Teaching Kids about Hating Sin (aka, Lessons from a Ten-Year-Old's Testimony)

I've been teaching children's Sunday School at my church for nearly seven years, and that responsibility carries its own unique joys and frustrations.  I've been privileged to serve with four different co-teachers throughout process who helped to compensate for my own shortcomings.  I consider myself blessed to have had an opportunity to influence these kids with the Gospel message for so long, but there are many times when I question my own effectiveness in trying to help these children understand the gravity of what it means to be a sinner in need of salvation in Christ

Almost all of my regular attenders have the remarkable benefit of loving parents who are strong Christian leaders and ensure that the whole family is at the congregational gatherings every week, yet not all of these children have experienced God's saving grace and committed their lives to Christ's service.  Therein lies my greatest challenge as a teacher; how can I plant some spiritual seeds in the hearts and mind of these precious but naive little sinners that God might one day grow into genuine faith?  It's not like God needs my participation in His plans, of course, but I do believe that there's a divine purpose for which I've been given the privilege of teaching these kids for a season of their lives.

One theme that I routinely emphasize to the children is that they need to recognize the fact that they are all sinners who are personally guilty of breaking God's commands.  So I'll often ask each child about their own personal acts of disobedience to parents or sins of that nature.  That's when things usually get interesting.  Lying, theft (from siblings), anger (again, usually directed towards their siblings) or hiding the truth tend to be the most frequent confessions I hear.  The kids can easily recognize the fact that they are sinners and even agree that they deserve punishment when they are caught in their offenses. But very few of the kids ever seem to be visibly upset and sorrowful about their sins and offenses, and that's been one of the causes of my frustration over the years.  I'm not content with the kids merely recognizing that they are sinners; I want them to hate their sin and run to Christ for rescue.  I can't make that change happen, but I hope that I can at least communicate the importance of that message.

There's a lot of spiritual advantages to being a child, as Jesus taught us in Matthew 18:3.  Their minds are usually more adept at having faith and in believing in miracles compared to most adults.  And most children haven't had as much time or opportunity to commit grievous sins that can harden the heart against God.   But there are probably spiritual disadvantages to being a child too. I think the inherent naivety of children can make it difficult for them to truly hate their sin for its own sake.  They might hate the punishment that befalls them because of their sin when their parents discipline them, but that's not the same as hating sin.  In order for them to truly understand their need for Christ as Savior, they need to understand how bad sin is... even the relatively "small" sins that they've committed in their short lives.  And it's at this point that I yield the stage to a remarkable testimony composed by a little girl.

Nearly a year ago, one of the ten-year old girls in my class came to Christ and was baptized.  With the help of her parents, she composed a written account of her testimony and the event that finally made her come to hate her sin and put her trust in Christ.  In my opinion, it's one of the best Christian testimonies I've ever read because it displays that rare recognition of how terrible sin is and why we should despise its existence in our hearts.  And the story all started because she was thirsty and decided to lay claim to the last Gatorade before her brother could get to it.

In her own words:

One day me and my brother had our practices, and there was one Gatorade left. I wanted it so I took the Gatorade and started to write my name and draw pictures on it so that I could have it and so no one else could take it.  After I stuck it in the fridge God showed me my heart and showed me that what I did was wrong and that I was being selfish for wanting and taking the Gatorade.  So then I took a note and I wrote, "I'm sorry for taking the Gatorade I feel so selfish just taking the Gatorade please forgive me."  And after I gave my brother the note and the Gatorade I felt like I loved God more than I ever have and I wanted to learn more about god and his word. 

Nearly a year later, I still read those words with amazement.  That ten-year-old girl didn't commit any great moral offense, and I doubt she even would have been punished by mom & dad for taking possession of that drink.  But she realized that the key issue was her own heart, which was selfish and didn't trust God.  And that's the realization that spurred her spiritual transformation.  After a talk with her mom, she was advised to admit she was a sinner and to trust in Jesus alone for salvation.  And then she wrote:

Then I realized that Jesus changed my heart. When I felt my heart change my dad and I read some scripture. One of them was Ezekiel 36:26: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." When I read this scripture I knew this is what I wanted God to do for me, and he did.

