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Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”; aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health your main and direct object you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
There is nothing more clarifying for our masculine souls than proximity to birth and death and the invitation these twin experiences provide to consider what we most deeply want. This immutable truth struck me freshly today while driving my daughter to school. In the midst of the bewilderment, unmet longings, and painful misses that my brave teenage daughter and I are navigating in the emerging rapids of our relationship, the memory of her birth rose up and caught my breath with startling power. The words spilled out to her before I could edit them: “The day you were born was the best day of my life. I remember every moment. I always will.”
Surely the poignancy of birth and death is why a man like Bill Lokey would risk so much, risk sitting with me for hours even as he draws closer to his grand transition from Life to Life.
The gift of being with Bill was a privilege beyond measure—this wise guide, this father in the faith. Together laughing and crying as we explored some of the deeply mysterious miles of life in a broken world; touching on the painful death of a marriage, the challenges and graces of parenting teenagers, intimacy lost and gained, vocation, and remarriage; and the task of showing up with intentional engagement all the way through our very last mile and very last breath along this slow and steady process of transformation into the likeness of Jesus.
Bill is nearing the end of his beginning. His journey through aggressive cancer has led him to the end of what modern medicine has to offer. Yet in the midst of this chapter of his story, he joyously mustered the strength to respond to my questions with bravery, courage, and love.
Join us for a conversation where we risk living and offering as we all journey from life to Life.
For the Kingdom,
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