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SPIRITUALITY

The Mystery

Michael Williams
6 min readJun 21, 2023
Image by Evgeni Tcherkasski from Pixabay

Last night, I joined a new creative writing group online. One of the participants was a woman in her early 40s who read us a story she had written. It told of a devastating tragedy she had experienced. Seven years ago, she was involved in a head-on crash that left her with terrible injuries and took the life of her seven-year-old daughter.

It would be nearly three months before this woman received the heart-breaking news for the accident had resulted in her being put into an induced coma due to the severity of her injuries. When she woke up, her first words were a desperate cry for her daughter.

It took five years and numerous surgeries to physically reconstruct her body, but no medical expertise could mend her shattered life. She constantly suffers from physical and mental anguish, blaming herself despite knowing it was an accident. She torments herself with endless “what ifs.” What if she hadn’t gone out? What if she had taken a different route? What if she had seen what was coming?

These ‘what if’ scenarios haunt her relentlessly. As if that isn’t enough, she shared that some friends and family members also blame her for her daughter’s loss. However, it is her self-blame that haunts her the most. At one point, she exclaims, “God is punishing me.” Others try to intervene, attempting to convince her that God is a loving…

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Michael Williams
Michael Williams

Written by Michael Williams

I’m a storyteller, Story Coach, writer, Guided Autobiography Instructor, End-of-Life Planning Facilitator & podcast host. Oh yeah, I play ukulele.

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