Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I long so much in these moments and always, but especially now, for the world that he promised, for the world that God promised, where there would be no tears, there would be no death, there would be no tragedy, there would be no lame, no pain, no hurt, no abuse, no hatred, no baseless hatred, just joy and peace fulfilled. And I can't tell you, I can't give you the answer on when or how, but the prayers that we pray for the restoration of our world take on an entirely new meaning from this place.
And how much.
How much I wish, and I know we all wish I could just.
Just talk to him and have him say, it's going to be okay.
It's going to be okay.
That's where faith and trust come in. And that's hard.
But you know what? Gabriel's accident has utterly broken my heart, but it has also awoken my. My heart.
We must be compassionate to one another, to take a moment to feel the loss of another human being in hurt and in sickness and in tragedy, and make a difference for them in whatever small ways we can in this little, small amount of time we have on this earth.
Baseless love, baseless hatred destroys worlds. Baseless love changes them.
Last Saturday, I gave a message about zeal.
And a message on cooperation and getting along. And, you know, the thing is, I didn't even really plan it. Just kind of like I haven't planned much of what I'm about to say, but I didn't plan it. But, you know, I then thought about the season that we're in this time that is called between the straits here, the three weeks.
It's this dreadful time leading up to the 9th of AV, the destruction of not one, but two temples.
It's a very, very, very sad time in history.
And it was baseless hatred that destroyed the temple.
It destroyed Israel. It was infighting among the people of Israel.
Zealots were a part of that, killing their own people.
All kinds of terrible things that caused that.
We say it was Rome, but the real idea is that had Israel been united, had Israel been serving one another and loving one another, that it wouldn't have happened. You know, maybe my message last week was a bit on the liberal side for people.
Some people describe it as Rodney King theology.
Can we just get along?
You know, Rodney King had a whole bunch of problems after 1991. He never really got his act together too much, but he was right about that.
Can we just get along?
The older I get, the more I understand where he was coming from. Regardless of what you think about Rodney King. And that's a statement I've asked myself a lot.
Can we get along?
And Saturday last week I left here in good spirits, had a good conversation with my friend Reggie Lal, who's leaving, shed some tears, and I left in good spirits because the next day we weren't able to do it on the 4th of July. So we had scheduled for the month previous a fifth of July, Eisner time at my parents house. And that was exciting and we were ready for it. And my parents and my brothers and my kids and my grandkids and my parents great grandkids were all there.
And as I left on Saturday here, like those moments in life that you just never see coming. I never saw it coming.
I had a joke with my nephew Gabriel as he walked in front of me and was carrying and popped a Coke. And I asked him, gabriel, did you put bourbon in that?
No, Uncle Dad, I didn't put bourbon in that.
Maybe next time.
It was a joke.
And within five minutes I heard Kelly yell my name.
And you know, I'm going to do my very best here, I promise you.
And I ran. And my brother Jordan, my youngest brother, had my nephew in his arms laying in the pool, didn't know what happened. I thought he had hit his head on the side or something.
But what happened was one of those milliseconds in time that changes everything.
That fast changes everything. A slip off the side of a pool that he's been in since he was eight days old and has jumped in a thousand times and he slipped and he misjudged his dive into the pool and his head hit the bottom.
Kelly was a foot away from him.
He came out of the water having a seizure. My brother got him very quickly. Upon getting over there to find him in my brother's arms, we quickly found out that he could not feel anything from his chest down.
And we all knew what that means in the natural.
Everyone's heard of accidents like this.
We got him out, the paramedics came and we did all that. And I can spare you all the details of what happened, but he's in the hospital. He has a fractured C6 vertebrae which controls everything from your forearms and your fingers from the chest down.
And he doesn't have any feeling there yet.
And I say yet because obviously medicine, I know medicine. I've been around medicine for 54 years. My dad's a doctor. I know how it works. You got to say what you got to say.
