One of the reasons I’m standing here tonight, beyond Craig being ill, is because today is May 29th. Twenty-two years ago at 7:18 Eastern Daylight Time, we were sitting in Trinity Missionary Church in Petoskey, Michigan, having just gotten the call. About 12 hours before that, our son had died. Craig wanted me to talk a little bit about that, this being the anniversary. I want to talk about three things related to this: prayer, providence, and comfort.
I know a lot of you have never seen a picture of him. We don’t have many pictures of John, but we do have one that has been enhanced a little for us and made clear. You can see it on the TVs. That was not too long before he died. He was 19 when he died. I won’t go into the story about how all the things led up to the prayer that I prayed, where I prayed, “God, if you need to break me to use me, break me.” Well, a month later, John died.
When you pray, be ready for God to answer. God may not answer in the way that you have planned, but He does answer. I did not plan on this being the method by which God would break me. I was pretty confident that God would break me nicely and that it wouldn’t hurt too much. But it hurt. It hurt a lot. I had known ever since I got involved in the prison ministry six years before that I needed some compassion training because, by nature, I am very much a “get over it” kind of guy. Our three youngest children are very much like their dad. They are very much “get over it” kind of people.
I had been talking with the chaplain at the hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, about going through some chaplaincy training in the hospital, but that never came through. But I got my compassion training on May 29th, 22 years ago. So what do you do now? I’m not the only one. Sheryl’s not the only one who gets news like that. We’ve had other people in this room get that call. What do you do for them? The first thing you can do is pray because you can’t change anything. When that call happens and you get that news, words are not going to change anything.
What do we do with prayer? We can pray certainly for the people involved. We can pray for the lost people involved. Our youngest son was 13 when this happened, and he was lost. He spent the next six years furious at God because his big brother had died. But people were praying for him. Six years later, he was in college. The story about how he got to that college is interesting. He wanted to go to Michigan State. On the way down to register, about an hour or two into the three and a half to four-hour drive, he said, “I can’t go to Michigan State.”
Remember, he’s lost. He said, “I can’t go to that place” because he remembered what his big brother had said. Our oldest son, who’s in his early 50s, went to Michigan State and transferred out after a year because of how pagan it was. Our youngest son was on his way to Michigan State to register, planning to pick up our middle daughter on the way. He gets to Saginaw and tells Sarah, “I can’t go to Michigan State. I got to go to Bethel.” Bethel College was the denomination college for the church we were attending at the time. They turned around, came home, and we made calls to get him into Bethel College. Remember, he’s lost and mad at God.
He went through his freshman year, with chapel mandatory three times a week, still mad at God. He returned for his sophomore year, and during a chapel service, while sitting with two guys, the Lord saved him. Providence. One of the two guys sitting with him is now our son-in-law, and he and Hannah have seven children. Providence.
After John died, he died on a Wednesday. The next day was Thursday, the day I usually went to the prison. It had been 24 hours since John died, and I told Sheryl I was going to the prison that night. She wasn’t exactly thrilled, but I knew I needed to go to the prison that night, so I did. I called up Terry Corrente and asked if there was room in the car. Yes. We went, and the guys already knew that John had died. They had been praying. I went and told them how I felt, how bad it was, and a bunch of stuff. I also told them about the love of God because God sent His own son to die. I get it now. My son has died. I know it’s a different level, but I get it.
As a result, one of the guys there, a murderer, had never addressed the pain he had caused his victim’s family for 20 years. He was from northern Wisconsin, went across the border into upper Michigan, killed a young girl, and was doing his time. He was a friend of mine. He said, “I never knew what the family had gone through, the pain I had caused until that night.” He wrote a little article and sent it to publishing houses, wanting to make a little bit of money. Mennonite Publishing House took him up on his offer, published the article, and sent him $35. He thought he had all the money in the world. The article reached 12,000 people through newsletters and then 145,000 people when Nazarene Publishing picked it up. Providence.
Six months later, going into another prison, I was going to do a message on a Saturday morning. The prisoners attending had not heard the story. One prisoner asked to talk to one of the spiritual counselors, of which I am one. They came up to me and said, “Jeff, so-and-so wants to talk to you.” I didn’t know who he was. They pointed him out, and I said he would have to wait until after I got done. After I finished my message about John dying, God’s grace, and people praying, I sat down with him.