I have read many adult testimonies of how God changed hearts and rescued very sinful people out of some very terrible lifestyles, but I can't think of many that impart the same insight into human nature as this little girl's story does.  If we could all hate the small sins we commit against God and our Neighbor as much as she hated what she thought about doing with that Gatorade bottle, then maybe we could all start recognizing how awesome a work of grace that God does in our hearts when we come to Christ.

When Comforting Others Seems Impossible

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Paul's opening statement in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians has long struck me as one of the most profound and humbling truths in all of Scripture.  In 2 Cor. 1:3-11, Paul explains that the suffering and affliction that he and Timothy had experienced while in Asia occurred for the purpose of teaching them how to better comfort other believers who go through similar afflictions.  God not only subjected Paul and Timothy to affliction, but He comforted them even more abundantly because of their experience.  The benefit of being brought through affliction to share in the spiritual comfort that comes through Christ is that the Christian is able to better empathize and serve his fellow Christians who are in the midst of their own suffering. 

That's a marvelous portion of Scripture, because it teaches the Christian to view their suffering not as a simple question of "why does God allow this bad thing to happen to me?" but a question of "how does God want me to use my suffering to comfort others who might be going through something similar?"  That's quite a revelation; it turns our focus away from ourselves and encourages us to start thinking about others.

On the other hand, the 2 Corinthians text does at least suggest that if God has not chosen to subject us to a particular form of suffering, then we may not be as qualified to comfort others as we might like to be.  Therefore, the experience of affliction becomes a prerequisite for us to learn how to better comfort others with the comfort that Christ first shows to us when we are in the position of the afflicted one.

That's a hard truth that frustrates me.

I don't have the personal experience to empathize fully with a widow who lost her husband young.  Neither can I fully identify with parents who have had to bury their own children, sometimes before those kids have even been born.  And thankfully, I don't yet know the pain of losing a parent.  But I have friends who live with all these burdens.

Another example has weighed heavily on my heart in recent days. This past week marked an important anniversary for people associated with Union University.  Tuesday February 5 was the five-year anniversary of the tornado that destroyed most of the old student dormitories but did not take the lives of any people on campus.  I graduated in 2005, which means I was already long gone when the storm came, but I had many dear friends who were still there when it happened.  I still remembered how terrified I was that night in my Louisville dorm seeing the reports of the devastation on the news and trying to decide if it was wise to try and call my friends in Jackson, TN to see if they were alright.

After all was accounted for, all of my friends were safe, but they were forever changed after that night.  They had experienced something terrible, a sensation of terror that I cannot even imagine.  I have marveled at the Union story for all five of these years.  There is even a strange sense within me that actually wishes I could have been there on campus that night so that I could have suffered in solidarity with my friends and know the depths of what they had to endure.  I wish I could have been there to help them in 2008, but I wasn't.  And I wish I could be better qualified to know how to best comfort them even to this day.  But that's impossible.  I wasn't there, and I can't understand the affliction (and the comfort) that those students and staff came to understand all too well.

I am humbled by the reality that I am unable to comfort my friends with the comfort that can only come from the people who were there and lived that night.  I experienced my fair share of storm warnings while at Union between 2001-2005, but I never lived through anything even comparable to "The Tornado."  And because of what I've seen at Union, I've since tried hard to prepare myself for a worst-case scenario whenever I endure storm warnings in Louisville.  None of this, however, makes me qualified to compare my experiences with my friends who saw the sights and sounds of February 5th.  I haven't warranted that sense of solidarity. And so I'm frustrated, because I know I am helpless to do what I want to do.  In a very real sense, I am incapable of bringing comfort to others.

But where our own strength might fail, the wisdom and mercy of God abounds all the more abundantly.  Thank God that there are other people who lived through that experience who cared for and continue to care for my friends.  Thank the Lord for the church families of all those folks who served the needs of their own.  Praise be to God that in the Body of Christ, there will always be someone who has undergone suffering so that they might be made more adept to bring comfort to others.

