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    Unfinished Business… with God: Finding Hope When All You See Is Pain
    Unfinished Business… with God: Finding Hope When All You See Is Pain
    Unfinished Business… with God: Finding Hope When All You See Is Pain
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Unfinished Business… with God: Finding Hope When All You See Is Pain

    By Daniel C. Diaddigo

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    About this ebook

    If God exists, where is he in all of this pain? This is one of the most pressing questions in life. If you wish a biblical perspective on this question, I recommend Dans book.

    Walt Henrichsen, author and mentor to men

    This book will inspire, encourage and challenge you on your journey.

    David H. Wills, President National Christian Foundation

    Dan uses his personal journey and engaging stories to sort through lifes most challenging moments. In the process, he exposes our conflict with God and our opportunity for healing.

    Ron Dun, co-CEO of Alliance Flooring

    This story has a Center and its not me. Im a fringe player in a larger drama that changed the lives of a handful of people forever.

    Stories like this happen every day; so in a sense, this story is not unique - but it is personal.

    Very personal.

    Tragedy is always personal to someone.

    Thats why I wrote this book.

    Ive done my best here to give you a window into one mans thoughts toward God during a season when God didnt make sense. It is my prayer for you that these pages will serve you well in your own journey, and that God would somehow reach through the words to draw you to Himself.

    You may not find in this book the answers to your questions, but you will find permission to process your pain out loud and encouragement to finish your business with God.

    Daniel C. Diaddigo

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWestBow Press
    Release dateJul 30, 2010
    ISBN9781449703547
    Unfinished Business… with God: Finding Hope When All You See Is Pain
    Author

    Daniel C. Diaddigo

    Daniel C. Diaddigo is a husband, father, businessman, and author whose life mission is to encourage people to walk with God.

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      Book preview

      Unfinished Business… with God - Daniel C. Diaddigo

      Acknowledgments

      Thank you to …

      Those who helped shape this book:

      Ron Dunn, for your encouragement and tenacity

      Walt Henrichsen, for patiently fielding my ridiculous questions

      Cindy Barnwell, a really cool and underpaid editor

      Ben Ortlip/Kaleo Ranch and Bruce Witt, for your insight

      My Family:

      Kelle, Rebekah, Caleb, Joshua, and Jonathan, you make today worth doing

      Kari and Sandra, for your willingness to let us look inside

      Others:

      Boyd Bailey, Mike Gleason, Doug Mahoney, Andy Stanley, David Wills, Matt Wilson, and John Woodall, for your invaluable feedback.

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Why I Wrote this Book

      Dust

      God

      Stories

      Whispers

      Wisdom

      Fear

      Echoes

      Hope

      Psalm 90

      For Discussion

      Endnotes

      Notes:

      Why I Wrote this Book

      This story has a Center—and it’s not me. I’m a fringe player in a larger drama that changed the lives of a handful of people forever.

      Stories like this happen every day; so in a sense, this story is not unique—but it is personal.

      Very personal.

      Tragedy is always personal to someone.

      That’s why I wrote this book.

      I’ve done my best here to give you a window into one man’s thoughts toward God during a season when God didn’t make sense. It is my prayer for you that these pages will serve you well in your own journey and that God would somehow reach through the words to draw you to Himself.

      You may not find in this book the answers to your questions, but you will find permission to process your pain out loud and encouragement to finish your business with God.

      Dust

      You turn men back to dust …

      Life as I understood it ended on November 19, 2003. Death will do that. It will interrupt life. So will the phone call that delivers the message you never want to hear.

      Don’t even joke like that, honey. It’s not funny, I said.

      In my ear quavered a tiny voice belonging to my daughter, Rebekah, then eleven years old. At first, I mistook her panic for giggling, like she was delivering the punch line to some terrible joke—but my gut told me this was no drill. This was real. I felt like I was watching a reel-to-reel movie when suddenly the film broke and the screen splashed white to the sound of rhythmic flapping.

      Uncle Kurt died, she said.

      Uncle Kurt. My brother-in-law and friend. Gone. Kurt. Father of five. Tommy and Sandra’s son. Kelle’s brother. Kari’s husband.

      Kurt was thirty-eight.

