Write About Now

I spent last weekend in Cincinnati, where the major news story was the murder of 3 year-old Marcus Fiesel. Marcus was an autistic little boy who functioned developmentally as a 12-18 month old. His foster parents, David and Liz Carroll, and their live-in girlfriend bound Marcus’ hands behind his back with packing tape and left him in a closet without food and water for a weekend in August. Neighbors later reported hearing screams coming from the house. When the family returned and found Marcus dead, they burned his body once, then twice more for good measure, and dumped what wouldn’t burn into the Ohio River.

THEN, to cover up their actions even more, the couple + 1 took their biological children to a park where Liz feigned a medical emergency and fainted; when she “came to” she claimed Marcus had wandered away and begged bystanders to search for him. Before the police and then the public learned the true story, hundreds of volunteers, professional rescue workers, firefighters, police, and paramedics spent days searching every inch of the park. 60 divers searched creeks and ponds, and a local businessman offered a $10,000 reward.

As my mom told me the saga, my first reaction was pity and heartbreak for Marcus. His birth mother abused and neglected him, and then the system created to protect forgotten children placed him in a home with a history of domestic abuse, theft, and violence. His little mind, although not mature enough to understand everything happening to him, was quite capable of experiencing fear, anger, hunger, thirst, and sadness. In three years he experienced more pain than I have in thirty.

Jesus loves Marcus and now Marcus gets to be with Jesus—whole, healthy, and pain-free. But even as I blinked away tears for his earthly life, it hit me that Jesus also loves David and Liz Carroll. He loves them just as much as he loves Marcus.

This blows my mind. We often discuss grace and feel grateful that it covers our sins of gossip and gluttony and greed. In our most honest moments, we remember that grace also extends to our other sins, the ones we don’t gloss over or minimize.

But grace also covers murdering children and burning corpses and causing community panic and lying to juries. Jesus died on the cross for our sins—we’ve heard it all our lives. So let’s restate it: Jesus hung on the cross and took the punishment for David Carroll burning a three year-old’s body in a park. Jesus felt the pain that all the adults would cause all the children of all time, and he died for those big people as well as the little ones.

Grace is one thing, and repentance is another. I don’t know if David and Liz recognize their sin or if they will ever confess it to God. (As of this writing, they have not confessed it to Cincinnati—they pleaded not guilty yesterday.) But whether or not they ever find and understand and accept God’s grace—how amazing to serve a God who went to such lengths just to offer it.