In my helplessness to comfort my friends as I would like, I can only offer my prayers to the Father of mercies and God of all comfort (to borrow the words of the 2 Corinthians passage once more).  And though I might lack the requisite understanding that comes through personal experience, I can pray the words of Philippians 4:7 that God might comfort my friends with "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding."

Grieve the Moment

I've spend a good deal of time on the internet over the past few years, and I've noticed a number of trends about how people use their social media accounts.

One thing I've learned is that whenever something tragic happens on a visible and public scale, people will inevitable try to immediately change the tone of the conversation away from a consideration of the present tragedy into a comment about some other issue that is morally significant to their interests.  It's not a matter of "if" someone will act in such a manner, it's only a matter of "when."

I observed this phenomenon after the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre.  Obviously, gun control  laws were and still are the popular subject of discussion, but I noticed another trend among many would-be paragons that bothered me.  There were a few folks who expressed some sentiment along the following lines "The murder of 26 children and school officials at Newtown was terrible but our country has legally aborted over 50 million babies since 1973!" Granted, that's a true statistic, but why does one think it's wise to frame the discussion in that light?  And as atrocious as abortion is, the argument against its legalization is not advanced by diminishing the severity of a mass-scale elementary school shooting.

I don't fully understand why people feel justified in doing this kind of "morality juke."  But I suspect the best explanation might be that the tragedy of the moment doesn't quite connect with their emotions at a truly personal level.  Although nearly two dozen children died (who most of the nation knew not by memory but only by their names and faces), some people immediately wanted to get angry about something else.  Such comments do nothing to console the pain of the grieving families of the slain.  If it were my children, parents, or siblings who were the victims, then I am certain that my soul wouldn't care about being burdened by an additional moral outrage.

As a point of illustration, I recall this same tendency in comments that were made in the context of local news reports about the car accident that claimed the life of my friend Stacy Ellison.

On the news broadcast that aired on television that night, the news reporter narrated the events of the crash and then abruptly changed the subject.  She warned that more automobile fatalities might be in store for Louisville drivers as wintry weather conditions descended upon the city.  Then, as a clip of my friend's crumpled Ford Taurus was displayed on the screen, she issued a morbid warning about the dangers of distracted driving.  I don't know if either Stacy or the truck driver who crossed lanes and collided with him were driving distracted at the time (though based on what I've read, the other driver simply had a medical attack and lost control in an instant), but that question certainly didn't matter to me. I know for certain that wintry weather conditions weren't a factor, but the nightly news nevertheless felt the need to create a narrative where it didn't need to exist.  If I were to ever have the opportunity to have a face-to-face conversation with that reporter, I would feel compelled to ask her why she felt the need to dismiss the immediate tragedy like she did. 

But I suppose I already know what the answer might be.  The fact is that while a fatal automobile accident in a Metro area is both public and newsworthy, it simply doesn't have much emotional power unless one actually knew the victims involved.  It was only newsworthy as a local story, not as a national tragedy.  And the only people who really had to suffer were the victims and the people who knew them and their families.  Those who weren't personally affected by the event could simply divert their minds to other concerns and move on with their life routines.

My hope is we will cease our habits of dismissing the impact of immediate tragedies in order to draw attention to other subjects, however important they might be.  Let us do more to follow the example of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who grieved with their suffering friend for seven days and seven nights without even daring to offer a word, as Scripture recounts in Job 2:11-13.  And let us avoid the imitation of their eventual attempts to shift the narrative from one of grief into irate moral diatribe.  Though there is much evil and suffering in the world that might pain us and remain ever with us, we are often best served to focus on the present crisis of a fresh wound... and grieve in the moment.

I'm Thankful for This Year... of Suffering

I am thankful for being able to know suffering this year on an unprecedented scale from what I had known previously.

