We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord

I have bad news. This afternoon, someone sent me an Instagram photo indicating that my friend Travis has died.

To a person who looks with the natural eye only, this is not shocking. Travis had been in intensive care for weeks following an accidental shooting which led to complications. To people who have felt great faith that Travis was going to be healed, it’s a major blow.

A year or two back, I listened to Derek Prince as he taught people to prophesy. I decided to try it. Paul tells us to covet prophecy, and he says it’s a better gift than tongues in some ways. God clearly wants us to do it. I started doing it once in a while, and then I made a point of doing it a lot every day.

I heard positive things. “I will build you up.” “None of the things you worry about will happen to you.” “My love will pour through you.” I rarely heard anything negative. That concerned me, because I knew from prayer in tongues that it was possible to get in the way of the Holy Spirit and add your own material. I prayed repeatedly for guidance. I had other people pray. I did not want to be a false prophet.

The other day, I heard myself saying Travis would be healed. Yesterday, someone who is very, very honest said God told her the same thing.

Look, it can still happen. He can still recover. As I said before, Lazarus stank when he was healed. He was dead and rotting. But generally, the dead stay dead.

I knew before this happened that if Travis died, I would have a major problem apart from the grief. I knew I would have to question what I thought I heard from God. That’s a big deal. I have been relying very strongly on what I thought was God’s voice for years. How much am I wrong about? What do I have left to hold onto?

You can’t sweep problems like this under the rug. Pretending things didn’t happen is not acceptable. You have to hold yourself accountable.

It’s as though I built several rooms onto my house, and one or more have to be torn down. I can’t entertain guests in a house that isn’t habitable. How can I talk to other people about God right now?

What can I tell the world about Travis?

He had a bad start. He got in trouble a lot when he was a kid.

He excelled in music when he was in elementary school. By the time I met him, he played 11 instruments well.

His Dad tried to raise him and his siblings well. His mother and father split, and his father deteriorated. He was isolated from the family.

I met Travis at Trinity Church in Miami. I believe he was 17. We were on the security team. We became unlikely friends. In prayer sessions behind closed doors, we talked about things the pastors didn’t want to hear about: prayer in tongues, casting out demons, confession, and transformation through the Holy Spirit. Travis got hooked, and he started to change.

He kept growing, and our friendship grew. I started making pizza for the church’s cafe, and Travis became my sous chef.

We knew the church was a mess. We both left. He came to the new church I joined. We left that one, too. We started spending a lot of time praying at my house. During one session, Travis had a vision of a woman he believed would be his wife. He never saw her face.

Travis was a teacher. He worked at a government-funded center, teaching ghetto kids music. He wanted black children to be successful and appreciated. That desire burned in him. He could not accept the way black people in America were living.

He was hurt over and over by the things that happened to young people he knew. He was frustrated with their parents, who wouldn’t drive them to lessons. Kids had unwanted babies. They got shot. One friend from church got caught driving a stolen Mercedes, and after the police handcuffed him, he jumped into a canal and drowned.

Travis wanted to see black people rise up and do well, and over and over, he was slapped in the face by deaths, illegitimate births, and incarcerations. It caused him tremendous pain. He could not let go.

He wanted to be the first member of his family to get a degree. He had started college at FAMU in Tallahassee, but he got caught up in a marching band scandal and left. I encouraged him to go to the University of Miami and audition, and one day, he went without telling me and got a full ride, less room and board.

He worked harder than any student I ever knew. He lived in rented rooms. He slept on people’s couches. He sometimes rode a bicycle 15 miles at night to get home from jobs. He was promised a car, but by the time he got it, it was in such bad shape it had to be scrapped. His cheap, wobbly secondhand bicycle was stolen by someone who must have been desperate as well as heartless. He had to scrounge up a new one. He never quit.

When I left Miami, I made him my house sitter until I sold the house. I told him he was the Fresh Prince of Coral Gables. He loved the peace and safety.

During his time there, I got baptized at a Last Reformation event. I told Travis about it, and he got so excited, he borrowed a car and drove to my house near Ocala to be baptized in my pool. He couldn’t submerge completely in my tub. It was 51 degrees out when he went into the pool. He drove up in a borrowed car, stayed one night, and drove back.

When the place finally sold, I was concerned about him, but he landed on his feet. He found a place near school. He struggled, but he didn’t live in the street.

When COVID-19 hit, he had a problem. He played gigs to make money, and the gigs were gone. We prayed over the phone. He said God would handle it.

He got a respiratory bug in March. He had a high fever and aches. I told him to get checked, but he stayed home. Some friends and I prayed, and his symptoms dropped off to nearly nothing overnight.

Travis got in contact with me a few times about a friend who wanted to get a firearm. He asked me for advice. I saw nothing odd about it. I suggested a Glock. A simple, reliable gun. I said I would consider .45 ACP if it were me. I probably mentioned .40 S&W.

