New Year’s Day in northeast Portland began with rain. The eighth day of Christmas, Thursday, January first, was a holiday for most. Yet, many had jobs that demanded their presence.

One of those who had to work even on the holiday was Jeffrey, a former student of 40 years ago and my “computer guru.” For 15 months, he has faithfully worked with me, trying to teach me how to begin and continue a website. Truly, I am indebted to him.

Driving on rain-drenched streets to his job at the post office, he never saw the car coming straight at him and striking the passenger side of his car. “The inside of the car exploded!” he texted. “And the console ended up in the passenger seat!”

He had to be taken from his totally demolished car, which he did not have a chance to see after the accident. Rushed to the nearest hospital, he had no broken bones but internal injuries that have required two operations. No surprise that his latest text ended with “lots of pain, hard to concentrate.”

Of course, he will go to a rehabilitation center when he is discharged from the hospital. But then what? No one knows because the honest answers lie in the future.

In his short story, “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens wisely pictured the future as a gloomy, mysterious entity “shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form….” Indeed, the future is absolutely unknown. And because we cannot know it, we fear it.

However, we can choose to know the One who holds the future, the One who metes it out event by event, cause by cause, and result by result. Knowing the Alpha (Beginning) and the Omega (Ending) takes our focus off the fearsome uncertainties and settles that focus onto a knowable Person who promised, “I am with you always.” (Matthew 28:20).

I cannot give Jeffrey the answers he wants to hear and that I want to speak. But I can tell him of Philippians 3:10 and that in his pain he shares in the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. I imagine that both of them were battered and bruised to a similar extent. And it is with the amazing power of the resurrection that healing and answers will come.