We don't cannot. It's not that we don't we simply cannot accept with all of the stories and all the rally that has come around and stories of people saying, you know, you know, these amazing things, we just. We don't believe it. And he doesn't.
He doesn't even know. Of course, we don't share.
You don't share things like that.
But he's 17.
He's a rising senior at ace.
He loves the Georgia Bulldogs, and he wants to be one. And when we saw him in the hospital on Wednesday, he said, you know, it's all.
It's okay as long as by October, I'm out of here so I can get my Georgia application completed and get ready to go to uga, because that's what he wants to do.
And I said, you know, it's going to be kind of tough, Gabriel.
You got to fight ahead of you. And he said, uncle D, you know me, I'm a fighter, and that's what we hold on to.
And I don't tell you any of that to.
You know, it's not about feeling sorry or anything. It's just simply very, very hard right now. And it's very, very hard to see past the facts. And we're praying from hope and from faith and from belief and everybody around us doing the same thing. And as I was sitting in my office Monday, just absolutely devastated after this had happened, just the afternoon before, I was looking for any comfort I could find in the word of God. And it's there, but it doesn't jump off the page in tragedy all the time. But I went that section that God put me toward in Matthew 9 and Mark 2, where it says some people came bringing to him a paralyzed man.
He was carried by four men. And when they couldn't get near Yeshua because of the crowd, they removed the roof where he was. And after digging through, they lowered the mat that the paralyzed man was laying on. And Yeshua, seeing their face, said, son, your sins have been forgiven. And there's a whole other thing that happened because the religious leaders, the ultra religious, the bad ones, they're not all bad, but the bad ones are there, and said, who does he think he is? Who does he think he is that he can forgive sins? And Yeshua said, okay, fine. Which is easier, to forgive sins or to tell him to get up and walk? Okay, fine, get up, he said, I tell you, get up. Take your mat and go home at once. The man got up, took his mat, walked before them all. They were all astonished, glorified God saying, we've never seen anything like this.
That's the story that we're holding onto.
But you know something?
When I was, when I read it, when I read that, I so much wanted him to be here.
So I could take his hand and say, we need you.
You can just touch him. I would do anything, I would do anything for him to walk in the doors.
We could go.
We could go to the hospital, he could walk in and he could say it and it could be over.
But, you know, I thought about.
I thought about those guys, the men with their friend on a mat.
Why did they do that?
They did it because they had compassion.
They wanted something was wrong with their friend. They wanted him to be better.
They wanted him to get healed.
He suffered in his condition and they felt that and they knew that and they knew that Yeshua could change it.
And you know what? Yeshua shared their compassion.
And he always did.
You read that section in Matthew 9.
He's looking at the people and he felt compassion for them because they were lost. And when his friend Lazarus died, he cried and he felt sorry for his sisters and he hurt inside.
He was amazing at seeing people.
He felt compassion for them. He wept all of these things. He felt pain. Deep, deep pain.
And I knew he could feel ours.
And I wanted him to be here.
My nephew. His name is Gabriel.
It's a Hebrew name drawn from the roots for strength and the name of God. And it means.
God is my strength. That's what Gabriel means.
And little could his parents have ever known when they chose that name, how much he was. Would need it.
God is my strength.
He needs that now.
You know something? In my line of work, I'm on the receiving end of a lot of bad news.
I am one of the first calls.
Two weeks ago, we buried a three month old Eliana Henderson.
A baby.
And people have accidents and people get sick and all of these things happen.
And you can become very callous to it because it's your job.
Callous to the pain and the devastation and all of the things that people are dealing with.
I'm guilty of that because it's my job. And it breaks my heart to say, you know how easy it is to say, I'll pray for you.
I'll pray for you. It's easy for me to show up and find words and do a funeral and sit with the family and all good things. But when it hits you at home, when it hits you at home, there's absolutely nothing like the pain of tragedy.
And we all know it.
And Yeshua felt, I believe what we're feeling.
I Believe he felt that all the time.
