Christian musician Steven Curtis Chapman talks of tragedy

Two months after the tragic accident that claimed the life of his 5-year-old daughter Maria Sue, Steven Curtis Chapman appeared with his wife and three oldest children on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Aug. 7 to testify to the solid hope believers have in Christ.

Maria Sue Chapman

Chapman, a Grammy-winning Christian musician, said he deals with the loss of the youngest of his three adopted Chinese daughters “sometimes in intervals of about 15 minutes at a time.”

One of the most pressing questions King wanted to ask was whether Chapman lost his faith at any point.

“You know, at that moment, I’ve got to say, Larry, I mean it was – I was crying out to my – to my Father,” Chapman said.

“I really wasn’t angry at God,” he said. “And until you walk through that, I think I’m not sitting here saying, you know, ‘I’m so – we’re so strong and I made even a choice to do that.’ It was just my immediate natural reaction was – I mean I know I heard myself saying a lot, ‘God, you can’t ask this of me. You can’t ask this of my family. This is too much. We can’t do this.'”

Chapman was standing on the front porch of his home in Franklin, Tenn., May 21 when he saw his 17-year-old son Will Franklin coming up the driveway in an old SUV. Chapman said he believes it was providential that God allowed him to see that Will was driving uncharacteristically slow and wasn’t talking on his cell phone.

Will drove around to the back of the house, and as he was turning the corner, he didn’t see his little sister run into his path. Immediately he knew he had hit something, and he stopped, only to find something that would forever change his life.

Maria had been on the playground in the backyard with her two sisters, and she ran toward her brother when she saw him coming in the SUV because she wanted him to lift her onto the monkey bars, Chapman said.

As they waited for medical personnel to arrive, Chapman and his wife performed CPR on Maria to no avail. The girl was flown by helicopter to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Will and the other children have been meeting with trauma counselors in order to work through their grief, their mother Mary Beth said while opening up about her own reaction to losing a child.

“I’ve been mad. I’ve been sad,” she said. “I’ve jumped up and down. I’ve crawled under my bed. I’ve gone in my closet. You name it, I’ve done it. And I know that I will never understand, this side of eternity, why Maria, why Will. I have a list of questions in my journal, you know, ‘Why?’?”

The family agreed that they have never been angry at Will for the accident, and they rallied to show him their support. As Chapman was being driven to the hospital, he stopped in the yard to yell at his son, who was doubled over in agony, ‘Will Franklin, your father loves you.”

Chapman told about a discovery he made in the hours after the accident that has provided comfort in the days since.

“When she first died, Caleb and I, especially, kept saying if we could just see, if we could just have a dream, something, God, we’d believe it. If we could just see something that would tell us that she’s OK.

“And the day after the accident, we went home to get some clothes for the funeral,” he said. “Sitting on the art table was this little picture that Maria had drawn the morning of the accident. She had drawn a six-petaled flower, and only one petal was colored in. We have six children. Only one is whole now, we believe, in the arms of Jesus.

“She wrote the word S-E-E,” he said. “She wrote the word ‘see.’ And she had never written that before. She was saying, ‘See, I’m good. I’m OK.’?”

Chapman has begun touring again, and he said the tragedy of losing Maria has given him more confidence as he sings.

“I know a lot less about God, but the things I know about God, I know a whole lot more, for sure,” he said.

As a tribute to God’s faithfulness, Chapman wrote another verse to “Yours,” a song that originally appeared on his album “This Moment,” released last year:

I’ve walked the valley of death’s shadow

God we belong to you.