Hello, and thank you for coming. It’s an honor to have you here and it’s an honor for me to be asked to speak.
I had actually been thinking for quite some time about what I would say today, and it sounded good in the shower, so let’s see how it sounds in real life.
I think the first thing I’d like to say is what I wish I had sincerely believed by the time I was ten years old—and you can put this on my gravestone. I wish I had sincerely believed that I had no business closer than conversational distance to a female until I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I was actually paying the bills doing it. It would have saved me years of agony and heartache and feeling sorry for myself. There’s nothing or very little I can think of in the world you want to have less than a former girlfriend, and there’s almost nothing I can think of that you don’t want to be more than a former boyfriend.
More importantly, I would like to say that I have tasted and seen that God is good. “The Lord is good, and his mercy, his love, his kindness, endures forever.” God is good, and he shows his goodness through his people.
I wanted to have this event somewhere else besides this church. After all, at this phase in life, it’s all about the alcohol, and they wouldn’t let us serve any here. So it’s ironic—or providential—that we are here because this building has been a very important part of God showing his goodness to me and my family through his people.
Twenty-two years ago. I was a disgraced former missionary with a wife and three school-age daughters to provide for. I had no job and no skills I knew how to work into a job, and I felt like a leper. We had family, but there are people with families who are sleeping on the street, and I was literally afraid of having to sleep under overpasses. Ginny’s sister and her husband took us in, though—ten people in a one-bathroom house—and we were OK for the summer. But how long could that last?
One of the first things we wanted to do, however, was to put our girls into a Christian school, so we enrolled them in a Christian school from a Christian tradition much different from ours. But one of the people who worked there happened to go to this church, and she was somehow instrumental in connecting us with a Christian couple who had an available rental house we could almost afford. We lived there dry and reasonably warm for fifteen years.
Soon after that, we wandered into this church, not knowing anybody or anything about it. The people took us in right away—our girls were involved in youth groups, Ginny was playing keyboards, and I was part of the missions committee. They were imperfect people, and we were imperfect people, so we got along fine. I’ll never forget that first Thanksgiving week when somebody knocked on the door one evening and brought in four big boxes full of groceries that were badly needed.
I managed to go through three jobs in the first year, each less enjoyable than the previous and none paying anything close to what I needed to provide for my family. But God provided Ginny with piano students, which paid the majority of our bills. And God hadn’t forgotten me either: one of the men in the church heard a bit of my story and help me get a gig teaching English writing skills at a local seminary. I felt like the leper being invited to work at a hospital. That job evolved into the editing business that I’m still somewhat involved in.
A bit later, one of God’s people, the husband of one of Ginny’s old roommates, helped me get a long-term temporary gig working on the notes for a Bible published by a major publishing house, and now I felt like the leper was being allowed to work with patients. I was being allowed to work with holy things again, and that was also a great time for us financially.That gig ended, and there were some lean years until an old colleague suggested I call some mutual colleagues, and before long I was working not only on notes but also on the translation of the Bible that that group was putting into the hands of people from minority groups that could never hope to have their own expatriate specialists on site long term. I could hardly believe that God would allow me to do those things working remotely and to travel to Hanoi and Kathmandu on business: the leper was now in the operating room! And over the last few years, I have been privileged to go by myself to Costa Rica and to accompany Ginny to Peru, Cameroon, and Gambia to hold workshops, with most of the expenses provided by donations from God’s people.
So, my testimony is that God is good. He has certainly been good to me and to my family. What the catechism says is true: the most important thing in life—”the chief end of man”—the most important thing in life, what life is all about, is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever”—that is, to show the world how good God is and then know that he has accepted you as his child and you will be enjoying him forever. He shows his goodness through his people, through his church. What life is all about is to be part of God’s community, the community God is building to live for Jesus. Everything else is just stuff.
So that’s what I’ve learned from living for seventy years.
Thank you.