What we feel, and you know what I say, selfishly, we're not humanly capable of that.
We would not be able to live a life if every bit of bad news we heard hurt as bad as it does when it hits us directly. We're not built like that.
But Jesus was.
And when it says he felt it all, he felt it all.
But it really made me think,
[00:17:13] Speaker B: in
[00:17:14] Speaker A: a world of tragedies, we should feel it more.
We really should. And these two, just two lessons.
I long so much in these moments and always, but especially now, for the world that he promised, for the world that God promised, where there would be no tears, there would be no death, there would be no tragedy, there would be no lame, no pain, no hurt, no abuse, no hatred, no baseless hatred, just joy and peace fulfilled. And I can't tell you, I can't give you the answer on when or how, but the prayers that we pray for the restoration of our world take on an entirely new meaning from this place.
And how much.
How much I wish, and I know we all wish I could just.
Just talk to him and have him say, it's going to be okay.
It's going to be okay.
That's where faith and trust come in. And that's hard.
But you know what? Gabriel's accident has utterly broken my heart, but it has also awoken my heart.
We must be compassionate to one another, to take a moment to feel the loss of another human being in hurt and in sickness and in tragedy, and make a difference for them in whatever small ways we can in this little, small amount of time we have on this earth.
Baseless love, baseless hatred destroys worlds. Baseless love changes them.
To just show up, just be there.
The way that he did, the way that he demonstrated it for us. And listen, I'm going to say it.
Honest before God, honest before you. I'm angry.
I am angry at God.
And he can handle it. I don't know what he's going to do, though.
And even in my anger, I trust him.
He didn't cause it.
It's not even so much that he allows these things, but he knows them and he has known them from the beginning.
And part of the beauty of Judaism that I love about all of our emphasis on the soul is that he knew.
And Gabriel Eisner soul was chosen for this mission, And his name was chosen for this mission.
So all we can do is see how he walks it out.
And I mean it walks it out.
So to everyone else out there, everyone in the seats in the world.
If you're hurting. I feel for you.
I do. I feel you. I'm sorry.
I hurt with you for whatever it is that you're hurting from.
I'm trying desperately to be a leader now who can model compassion to reclaim that through tragedy.
Gamzula, Tovah, the sages say this too is for the good.
It's impossible to see it, But I believe it.
And so whatever it is, whatever the challenge, I feel you. I feel with you.
And if we can do anything, we will.
More than just I'll pray for you.
We will do that. But we'll feel, feel, take a moment to just be genuine about that. So I'm asking.
I ask for your prayers for Gabriel Asher Eisner, son of Jonathan and Katie Eisner. To everyone who has ever received any bit of benefit from being a part of Shalom Macon, please invest that gratitude into prayers for my nephew.
I know God is his strength, and I know God is with him. And I know God is with you, whatever you're struggling through, whether you feel it or not.
And as I said, when you ask me to pray, you can believe. I will pray, I will feel. I will do my best to be there forever, however I can. I wish I could promise forever. That's another world.
But let's have the kind of zeal that I talked about last week, beyond tragedy. Zeal for the ways of God.
Zeal to love people in the way that God has told us. Baseless hatred.
It destroys and it's still destroying. And the antidote is love.
Just because.
Baseless love.
And take a moment, my friends, when you look around at a hurting world, to feel the way Messiah felt, even if just for a moment.
But he didn't languish in his misery.
He got busy fixing and doing. And we're not him.
But he gave us a holy spirit that should inspire good within us.
To do good, to be good.
And always, always be, my friends, in prayer for the day that is coming when every tear shall be wiped away.
Shabbat Shalom.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: I'm Darren with Shalom Macon. If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you subscribe to our channel. Next, make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch.
Last, head over to our website to learn more about Shalom Macon, explore other teachings and events, and if you're so inclined, contribute to the work that we're doing to further the kingdom. Thanks for watching and connecting with. Shalom, Macon.