I know that sounds bizarre, and I don't want to give the impression that I enjoy suffering in any sense.  I hate death.  I despise everything about it, everything it has done to people I love, and what it will eventually do to me one day. I hate the fact that we live in a fallen world where suffering and death are inevitable.  Whether it comes suddenly (like the loss of my church friends) or slowly (in the case of my Granny), death is a terrible, terrible thing.  It really is "the last enemy" as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:26.

But suffering can also be instructive and purposeful in a Christian's spiritual maturity.

This morning, my pastor Brian Croft commemorated the anniversary of our friends' passing with a sermon from 2 Corinthians 1:1-11, where Paul famously proclaimed that God "comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort that we ourselves are comforted by God" (verse 4).  I seem to remember trying to do a Greek exegetical paper on that text, but most of those projects left me less sure of the text's meaning than I was before I even started the study (that's probably one of the reasons why I decided not to push my luck with biblical language studies in the post-graduate level).

Exegetical nuances aside, I think the meaning of this text is more easily accessible for Christian believers who have endured great suffering and loss but have consequently been strengthened in their faith because of that suffering.  They have been able to recognize Christ as truly sufficient for their weaknesses.  Those who have suffered greatly and lost much should be more willing and able to comfort other brothers and sisters who are going through their own struggles.

Truth be told, I've lived a very comfortable life.  I'm still living a very comfortable life.  Growing up, I didn't experience much loss.  Those losses have certainly started piling up in the last five years, however; such is the nature of life.  When you don't known the pain of loss, it's hard to really understand what most of the Bible is talking about.  So, instead of focusing your exegetical energies on comforting people with the Word of God, you can tend to distract yourself with discussions and debates over subjects that (while important) don't really capture the thrust of what the Biblical authors (and the Holy Spirit) were most interested in communicating to God's people.  I could indulge that point further, but now is not the time.

It's important that so many of Paul's letters begin and end with comforting words to the Christian churches.  These churches, regardless of their relative virtues and vices, were living in tough times.  Paul himself had seen suffering beyond what even most of them had experienced.  But even Paul knew that his own tribulations couldn't compare to the greatest sacrifice which our Lord Jesus Christ made for us in his Passion week.  Now that was the definition of a terrible seven days.  Our Savior suffered and died for us, and by His resurrection He secured our eternal reward.  That reward doesn't mean that we've been given a free pass in this life to avoid pain and live a perfectly comfortable life. Quite the contrary, in fact. Our suffering will come, whether by external forces bearing down upon us in hostility or through the natural course of life in a fallen world.

But we've got a promise that we serve a God who is also our Great High Priest.  He symphathizes with us completely in our infirmities and was tempted in every way, yet He was without sin (Hebrews 4:14).  Because of His suffering, we can approach the throne of God with confidence that He will bestow us grace to endure our own suffering and use our experiences to comfort others in their suffering.

Therefore, I'm thankful for this year in which God has taught me suffering, even if my experience is still meager compared to what most people in life deal with on a daily basis.  And I ought to be about the business of bringing comfort and grace to others, because I'm sure I'll be on the receiving end again in the future.

Expecting God to Do Something Great

This past Sunday marked the 9th anniversary of my pastor Brian Croft at Auburndale Baptist Church.  During last Wednesday night's business meeting, he shared a couple of simple reflections that he had learned during his time as pastor.  He recently posted them on his blog.

Both points he noted are good and very emotional subjects for folks like me who have known Brian over the years, but his second point resonated deeply with me:  "The Way God's Blessing Often Flows Out of Sorrow."  In every church, there will be painful losses.  Whenever members leave a church, there ought to be sadness to see them go, even when it is for good reasons like job or ministry opportunities. Some losses come about through controversy as members either leave the church in bitterness or receive the stern hand of church discipline.  Many of these losses, however, will come through the death of members... and some of them tragically so.