When John died, his best friend, who was later arrested, was looking at three felonies, one of which was driving drunk and causing death. I sat down with this young guy, and he said, “Jeff, I did what killed your son. I’m doing 7 to 15 years for driving drunk and causing death.” Out of the 52,000 prisoners in Michigan at that time, he was in that prison, picked by the chaplain, to talk to me. Providence.
What about comfort? Second Corinthians 1:3-4 talks about comforting others with the comfort we have been given in Christ. People can identify with the pain. Not everyone can feel the pain, and that’s good. You don’t want to feel the pain. But let’s be frank: death is a reality in this age. It’s appointed for a man to die once, then face judgment. May 29th, 22 years ago, made me very focused on one thing: we all need to be ready to die now. You can’t rest on being ready yesterday. You’ve got to be ready now.
Not everyone gets old like me and dies. This is serious. The people involved with us back then get it now. One of the guys who was in the chaplain’s office with us when what happened that instigated the prayer that started this whole thing? He was a volunteer and ran a housing unit. His daughter was killed a few weeks ago in Minnesota around age 40. Our pastor at the time who did John’s funeral, his 43-year-old son dropped dead three years ago, and they still don’t know why. People die.
When I’ve told the story about the three guys coming to our house that morning, the first guy who showed up just died a couple of weeks ago. We don’t get to take a day off from being a Christian. We can’t put in for PTO or vacation. We’ve got to be ready now because none of us know if we’re going to make it to 7:30.
I know I talk about death and dying a lot, but that’s because I want us all to be ready, and I want us to pray for each other that we are all ready. Many people we thought were ready over the last 20 years are no longer ready. It’s scary to see people walk away. It’s scary to see people who you thought were firm in the faith walk away.
We need to pray. Yes, we pray for people to be saved, but let’s pray for people to remain saved. I know that sort of flies in the face of our Calvinistic doctrine, but if we use means to get people saved, we use means to keep people saved. We pray for each other. We pray that we persevere. We pray that we endure to the end because we don’t know how long our race is. It might be a sprint. It might be a marathon. We don’t know. But we’ve got to finish the race.
So we need to pray for each other. We need to comfort each other because we are going to have people die in this room. You’re all going to die. People we know and love are going to die. How can we comfort them? One way is to pray for them. We felt it. People have asked, “How do you deal? How did you deal with it?” The way we have dealt with it is that God answered people’s prayers and gave us abundant grace for 22 years.
How does Scott deal with his mom dying? How does Bob deal with his wife dying? How does Shamika deal with her brother dying? You’ve got to have grace to get through it because it hurts. It’s always going to hurt in this life. But God will grant grace when God’s people pray for grace for the afflicted, for the people who are grieving.
I just wanted to say that. I thank people to this day who pray for us. This is not an easy day. Our family text thread has no joking around on May 29th. It’s pretty somber every year. It’s pretty somber for my wife on Mother’s Day every year. It’s a little bit somber for me on Father’s Day every year. We all deal with things like this differently.
You know that I have quoted Revelation 21:1-4 a gazillion times. I’m not going to do it now, but that has been my passage for 22 years now because there will be a day when there will be no more crying, no more pain, no more tears because the former things will have passed away. Praise God when that day comes.
So let’s pray right now.
Oh Father, we ask that you incline your ear to us. In this age, we know that your word says we enter the kingdom through much tribulation. Tribulation might look different for one person compared to another, but tribulation is still tribulation. Trials are still trials. Pain is still pain. Father, we know some people enter the kingdom through much physical pain. Some people enter through much emotional pain. Some through financial trials. But Father, there are trials, there are tribulations. They’re real, and we don’t want to minimize them in other people’s lives. Help us to be compassionate with others. Help us to understand that even though their problem is not ours, their problem is still a problem. Their trial is still a trial, and their tribulation is still a tribulation.
Father, help us to bear with one another in love. Help us to be patient with one another. We ask for more grace today. We can’t just pile it up from yesterday and take it out of the closet. We need today’s grace today. We’re all going to need more grace tomorrow. We’re all going to need more help tomorrow. Father, help your people to help each other. As things happen, it can be easy to be this army that shoots our wounded. We don’t want to shoot our wounded. Help us to nurture, comfort, and come alongside our wounded. Help us even when we don’t know what to say. Help us to know when to be quiet, help us to know what to say, help us to be wise, help us to be discerning. Help us to see the reality of the tears people experience in this age.
We ask this in Christ’s name, Amen.