      My mind raced to Kurt from every angle, each time with the same result. Instead of finding Kurt, I saw the place he once occupied, now an empty cutout, a silhouette burned against life’s landscape. That’s the place Kurt should have been. But he’d been ripped from the scene, replaced by a hole of a memory which shrunk even while I stared through it into forever.

      I will never fully grasp the depth of the scars Kurt’s departure has left on the souls of those closest to him. I do not know what that sort of abandonment feels like to a child or what it is like to wake up to an empty space in the bed each morning. I’ve never experienced a four-year-old’s night terrors, my niece’s fear of crowds, or what it is like to lose your only son. I can only imagine what life will be like for Tanner, whose entire memories of his dad could be pasted on a Post-It note.

      When something like this hits so close to home, you lose your filters. Your heart shrieks in protest, and your mind is powerless to edit or temper its wailing. As much as you want to make sense of the tragedy in a cognitive, rational way, you can’t. Still, your mind works overtime, gathering and sorting facts, trying to organize them into a pattern or to shape them into meaning.

      What happened? When did it happen? Why …

      It’s right there, somewhere around why, that the mind yields to the heart for interpretation. Why pulls you to another place, a place past the bookends of your days. We know intuitively that it sits somewhere outside our ability to grasp with any clarity. There’s something huge about the question of why.

      What, where, and how are logistical questions we can answer by observing the facts of the matter. Why points us to an altogether different place. To answer the question of why, we must rely upon the notion that there exists an explanation higher and broader and beyond ourselves.

      In front of why, I feel suddenly small. My incapacity to bring order to the chaos shoves itself to the front of my thinking. Here, where I surrender to my smallness, I reach for God, and I begin to soberly assess my own place in the scheme of things—my place before others, my place before God, my place in time.

      Fade to black

      This scene keeps racing through my mind. It looks like a movie trailer. I’m in a foxhole with a bunch of soldiers. The sounds of war pound my temples, and explosions split the night. Kurt and I are stretched diagonally against the dirt, our heads just below the lip of the trench. We have a wrinkled map stretched between us, and we are discussing strategy. I press my hand against my earpiece and nod to Kurt. Our coordinates have been confirmed. It’s time to move out.

      Under the glow of artillery fire, Kurt and I climb out of the trench and motion for the soldiers to follow. This is for our kids. This is for the Kingdom. This is for freedom.

      No sooner do my feet find their footing outside the trench than I hear a whistling sound. A flash of light, an explosion—then everything goes dark.

      Fade to black.

      When I come to, I’m in a medical tent, surrounded by doctors. The beeping I hear belongs to a machine monitoring my vitals. The sounds of war, though distant to my ears, thunder in my head. I struggle to lift myself from the table to get back to the fighting, but I am restrained. An artillery shell landed right next to me, I learn. I’m lucky to be alive, I’m told. Everyone is sorry about my friend, Kurt, I hear. The hole in my side continues to bleed. I need some rest, I’m instructed.

      The emotions that surged when I lost my friend were not the sort I might have anticipated. I would have expected I’d feel anger or even bitterness toward God, but I didn’t. Not immediately, at least. More than anything else, I felt interrupted.

      The question my heart wrestled with was, "Why now?" In other words, I want to know why God didn’t allow Kurt to travel a little farther down the road before He took him home—why He didn’t allow Kurt to stay in the battle longer. Kurt was on the cusp of exploding into the man God created him to be. He had uncovered his calling and squared with his past—a dangerous combination for Kingdom work. He was turning the page to a new chapter in his life. I’d never known him to be more focused. Kurt was developing deep wisdom—the kind you typically find etched into the lives of older men.

      Behind the grill

      A few weeks before Kurt’s death, he and I had taken our boys camping. We spent hours one afternoon slouched in our folding chairs, crunching potato chips, and dreaming out loud about the future we hoped to shape for our children. Our conversations wandered between catnaps and Diet Cokes. Meanwhile, our sons practiced slip knots and chopped wood with a reckless abandon, of which their mothers would most certainly have disapproved. By the time the sun slipped low in the sky, the boys had constructed a teepee out of tarp, rope, and wood, and Kurt and I had penciled answers in the blanks to some

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