The tragic bonfire accident has made an indelible mark on the life of every Aggie. Many of us are struggling with
how to deal with the grief that grips us. Confusion, shock and grief are only a few of the emotions we are experienc
ing. We encourage you to take the next step in processing the enormous amount of grief we feel. We need hope in the
midst of incredible sorrow.
In the early 1980s, Steve Sawyer, a hemophiliac, contracted the HTV virus and Hepatitis C from unscreened
blood supplies. Years later, at 19 years old, knowing his death was imminent, Steve used his remaining years to travel
to hundreds of college campuses to share with students what he’d learned about living with hope and peace in the
midst of terrible circumstances. Like your classmates, he, too, died an unfortunate death. As \s e mourn the loss of our
fellow Aggies, thousands of students who heard Steve would tell you that Steve’s message about hope and God’s love
changed their lives forever.
The following is edited from a talk Steve gave at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Living with Hope
No Matter What Life Throws at You
by Steve Sawyer
O ff the coast of Maine, there was a Navy
ship sailing in very dense fog. This night
the midshipman on duty saw a light and
immediately contacted his captain. “Captain there
is a steady light in the distance heading straight for
us, what do you want me to do?” The captain told
the midshipman to flash a signal to the vessel,
directing it to change its course. The vessel signaled
back, “No, you change your course.” Again the
captain instructed the midshipman to command the
on-coming vessel to change their course immedi
ately.” Again the reply was, “No, you change your
course.” With one last attempt, the midshipman sig
naled the vessel saying, “This is the Captain of a
U.S. Navy battleship and you must change your
course immediately.” The reply was, “No, you will
have to change your course. This is a lighthouse.”
This story illustrates how we as humans tend
to deal with pain and suffering. We always seem to
want the circumstances around us to change course,
rather than changing ourselves to meet the
circumstances.
My life has been a perfect example of this. I
was bom with hemophilia, which is a blood disor
der in which my bones and joints will painfully
swell. Hemophilia is treated with a protein from a
blood product gathered through donated blood.
Well, somewhere between 1980 and 1983, one of
the donors to my particular donor pool was infect
ed with the HIV vims. As I result, all the medica
tions I received from that particular pool, which
could have been hundreds of doses, was all infected
with the HIV vims. I also later received Hepatitis C
in the same way.
I actually wasn’t told I was HIV positive
until 1990, which was my sophomore year of high
school. When I was told, my initial reaction was a
fairly common one when we’re dealt something we
can’t handle. My initial reaction was just to deny
that I was HIV positive, just try to pretend that it
wasn’t there. HIV didn’t hurt, like hemophilia hurt.
With hemophilia, when your joints and muscles
swell it is very, very painful. And HIV had no out
ward symptoms. You couldn’t really tell it was
there, so it was very easy to just pretend it wasn’t
there. And actually that’s the way my parents dealt
with it too. They said, “You look good, you look
OK, so you must be OK.”
A great example of this denial is from the
movie, Monty Python’s In Search of the Holy
Grail. In one scene King Arthur is trotting through
the forest and comes across a knight in this beat-up,
black armor. This knight is blocking his path, and
King Arthur realizes that he’s not going to get by
unless he defeats the knight in battle. A battle
ensues and King Arthur manages to sever the arm
of the black knight. King Arthur sheathes his sword
and begins to walk by, but the knight says, “No.”
And King Arthur says, “I cut off your amt.” The
knight looks at it and says, “No you didn’t.” So
King Arthur looks at the ground and says, “There’s
your arm right there.” And the knight says, “It’s just
a flesh wound.” King Arthur realizes that he’s
going to have to severely maim this guy in order to
get by him. So the battle continues and King Arthur
severs all the limbs from the knight’s body until all
that is left of the knight is just a stump on the
ground with a head. As King Arthur trots by and
you can hear the knight in the background yelling,
“Come back you coward, I’ll bite your knees off.”
Well, needless to say, that knight is in denial.
He couldn’t face the fact that he had lost the fight.
And although thafs a humorous example of denial,
the dangers of denial are very, very real. If I had
continued to deny the fact that I was HIV positive I
might not have taken the right precautions with lit
tle cuts in my fingers or things like that, and I could
have severely hurt, or even killed someone. But the
dangers to yourself when you deny something like
that are also very dangerous, and very painful.
When you push something down for that long, and
you try to pretend it’s not there, it builds up. And
eventually it explodes. 1 was able to deny that I was
HIV positive for about three years. My senior year
of high school, in 1993, I got very sick. I started
showing symptoms of the disease. T-cells are the
white blood cells that fight infection, and the num
ber of T-cells you have in your body tells whether
you are HIV positive and whether you have AIDS.
When your T-cells drop below 200, you are consid
ered to have full-blown AIDS. My T-cell count was
at 213 and dropping. And I was very, very sick, and
very pale. I couldn’t hold down food, and I could no
longer pretend that this wasn’t real. This was very,
very real.
Denial would no longer an option, so I had to
find a new way to deal with everything I was going
through. The first thing I tried to do was blame
someone. If someone could walk up to me and say,
“Steven, this is my fault, man. I’m sorry,” then
maybe I’d feel better. So initially I decided to blame
the entire homosexual community. Easy cop-out.
