max lucado

He still moves stones.- Max Lucado

Word for word, this is how Mr. Lucado tells the story. . .

"Rebecca Thomson fell twice from the Fremont Canyon Bridge. She died both times. The first broke her heart; the second broke her neck.

She was only eighteen years old when she and her eleven- year old sister were abducted by a pair of hoodlums near a store in Casper, Wyoming. They drove the girls forty miles southwest to the Fremont Canyon Bridge, a one-lane, steel-beamed structure rising 112 feet above the North Platte River.

The men brutally beat and raped Rebecca. She somehow convinced them not to do the same to her sister Amy. Both were thrown over the bridge into the narrow gorge. Amy died when she landed on a rock near the river, but Rebecca slammed into a ledge and was ricocheted into deeper water.

With a hip fractured in five places, she struggled to the shore. To protect her body from the cold, she wedged herself between two rocks and waited until dawn.

But the dawn never came for Rebecca. Oh, the sun came up, and she was found. The physicians treated her wounds, and the courts imprisoned her attackers. Life continued, but the dawn never came.

The blackness of her night of horrors lingered. She was never able to climb out of the canyon. So in September of 1992, nineteen years later, she returned to the bridge.

Against her boyfriend's pleadings, she drove seventy miles- per hour to the North Platte River. With her two-year old daughter and boyfriend at her side, she sat on the edge of the Fremont Canyon Bridge and wept. Through her tears she retold the story. The boyfriend didn't want the child to see her mother cry, so he carried the toddler to the car.

That's when he heard her body hit he water.

And that's when Rebecca Thompson died her second death. The sun never dawned on Rebecca's dark night. Why? What eclipsed the light from her world?"

Max Lucado goes on to further write about the possibilities of fear, anger, guilt, and shame that Rebecca may have experienced the next nineteen years of her life after that assault. He writes encouraging words of healing as the story ends with this... "Invite Christ to journey with you back to the Fremont Bridge of your world. Let him stand beside you as you retell the events of the darkest nights of your soul."