In all my years at Auburndale Baptist Church, I never knew such sadness as the stretch of days between November 30 and December 2 of 2011.  Our church lost three people dear to us in two unrelated automobile accidents hundreds of miles away.  In both instances, a vehicle from the opposite lane lost control and made a head-on collision with the specific vehicle containing the people precious to us.  After the first crash, I tried to rationalize it as a simple, occasional tragedy.  But after the second crash, the one which killed my dear friend, I could not accept the fact that it was a simple coincidence.  I felt as if I and my brothers and sisters and Auburndale had suffered a cruel blow ordained by God himself.  As I have confessed in a previous post, I had to deal with a little bit of my own anger toward God for not only allowing such tragedies to happen, but for seemingly being the direct cause of them.  I am thankful, however, that the grace of God in Christ proved sufficient for me and brought my heart to dependence upon him rather than resentment.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that God must have a great purpose in order to ordain such a terrible sequence of events.  The first thing I did after hearing of the loss of my friend was to take the time to call up various people throughout my life who have made a great impact on me (and who continue to be important to me) and simply let them know that I appreciate and care for them.

I have seen the seeds of long-term transformation in my own life since the events of last December.  I try not to ever take the important people in my life for granted or assume that they'll always be around for me.  When people I care about get sick or go through hard times, I do what I can to lift them up and encourage them in the Gospel.  Life is way too short as it is, and it can change from routine to tragedy in an instant.  I do not know what God specifically has in mind for my life, but I hope that I am able to honor the friendship I had with Stacy Ellison by working harder to strengthen the existing and future relationships in my own life.  And I hope God, in his kind and wise providence, will put the people in my life that I'll need to be more effective for Him and appreciate His goodness even more.

Therefore, in light of all losses that have occurred in my life since last December, I'm encouraged rather than discouraged.  I'm expecting God to do some great things.  And I hope I'll get to see them.

Teaching Kids about Death and Resurrection

I posted previously about my first reactions to the recent death of my friend, Stacy Ellison. This is the follow-up story about how I went to church the Sunday immediately following his passing.

Despite my grief over the loss of my friend, I had to prepare a Sunday School lesson for three kids, ranging in age from 10 to 12 years of age. I chose the text of John 11:1-44, the famous passage where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. That text is an easy choice, since it so clearly gives Christians comfort with the hope of being raised from the dead ourselves. I was also hoping that these tragic events might make the threat of death a present reality to these precious (and mostly unconverted) little children with so much living yet to do (God willing). I prayed that if any good might come from these sudden deaths, it would be that it might awake unconverted souls to their need for salvation in Jesus.

For the sake of my emotions, I decided not to mention Stacy or his family directly during the course of the lesson. After reading through the biblical text with the kids, I proposed a three point summation of the passage:

1. Lazarus was a friend of Jesus.
2. Lazarus died.
3. Jesus resurrected him from the dead to live again.

I tried to make the kids aware of two facts. First, that the second point ("this man died") is a fate that awaits all of us assuming that Jesus doesn't come back first. And secondly, that the third point ("Jesus resurrected him") is dependent upon the validity of the first point ("He was a friend of Jesus"). My goal was to communicate to these children that if they want to have a hope in life beyond death, then they must be a friend of Jesus, which I chose to define as "Trusting in Jesus alone for salvation."

It's a message I had presented to these kids many times over the past five years, but that Sunday I emphasized it with greater passion than ever before. On account of the death of my relatively young friend of 37-years-old, I was conscious that none of us has any guarantee on how long we will have to live before that dreaded day of earthly death falls upon us.

In my previous post, I stated that the nature of Stacy's kind of "accident" unnerved me. Just two days earlier, a Texas pastor and his wife (Jackson and Barbara Boyett) who had been friends of our church also lost their lives in a head-on collision in which an oncoming vehicle slid into their lane. At the time, I tried to justify their deaths with arguments like, "I sure do know how dangerous those country highways can be. When cars reach high speeds and drivers get lulled into distraction, bad things tend to happen." And then I heard about Stacy's crash. Apparently it wasn't the result of cars traveling at high speeds and apparently it wasn't the result of a distracted driver. From what I've read, a the driver of a pickup truck moving across a busy metro bridge in a 35 MPH zone suffered a seizure, pushed down hard on his gas pedal, and slid across into an oncoming Ford Taurus, which my friend was driving. There's just no logical explanation for why Stacy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It just seems like it was destined to happen. I don't know if there is any significance as to why these dear folks died the same way in such a short amount of time, but it felt like cruel irony. I felt like God was just trying to get my attention by saying "When it's your day to die, there is no avoiding it or explaining it away."