On April 9, my phone rang. The caller ID named Travis, but the voice was someone else’s. The man on the other end said he was Travis’s friend. He said Travis had been shot accidentally. He stressed “accidentally.” I asked if they had called 911. Hoping for a break, I asked where Travis had been shot. The friend said, “in the chest region.” No break.

I could hear Travis in the background pleading with God. He wasn’t afraid to die. He just didn’t want to die that way, so soon. He said, “Not this way, God!” That was the last time I heard his voice. His friend hung up.

After that, the information dried up. No one answered his phone. I started accounts on Instagram and Facebook, hoping to alert his family. I found his brother and let him know. I thought the family would handle things.

I didn’t want to go online and say, “TRAVIS HAS BEEN SHOT.” I thought it would make his family panic. Now I wish I had done it. Maybe more people would have tried to help. I worked with some friends who tried to look after Travis’s affairs, and the family was not responsive. We didn’t hear from them for days. I assumed things were going well because the early report was that the injury was not life-threatening.

Travis lived out his final days in a remarkable state of isolation. There was no phone in his room. He was intubated at least part of the time. They didn’t give him a laptop so he could Skype. The hospital was so strict, they would not allow cards into the room. Recently, a nurse told Martha Travis had never had a visitor.

We knew very little about what was happening.

As far as I know, he didn’t die from a gunshot wound. He died from complications. He wasn’t getting oxygen. He had an infection. He was tested regularly for covid, but the tests were negative. Of course, the tests are not reliable. He may have had covid in March, and he may have relapsed after the shooting.

Would things have been different with better communication? I don’t know, but things were handled very badly.

I thought I could point to Travis as a success story. Someone whose life had successfully repaired, partly with my participation. I thought I would see his wife and children. I thought I would be at the wedding.

He’s in heaven. That’s for sure. If he had any issues with God, you can be sure he cleaned them up while he was alone in the hospital. You can say that makes him a success, but it’s not the kind of success I had in mind.

I thought God had given him to me as a sort of son, to make up for my failure to marry.

Now the crop is gone, and it’s late in the season.

Is it right to feel sorry for him? He has seen Jesus. He is perfect. He is happy. He is fulfilled. He is safe, forever. He’s with my dad. Surely they have talked today.

I suppose if I grieve, I’m really feeling sorry for myself, not Travis. He’s practically a god now.

Over the last few days, I’ve been telling God I would be happy to take Travis’s place. It didn’t matter to me. I enjoy life, but it’s not like I have a lot of meaningful irons in the fire (one less now), and I am not far from elderly.

Now I’m still here, he’s gone, his wife will have to marry someone else, and his kids will not be born. There will be no one to help his dad, who has MS and lives in a facility, unless God sends him a friend. His dad had been very bitter, but he had come around. He had started praying with Travis. He had started calling him often instead of shutting him out. Where does a 59-year-old man in a wheelchair go to replace a son like that?

Will anyone try to save Travis’s family now? Who else will care?

I spoke to my friend Freddly about the news. She’s a nurse in a management position, and she deals with dying people, including covid patients. She is very experienced. She says something is wrong. She says young men don’t just die suddenly, even when they’re intubated and connected to ECMO machines. She says that happens to the elderly. The nurses knew Martha had a special relationship with Travis. According to Freddly, they would have made sure Martha was informed had he taken a sudden turn for the worse. Even though she was not his wife, they would have seen to it that she had a chance to come to his bedside had they thought he was about to die. They didn’t do that. Two days running, they said there was no change, and there is no chance they were wrong. They told her he was in the same condition at 9:30 this morning. So what happened?

She said she wished she could look at his chart.

It’s good to have an expert to talk to, not that it does much good now.

I talked to a mutual friend today. He was on the Trinity Church security team with Travis and me. He wants to go to the funeral if there is one. My concern is that Trinity will be in charge. I don’t want to see people who used Travis using him as a tool to boost their profiles. I am also not excited about being among people he knew who let him down consistently. But on the other hand, it might be good to show up, welcome or not, and hold my head up and look them in the eye.

I don’t want to go to Miami. Not even for this. I don’t know how it will play out.

It was a great, great privilege to know Travis and to be of some assistance to him. I’m glad he’s out of harm’s reach now. He could not catch a break in this life. It seemed like it rained on him every day. He fought the curses of black life, and he still died like a black man who was still immersed in them. That’s all finished now. I will take the good with the bad.

I won’t get to see him stand at the altar, and I won’t get to hold his kids. I won’t have a third godchild or a boy named after me. That’s okay. We have a father who makes all things right, even if it has to wait until after the resurrection.

I look forward to seeing him again. Until then, I will remember how blessed I was to know him in this life.

A friend who led the armorbearer team at Trinity Church just did a final roll call for Travis via text message. His call sign was Bass Clef.

So that’s it. Travis didn’t sound off here, but he was present at a better roll call today. It won’t be that long before I sound off as well, and then all our troubles here on earth will be forgotten.