Some twelve feet from the fallen men, and from the weapon (laid against the Cross), and at a perpendicular to the weapon, I knelt.
Between the fallen men and the weapon, and between the weapon and Luther Dunphy, and between Luther Dunphy and the fallen men, in a line might be drawn establishing a triangle of (uneven) sides and at its peak the Cross of Crucifixion you would want to say was accidental in the asphalt and would never have been detected by any human eye, except for the intervention of the Lord guiding my hand.
I am a big man and I am (no longer) a limber man. My knee joints often ache, it is said with the onset of arthritis. The bones of my hips and the muscles of my lower back often ache but in defiance of such pain I never complain to my employer nor to my fellow roofers nor do I suggest any sensation of pain on the job or at home (except if my dear wife notices, and it is not possible to dissemble to her who knows me so well through sixteen years of marriage) and in the aftermath now of the assassination of the abortion provider and his accomplice I took care to kneel with my arms uplifted (though now heavy-seeming, tremulous and numb) to await the arrival of the Muskegee police.
Dear God I commend my soul to You. If it is Your will, I will be joined with you in Heaven this very hour.
Bowed my head with shut eyes, and eyes rimmed with tears. For I understood that my (mortal) life as Luther Dunphy had ended, in the asphalt driveway of the Women’s Center on this second day of November 1999. My life as a loving Christian husband and father and a private citizen of Muskegee Falls, Ohio. That I was born in Sandusky, Ohio, on March 6, 1960, and would die now, in this place, seemed to me clear for I had “read” this inscription on a grave marker but the night before. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
In deep prayer they would find me with my arms upraised in the posture of surrender and my hands visible, holding no weapon. Deep-immersed in prayer “as if entranced” but “cooperative” (as it would be reported) as Broome County police officers approached with drawn weapons.
And in my heart I pleaded with the Lord to give me sanctuary with Him in this hour. Pleaded with the Lord, let me make an end of this now. For I will be their captive, and I will be tried in their socialist atheist court of law, that has forsaken You. And I will be jeered at and ridiculed and in the end, in their atheist court I will be sentenced to death. But it will be their way of death which will not be speedy. Truly I understand it will be protracted and shameful and it may be, I will not be strong enough to withstand despair. For a sentence of Death Row will wear away at my soul, in the way that a great abyss is worn out of rock. Pleaded with the Lord in His mercy to allow me to make some threatening gesture to the police upon their arrival, that they would shoot me down where I knelt. That they would execute me in a barrage of bullets that there would be three of us laid lifeless on the asphalt driveway on that morning as a sign to all the world, the abortion butchery must stop.
But the Lord did not give this permission to me, in His inscrutable wisdom. Though the Lord had been close to me as the heart beating in my rib cage now the Lord had withdrawn from me to His mountain, to observe His servant and His soldier in the aftermath of His mission.
And so, I did not die that morning. Instead, the Lord caused a numbness to pass into me, of utter submission. I was handcuffed and taken into the custody of the State of Ohio from which, in my lifetime, I will never be released.
TURNS
A life is a matter of turns. As I call them.
A turn is a sudden surprise. As if your shoulders are gripped from behind and you are forcibly turned to see something hidden to you, until that moment.