still be angels.

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