“They think he’ll walk again,” Renee’s voice wavered, almost imperceptibly, as she strung together five words no one wants to say about their little  brother.

From my dorm room in Abilene, 300 hundred miles away, I continued to listen as my typically matter-of-fact friend became uncharacteristically silent over the phone.

This couldn’t happen.

In a family of runners, cross-country skiers and long-distance swimmers, this changes everything.

Paul, Renee’s younger sibling, started as a freshman at Colorado School of Mines last fall, serving as a kicker for the school’s football team. On Sunday, back at school in Colorado, Paul was turning flips on a trampoline when an ill-fated flip landed him in a hospital bed, immobilized and in a neck brace, 1000 miles away from his hometown, College Station. And Renee can’t get there.

The rest of her family has been able to fly to Colorado, be at his bedside. But Renee is a senior chemical engineering major with graduate school interviews at Ivy League universities all over the country driving the next several weeks. She simply cannot leave right now. Her whole family has flocked to her brother’s aid, but she is stuck in Aggieland. Alone.

Granted, no one ever is really alone in College Station. Despite the local university’s big-city benefits, the small-town microcosm provides an almost familial network of support that outsiders commonly describe as “cultish.”

And because skiing accidents are common in Colorado, Renee said the facility treating Paul is one of the best in the country for his specific injury.

What’s more, doctors told Renee’s family that most often, victims of an injury like Paul’s are left quadriplegics. But because he still has feeling in his limbs, in Paul’s case, “they think he’ll walk again.”

If it had to happen, I guess the circumstances were just right. “And if anyone can come back from something like this, it’s Paul,” I tried to consol Renee over the phone. But I know it’s small comfort.

And it’s a difficult set of circumstances for which to thank God.

After talking to Renee on Tuesday morning, all day I replayed her heartbreak as it had reverberated over the phone.

Bad things happen to good people; that’s just the way it is. But I couldn’t help questioning, why there? Why now? Why Paul?

Why can’t Renee be there for Paul? And why can’t I be there for Renee?

What good is God if he can’t or won’t shield his followers from crisis?

Finally, I remembered a basic, perhaps obvious, principle of Christianity: God may not always shield us, but he walks with us, if we let him.

That’s the difference between living out struggles within Christianity and without. That’s our only guarantee – that even amidst heartache, even when we can’t see him working, God is with us, our Immanuel.

And that’s a faith we cling to: Just like I am 300 miles from my childhood friend, and still she knows I am here for her; just like Renee is 1000 miles from her broken baby brother, and still he knows she is there for him; we are a flawed and unholy world away from our heavenly father, and still we know, he is here with us.