And after I thought about that, I realized that it’s
kind of stupid to blame an entire group of people for
my problem. I then decided to blame God. Now I
didn’t really believe in God at the time, but I figured
if anyone has control of the situation, it’s got to be
God. So I blamed God.
What happens when you have someplace to
focus all this built-up pain, is it turns into anger. And
eventually it turns into rage. And now I began to deal
with everything I encountered by getting mad. And
anytime someone said anything that just kind of
annoyed me. I’d explode at them. Punching walls.
Destroying my room. Things like that.
But I found out that anger has the ability to
cloud your mind, and keeps you from thinking
rationally, and it keeps you from acting rationally.
Worse, it hurts those you love in the process. A
much better way to deal with pain is to cry, because
it doesn’t hurt anyone and if feels really, really good.
Well, on one occasion, I was in my room. And
I had reached bottom. I was very, very sick. And I
had lost a tremendous amount of weight. And I was
in my room and I was screaming, swearing at God,
punching the walls, and my Dad walked in. And he
closed the door behind him. My father is a recover
ing alcoholic. And through AA he learned about a
Higher Power, he learned about God. He looked at
me and said, “You know Steve, I can’t help you.
Your doctors can’t help you. Your mom can’t help
you. You can’t help you. And the only one who can
help you right now is God.” And he walked out of
the room and closed the door.
Now, I had just finished swearing at God, so I
didn’t think I was quite in the right position to be ask
ing God for help. But, here I am, no choice. I dropped
down on my knees, and through my tears I said,
“Alright God, if you’re there, you help me and I’ll
help you.” In an extremely short amount of time I
gained all of my weight back, my T-cell count jumped
up to about 365, which is pretty good. And I felt great.
I felt great, just like that. And I thought, OK, thank
you God. Bye. That was nice. Goodbye.
I graduated and I went off to college to take my
placement test the summer before my freshman
year. This was when I met my roommate. I got
there and I finished the test, and there was this tall,
skinny blonde kid standing there. And he said, “Hey,
you look normal. Want to be my roommate?” And I
thought, Well, ok, you don’t, but.. .“Sure.” And we
became roommates, and actually we became best
friends. And I found out that my friend was a
Christian. And at the time I had this picture of what
a Christian was. To me a Christian was a hypocriti
cal, condescending, condemning person. That’s
what a Christian was to me. That’s all a Christian
would ever be to me, I thought. But my roommate
was different.
He had a problem with dyslexia. And I
noticed that he would study, and he would get to that
point, (where I would start punching walls and
destroying things, and just tearing things apart),
when he would reach that point, he would just stop,
he would close his eyes, say a prayer, take a breath
and go back to work. And that blew me away. And
I thought. How can you not break something? You
have to break something! It really amazed me that
he was able to do this.
My roommate invited me to go to spring
break with him to Daytona Beach. While there, my
friend started talking to the guy next to us on the
beach. And at first we started talking about common
things, normal stuff. Then my friend decided to get
into some deep, heavy issues. And I didn’t want to
get into that. I had been struggling with a lot. It’s
tough to know you’re dying at such a young age. And I
really didn’t want to talk about that stuff with some
stranger on the beach, and so I kind of faded out of the
conversation. They kept talking, and eventually it got
around to the point where my friend tried to explain what
he believed as a Christian. I never heard what a Christian
was. I always had a picture of what a Christian was, but
I never actually knew what they believed, or what they
thought. So I kind of listened in on what he was saying.
And he explained it in a way that was fairly sim
ple. I don’t know if I could explain it quite as well as he
did. But he explained something like this. “I believe in
God, obviously. And I believe that God created us to be
in relationship with Him. But we don’t want to be in that
relationship with Him, so we push Him away. The Bible
calls that pushing God away, that rebellion, (whether it’s
actively rebelling against Him, or just a passive indiffer
ence), the Bible calls that ‘sin.’ I don’t like the word ‘sin,’
so I think of it as just pushing God away.
“And because we did that, and because we were
created to be in a relationship with Him, there’s a penal
ty. The penalty for that is death, we die. And there’s a
spiritual death, we’re separated from Him.” I thought.
That’s happy.
I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. So I
said, “But God loves us.” And he said, “But God is
just, as well. Love without justice means nothing.”
And that still didn’t really mean anything to me. And he
said, “Well, picture the person you care about most in the
world, the person you would give your life for, in a sec
ond. Picture yourself pushing that person away, and you
don’t see him again for a long time. Then one day you see
that person fifty yards away, and you go running to him
and you throw your arms open, but they stop you and say,
‘No, you pushed me away, remember?’ Now picture
pushing away the greatest love in the universe, and that’s
what’s it’s like.”
And I thought, Wow. That’s not good. And he said,
“Well, it doesn’t end there, fortunately. Because God
loves us so much, because He cares about us so much. He
decided to pay the death penalty for us. He sent His Son,
Jesus, to die on the cross in our place. And because Jesus
didn’t push God away, (since He was God in the flesh), He
could pay the penalty for us.”
