My former Pastor died unexpectedly. 

Shortly before Christmas.

Admittedly, I hadn’t seen him or heard from him in over 20 years.  My oldest child was a newborn when we last visited him, from our home in Washington State, at his church in Idaho.  Not the church he pastored when I met him in California, we had both moved on.  After that, we moved on again.  My husband and I to Alaska, where a new career and eventually another child awaited, then eventually to Colorado where almost 20 years passed and two more children were added to our family.  I don’t know exactly what he did next or where he went.

But in December of 2020, a facebook friend notified me of his passing and my heart felt the loss.  I was 13 when I visited this small church in the outer Bay Area of California.  It was at this small community church in California, that I bumped into Jesus for the first time.  I experienced Him first over the course of several months in youth group, where this amazing group of leaders and students loved me, poured life into me, and spoke truth.  And then on a Sunday morning in November, just one week shy of my 14^th birthday, I walked into church, a little afraid of what to expect, and heard my first message of Jesus’ love for us and an invitation to salvation.  If you were in church world in the 80’s & 90’s these words will echo in your memory, but “with every head bowed and every eye closed,” I raised my hand for salvation.

I didn’t know what I was doing.  I didn’t yet truly understand the gift I was accepting or how it would radically change my life, but these people had something, were a part of something, and I wanted what they had and so I said yes.  Over the next 30+ years I have said yes hundreds, probably thousands of times, to where Jesus was leading me next, sometimes excitedly, sometimes fearfully, sometimes reluctantly, but all those yeses have lead to a life filled with Jesus and it all began with that first one.

As I‘ve spent the last weeks remembering the life he lived, the impact that life had on my own, reminiscing with people I haven’t seen in all this time, I’ve realized that despite all the places we’ve been sharing the impact he had on us, there is no way to capture it all in one list, one post, one paragraph (or even one blog post).  I still use some of his stories today when talking to people about Jesus.  I still share his lessons when speaking to others.  I still make my own life choices based on the foundations he laid so many years ago.  So much of how I see and experience Jesus has roots in the image he painted.  My heart for churches and ministries and communities is so much based on the amazing community he built his church around.  Everything I have learned and grown in in the years since moving on from that church has been planted in the soil he first cultivated.  And of course, he wasn’t alone.  There were so many people speaking into my life in those days. 

And I suspect he didn’t know.  I was a teenager back then, with no insight into the mental workings of pastors and church leaders.  In the years since then I’ve spent a lot of time working for people like him,  with people like him, I’m pretty sure I’ve been people like him.  Filled with all the dreams and vision that God can give, but also filled with the knowledge of my own shortcomings, my own failures, my own impatience.  Dealing with the highs and lows of church life, the moments of amazing abundance and the seasons of drought, the power of amazing faith and the devastation of loss.  I don’t know most of the last 25 years of his story, but he was always very open about his story as long as I knew him.  He was a man not afraid to learn, a man who loved community and reaching the unchurched, a man who made mistakes and owned them, a man who loved his family thru hard times.  He was a man who taught us how to trust Jesus with everything, willing to risk it himself in doing so.  He taught me how to say “Jesus you are welcome here” and then deal with whatever Jesus chose to do.  And because of who he was, what he inspired in others, I have spent my entire adult life in service to the church.  As a volunteer, as a staff member, and in supporting ministries, and in return, although sometimes I’m also not very good a taking stock in my life, I know I have taught countless others to do the same.  My children now, as they have entered or are nearing adulthood, share those same values, to love and to serve and to follow Jesus.  So many people have spoken into all of us over the years, and Jesus has opened doors for us to speak into others the same way, but my path, my faith story, begins in a little community church and a man named Larry.