As I read through John 11, I was struck by the emotional rebuke that Martha appears to give to Jesus in verse 21. She said, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." It's a subtle rebuke, but it's absolutely true. Jesus knew of Lazarus's ailments yet intentionally delayed a visit for two days promising that "it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it" (verse 4). The human side of me wants to know what Jesus was doing that would have been so important. What human friend would sit around while his friend lay dying? What human father would intentionally delay going to help his suffering son? If only for an instant, Martha appeared to be angry at Jesus. Given the perplexing nature of the recent deaths of people connected with my church in Louisville, it was an anger with which I could sympathize... if only for a moment.

Yet, though Martha's faith may have been weakened with the death of her brother, it was still strong enough to confess that "I know even now that whatever you [Jesus] ask of God, God will give you." This was not a "health and wealth" mantra, but an expression in her confidence in the unbreakable union of Jesus and God the Father. Even though we may not always like how God's providential will unfolds in life, we have to trust that God works through all things for the glory of Christ and "for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28). It was an immediate rebuke to my own disappointment with God's providence over the past week.

Getting the focus back on the Sunday School lesson, I simply exhorted those precious little children to ensure their eternal destiny by putting their complete trust in Jesus to save them from their sins. In order to be raised from the dead, they needed to become friends of Jesus. As I thought of the grace Jesus had shown to Stacy, I thought also of the grace Jesus has shown to me in forgiving my sins and giving me a new heart. It was at this point that the emotions I had suppressed all weekend finally got the best of me. I had to hand over the remainder of the lesson to Matt Miller, my co-teacher, because I could only weep like small child who had just stubbed his toe on a door. Matt challenged the kids again not to delay matters of eternal salvation.

I genuinely hope and pray that the sudden deaths of the Boyetts and Stacy Ellison might give the rest of us cause to think more seriously about the salvation of ourselves and others. Ultimately, the most important question we have to answer is whether or not we're a true friend of Jesus Christ.

What I Did When I Learned My Friend Died

Today marks the one week anniversary of the tragic, all-too-soon death of one of my good friends of the past seven years. Stacy Ellison died at the age of 37 after injuries sustained in a car crash on the Louisville Second Street Bridge. Stacy leaves behind his wife, Kim, who he loved and cherished, his little girl, Ali, and his infant son, Titus. He also leaves behind so many friends and family members who loved him dearly.

The Ellison family showed me great love, care, and joy during my time in Louisville. When an ice storm knocked out power across most of the city a few years ago, they housed me and my then-roommate for nearly half a week. I considered Stacy and Kim to be like my really cool, slightly more mature cousins. Stacy was my buddy; we watched NASCAR together, played in the same fantasy football league, and we once played a little Microsoft Kinnect (the last time I was over at his house). Stacy was a good Christian man, a deacon in our church, a faithful husband and father, and, of course, he was my friend.

A little over a month ago, he made me laugh so hard when he pretended to use his son as a Yoda puppet. I got so excited I had to leave the church fellowship hall because I was distracting the kids from their lesson. That was classic Stacy Ellison.

The details of his death have been a source of grief, mostly because it doesn't appear that there is anything he could have done to avoid it. Stacy was driving north from Louisville into Indiana in a Ford Taurus on a beautiful, somewhat comfortable December afternoon. A Silverado truck was coming south in the opposite lane. Because of extensive maintenance projects on the bridge, the speed limit was posted at around 30 mph. An eyewitness who was following the truck claims he was following the speed limit and the truck seemed to be doing about the same speed. Suddenly, everything went crazy...

