My Friend Ben

Ben and I went to high school together and knew each other for those halcyon years. We shared many a class together, growing up in the days when the air was clean and teachers could talk about Christ’s death being a “redemption” to explain the meaning of the English word to us vocabulary-challenged students.

Time and tide, which wait for no man, separated us. Ben went to a university out of state; I didn’t leave the city limits for the groves of academe`. I hadn’t seen or heard from Ben or anything about Ben for a handful of decades. But then, out of the clear blue, there Ben was, after all these years--my friend Ben was on the Internet, along with his picture and a brief autobiography, a record of his life since way back when. I learned much from what he wrote:

He didn’t stop being an athlete when he went away to school; he got a free academic ride on his winged feet, earning a track scholarship which led to his pocketing gold medals along the cinder-track way.

He admitted that he wasn’t ready for college; reading, writing, and arithmetic came in a poor second to the social life his university offered. Scholarship-earner, relay runner who burned up the track, and party boy; all described my friend Ben.

One other word described him—failure. He flunked out of school and came back home. He went to a junior college, rebuilt his GPA, fought his way onto the Dean’s Honor List and then enrolled in our hometown university whose campus became his playground with the same out-of-state result. My friend Ben flunked again, having accumulated over 150 hours of credit and no degree.

After parting company with his education, my friend Ben chose to join a movement that was sweeping the county at the time—he began to inject, snort, and swallow whatever a card-carrying, hopped up hippie was supposed to inject, snort, and swallow. My friend Ben entered the movement of drugs and free love. Because of his university training, he already had a major in Partying and was now continuing his studies on the graduate level.

It was then that my friend Ben began his career as a serial monogamist and when all was said and done, he recently settled down with his fourth wife. Along the way he’s held 19 jobs ranging from school bus driver to counselor for emotionally disturbed children, to being a manager of a Wal-Mart. He’s worked for a couple of major airlines, driven an ambulance and handled payrolls. A true Renaissance man if ever there was one. My friend Ben even became an agriculturalist of sorts, a raiser of livestock, a grower of crops; at one and the same time, a Cain and Abel.

When I saw his photo on the Internet, before I read the story of his life, I could see it in his face, the posed picture he chose to be the picture his former classmates would see. It’s an odd picture, taken from a bit below chin level and my friend Ben’s eyes are looking just slightly down toward the camera, up close and personal; his head is slightly tilted upward.

We see both shoulders, but not all of them; the photo's cropped. In the background we see the branches of a tree. The right side of his face is sort of shadowy, the left side, sunlit. The eyes squint; there’s no smile on his slightly parted lips. It’s a portrait that says it all: my friend Ben is a Dorian Grey in 21st century living color. He’s older than his years; his eyes look sad, his weather-beaten face seeming to say, like Jacob before him, “All the years of my life have been few and painful.”

I turn from my friend Ben’s picture in sadness. The years of self-induced misery; the wrecked relationships, the jobs of a nomad, but no real career have taken their age-old toll. And, there were children along the way. The once and future athlete who punished his body with God knows what, he became the once good student who failed, succeeded, then failed again. The parties, the drugs, the women and the wives, one of whom he knew just a few days before marrying and then almost twenty jobs, none of which led to anything resembling a lasting career to bring a semblance of stability to a life spinning and spun out of control.

And there’s that question, “What if . . .?” What if Ben had become a disciple of Jesus during our high school days? What if Ben had pored over and internalized the book of Proverbs, which is a three thousand year-old warning about exactly the life he chose? What if he hadn’t accepted the invitation to Stupidity’s bread and water banquet in Proverbs 9? What if he’d gone to Wisdom’s meat and fine wine feast instead? I know the answer to that “what if”—that photo and self-penned bio would have been vastly different.

You might say, “Well, your friend Ben brought it all on himself,” and you’d be dead-on right. He chose his banquet hall and dined on its meager fare for over forty years. But it’s difficult to see that picture of Ben and not be saddened. It’s difficult to read the words he wrote and not think, “Oh, what might have been.”

But I’m not the only one touched by the poignant picture and the wearisome words: God, who wrote all the warnings in Proverbs, has wept over my friend Ben, knowing, in His omniscience, “Oh, what might have been.”

My friend Ben, my friend Ben, oh, Ben, what might have been.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

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