And he said, “And when Jesus rose from the dead
three days later, He conquered that spiritual death. Now
we wouldn’t just die, we would die and spend eternity
with the greatest love in the universe.”
And I said, “Wow.” “But,” he said, “the catch is,
even though He offers this. He paid the penalty, if you
don’t accept this...well, it’s up to you.” I still really was
n’t clear on this, and the guy he was talking to fortunately
wasn’t clear on this either. So my friend said, “Ok, imag
ine yourself driving down the road out here, and you’re
going 90. And the speed limit is 35. You’re flying down
the road, and a cop pulls you over and writes you a ticket.
To pay the ticket you have to go to court the next day. As
you walk in the courtroom and look up, you see the judge
is your dad. And you think, Hey, that’s my dad. Your dad
looks at you and he goes, ‘Steve, did you break the law?’
And you say, ‘Yeah.’ And he says, ‘Ok, $500 fine or two
days in jail.’ He hammers the gavel down and that’s it.”
“Now because he’s just and he’s fair, he had to pass
sentence. But then he steps off the judge’s bench, takes
off his robe, reaches into his back pocket and hands you
$500. Because he loves you, he’s going to pay that penalty
for you. But you have to accept the payment. He’s stand
ing there with 500 bucks saying, ‘Here you go.’
“You can just say to God, ‘No thanks, I’ll just
spend an eternity separated from you.’ It’s a choice you
have to make.”
And my friend said the way we accept the payment
is through prayer. He said, “You simply accept this pay
ment. It is a gift from God, it’s by God’s grace. There is
nothing you have to do to earn this. It’s just a gift from
God.” This was the first time I ever heard about grace,
what grace is. He said, “It’s a gift that you accept by faith
through prayer.” And my friend offered to pray with this
guy. And as my friend prayed out loud, I prayed this to
myself, silently.
From that second on, my life took on a whole new
perspective. I no longer had to go to bed every single
night and worry about whether I was going to be alive the
next day. I no longer had a fear of dying, because dying
wouldn’t just end in this blackness, in darkness. Now
when I die I would spend an eternity, forever, with the
greatest love in the universe. It was so freeing.
My parents accepted the payment as well. They
prayed that prayer. And their lives have totally taken
on a new perspective as well. I mean, to think that
they would even let me travel, when I’ve been given
six months to live. It’s been over a year now, (actu
ally I should have been dead twice over now). You
can image how difficult it’s been for my parents to
just stand there, with their hands by their side and
just watch as their son dies in front of them. There’s
nothing they can do. The only reason that they can
deal with that, the only reason that I can handle that,
is that we each have Christ in our lives.
C an I give you the chance to accept God’s pay
ment for you? If you are going through
something that you just can’t handle on your
own, and you’d like someone there who can stand by
you and pick you up when the whole world is kick
ing you and stabbing you in the back, then I ask you
to please pray this prayer with me right now. This is
not going to be some magic phrase. It’s not some
magic incantation that’s going to change your life
like that. It’s not a big emotional trip or a thought. It’s
beginning a relationship, with God. And just like any
other relationship, it takes time. It takes effort. But I
ask, if you really feel like you need this, don’t pass
up this opportunity. It’s free.
So I’m going to pray a prayer. Prayer has noth
ing to do with closing your eyes or bowing your head
or folding your hands or shouting, "Alleluia!"
Nothing like that. It’s an attitude of your heart. It is
saying to God, “God, I’ve broken the law, I’ve
pushed you away. And I want to come back by
accepting your payment.” If you feel like you need
that, please pray with me right now. “Lord Jesus, I
need you. I thank you for dying on the cross for me.
I ask that you come into my life and make me the
kind of person I’ve always wanted to be. Amen.”
Now if you just sincerely prayed that prayer,
you’ve just begun the greatest relationship you could
ever have, a relationship with God. I would ask that
you not leave this here, but that you would take this
and follow through with it. A relationship with God
is a process. It means daily trusting God, trying to do
not necessarily what you want or what feels good,
but what you think God wants you to do. The goal is
to walk in His path, even though we will screw up a
lot. You make mistakes, but you keep going, you
keep working at it, trusting in His forgiveness and
His grace. Pray. Read the Bible. Find out what God
wants you to do. Can’t do it if you don’t know what
He wants. Some day you’ll reach peace. It may not
be until you reach heaven, but then it’s forever.
Steve Sawyer died of liver failure from hepati
tis C on March 13, 1999. He spent his remaining
years speaking on hundreds of college campuses,
even though the traveling compounded the pain of
his illnesses. In the last days of Steve's life he said he
wanted to speak to “just one more campus. ” Why?
“If I had to get these diseases that are killing me for
that one person to understand that they can have a
relationship with Christ, then it is worth it. In light of
eternity, that is all that matters. ”
We’d love to talk to you. Please call us at
the CRU office-696-8289.
From the Bible ...
“We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of
us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid
on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)
“For God so loved the world that he gave his
one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall
not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
“Whoever hears my word and believes him
who sent Me has eternal life and will not be con
demned; he has crossed over from death to life.”
(John 5:24)
“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O
death, is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55)
Sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ.
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