The truck began to swerve out of control, accelerated wildly, hopped the dividing curb, and careened into the lane of oncoming traffic. Stacy's Taurus was the lone car that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The vehicles collided head-on. The two passengers in the truck were badly hurt, but Stacy suffered unsustainable injuries and died within the next hour. Medical examiners believe the driver of the truck suffered from a "medical emergency" that caused him to lose control of his vehicle. The witness said the driver appeared to be suffering from a seizure that likely resulted in his foot smashing down onto the gas pedal, causing the terrible chain of events that claimed the life of my friend.

When I heard about Stacy's death after a call from another dear friend, I felt like I should do something to make the situation better... but that was just desperate longing to try and regain a sense of control in my life. After an hour of scrambling across the internet and across town to inform some friends of the terrible news I had learned, I returned to my apartment, unaware of what to do next.

It is my personal belief that Stacy and Kim knew how much I valued their friendship, yet I cannot recall any occasion when I bothered to verbalize that sentiment. It's the kind of thing I sometimes have trouble saying with a straight-face, maybe because of how overly-sentimental it sounds or perhaps because I don't want to find myself tearing-up unexpectedly. But one thing that left a pit in my soul was the fact that people I care about could go to their grave (and to meet God) never knowing the depth of appreciation that I had for them.

That night, I did the only thing I could do. I called up numerous people (some family, some friends) who have been important in my life over the past few years. I didn't call everybody who I probably should have called, and sometimes I only got their voicemail services, but I did manage to tell the people who answered the phone three simple words, "I appreciate you." I tried to express the nature of that appreciation, but I'm sure my attempts to do so only scratched the surface.

I am so thankful for the people that God has placed in my life, at different times and in different places, that have made my life better for knowing them. Often, we don't have as much time together as we expect, but that doesn't make the time spent together any less sweet. One thing I learned after the death of my friend, Stacy, is that I have to value the important people in mind. Hopefully, I can let them know how much I truly appreciate them.

Amber Mathenia: The Passing No One Told You About

Also see: Tim Ellsworth on Amber Mathenia

In this week that has claimed the lives of one popular celebrity and one distinguished Baptist scholar, the death of one young woman has gone unnoticed by most of the world. Ironic, since those are often the sort of people who deserve the most admiration. In this particular passing, that adage is true in spades.

Amber Mathenia, a 2001 graduate of Union University, was neither a pop-culture star nor an acclaimed seminary professor. Yet, in her 28 years on this earth she accomplished more for God than most people will achieve in a lifetime. She and her husband, Anthony, had been serving as full-times missionaries to Ethiopia for the last few years. The life of a missionary, of course, is always filled with danger and uncertainty. Yet, Amber was not called home to glory as a martyr. She finished her earthly pilgrimage when she and her two children were involved in a car crash while visiting family and friends in west Tennessee. The children were unharmed.

Amber was a woman whose life was characterized by a joyful submission to the will of God in all circumstances. She followed the will of God when she married a godly husband. She followed the will of God in standing by his side while serving the cause of Christ in Ethiopia. And she followed the will of God in the adoption of two Ethiopian children: Ellie, 4, and Isaac, 6 months.

As the world mourns the loss of an actor whose movies will surely preserve his legacy, and Baptists mourn the loss of a great statesmen whose publications will surely preserve his legacy, I ask that we all pause and mourn the loss of a godly woman whose legacy will surely live on in the hearts of those whom she blessed in life. Let us pray for her family, her father does not yet know the Lord. Let us pray for her children, Ellie and Isaac, now without their mother. Let us pray for Anthony, now left to persevere in the service of God as a single father and missionary. And let us pray that God might grant us the grace to conform our lives to the gospel with the same joyfulness as Amber Mathenia. In this way, we may honor her legacy in a way she would have wanted.

To live is Christ. To die is gain.

In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that monetary donations be sent to Christ Community Church in New Albany, Miss., where the Mathenias receive their support. Gift cards from Target, Wal-Mart or Babies R’ Us are also needed to provide for their children. The church’s address is P.O. Box 795, New Albany, Miss., 38652.