Good morning…

This holiday season, I am praying with my whole heart for two Macon families I will never meet. One family is forced to bury their beautiful eighteen year old daughter today at 3:00 pm. The other family lives on to support their own beautiful daughter, an eighteen year old responsible for the accidental death of her best friend.

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015, the OnlineAthens section of the Athens Banner-Herald reported: “A Macon woman was killed early Tuesday after she was run over by a car she was helping to push out of the mud. Murray Nixon, 18, was killed when she and a friend, an 18-year-old University of Georgia student, attempted to push a 2009 BMW 325i out of the grass and mud at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Macon, according to the Macon Telegraph. The car rolled back on Nixon, where she was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office. The accident occurred just before 3:30 a.m. The car became stuck after the UGA student drove off the parking lot and into the grass, according to a release from the Bibb County Sheriff.”

The sad, sad story came home to our dinner table that Tuesday night as our beautiful eighteen year old daughter shared a snap chat story from her phone of the two best friends enjoying their evening together less than twenty-four hours earlier, just before the unthinkable, life-altering accident. My daughter will room at college next year with a girl from Macon, who is a friend of both of the young people involved in the accident, and many of my daughter’s high school friends know the UGA student personally, the beautiful eighteen year old whose life will never be the same.

I pray that God’s love channels through friends and family to buoy the grieving, today and in the grueling days ahead. I pray that God’s strength rises up from inside this surviving young woman, who is bound to experience lasting repercussions. I pray that the many touched by this tragic death will seek and find solace in the ever present God who is with us in every day life, the same loving God who is with us from death into everlasting life.

After Christmas morning the true gift lives on: “‘A virgin will have a baby boy, and he will be called Immanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us,'” Matthew 1:23 (CEV),

Sue