Memory #7: Memorial service
My best friend Dave was short and round. He had dark hair that got thinner and grayer by the year, perhaps because he attended more Bethel College sporting events since 1980 than any other person.[1] He laughed hard and sang loud; his gusto for life was contagious; he made you feel important.
He was also about the funniest person I have ever known. An e-mail from Dave could leave you in stitches. His voice-mail greetings, which were only occasionally in English, made you want to call him back when you knew he wasn’t home. Meanwhile, Dave claimed that 19 years of Bethel undergraduate education had taught him that he was clearly illiterate in at least four languages.
Dave loved books, but wasn’t afraid to poke fun at popular titles. He read, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and suggested that it should have been called Dating Kissed ME Goodbye.[2] Dave considered writing his autobiography. It would be fashioned loosely after Jim Cymbala’s book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. Dave’s version would be called Break Wind, Light Fire.[3]
Dave was refreshingly honest; he knew well his shortcomings, and yet he wasn’t forever rehearsing them. If he needed to confess, he confessed. He longed for deeper intimacy with God and saw self-examination and candid confession as the place to begin.
Dave sharpened me—sharpened my mind, my spirit, my imagination. We had long conversations in my living room, in his car on trips, at our campsite at Cornerstone music festival.[4]
One long conversation concerned our childhood fantasies—pretend baseball and basketball games that we each had played alone as kids. Dave wondered about the meaning of such imaginings; I mentioned that C.S. Lewis seemed to think these imaginings might be a subtle indication of a person’s deep, almost hidden, longing for a world beyond this land of shadows.
I had just finished reading Lewis’s The Silver Chair.[5] In it, King Caspian dies at a very old age. Eustace and Jill are taken by Aslan from Caspian’s funeral up to a “mountain” stream. In that crystal stream they see Caspian’s dead body, water flowing over his wrinkled skin, long white hair, and beard. When the children see him, they cry. When Aslan sees him, he cries giant Lion tears that drop into the river.
Then the lion tells Eustace to pluck a thorn from a nearby bush. “Drive it into my paw,” he says.
Eustace obeys.
"A great drop of blood. . . . splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. . . . And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leapt up
and stood before them. . . . He rushed to Aslan and flung his arms round the lion’s huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a lion."[6]
When I told Dave this story, though it was after 3 a.m., his eyes sparkled. Sometimes more is communicated in a short silence in the pit of the night than a million words could ever express.
Life is full of mingled contrarieties. I oscillate now between heartbreak over my loss and immense joy over Dave’s gain. I miss those conversations with Dave—conversations that fluctuated from riotous laughter, to righteous indignation, to hushed awe. Dave could appreciate the resurrection of Caspian by the Lion’s blood because he had a healthy sense of wonder and a respect for metaphor and mystery. He could appreciate it because it was a picture of his Christian hope. At the same time, Dave could respect the simple, straightforward message of a Christian pop song.
When we were frustrated by life and had used each other to “dump on,” Dave would put things into perspective, recalling the lines of a Keith Green song. He told me if he ever got to preach a sermon his message would be a simple rhymed triplet. “Just keep doing your best / and pray that it’s blessed / Jesus takes care of the rest.”[7]
Frank Laubach, a different kind of best friend of mine and perhaps the greatest missionary of the twentieth century, whose books Dave read shortly before he died, said this. “God, what is man’s best gift to mankind?”
“To be beautiful of soul and then let people see into your soul.”[8]
My friend Dave spent much of his life giving this very gift to those he knew. I will treasure the beauty I saw in Dave’s soul all the days of my life.
[1] Dave was at far more than men’s basketball games during his nineteen years around Bethel. But let me focus on just basketball for a moment. I played in 147 games during my four year basketball career at Bethel. Dave was there for all but three played during a Christmas Break Florida trip my freshman year. We won 113 of those games, five of them after trailing by more than 20 points in the second half—we had made a habit of impossible late game comebacks. Winning that way is enough to give people heart attacks, never mind gray hair. Dave was also present at the NAIA national championship victories in 1995, 1997, and 1998. Consider the heart stopping finishes in each of those three games. In 1995, Mark Galloway hit an impossible three-point shot at the buzzer of regulation to send the game into overtime and on toward victory. In 1997, Randy Romer’s running jump shot in the lane with just seconds left put the Pilots ahead, but the opposing team threw a length of the court pass to a wide open player streaking down the court for a lay-up. Romer, racing after him, may have bothered him just enough. He missed the easy shot and the Pilots had their second NAIA national championship in three years. The next year, Rico Swanson’s fall away jump shot from the right wing at the buzzer made the Pilots back-to-back national champions. And Dave was there keeping statistics for all of this in his official capacity as the college’s Sports Information Director. Mostly, though, he was there as Bethel’s biggest fan. It’s a wonder, considering all he witnessed watching Bethel basketball, that his heart didn’t stop much sooner than it did.
[2] Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1997). When this book was first published it hit the evangelical youth pastor crowd like a tsunami. I can envision these well-meaning men (and very occasionally women) of God taking their young flocks on retreat and preaching to them the dangers of the secular patterns set for dating. Nearly a million copies of the book have been sold in almost a decade. Dave, trying to keep current on the culture of his dormitory full of eighteen and nineteen year old college males, read the book to find out why so many of them were beyond frustration with the girls on campus who had suddenly decided that dating was evil.
[3] Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997). Anyone who knew Dave soon found, always (of course) in the high and holy literary spirit of “The Miller’s Tale,” that Dave was prolifically flatulent. He was as sincere and God-loving a person as you could ever hope for, and he was as hilariously irreverent as they come. Cymbala’s book is about reinvigorating the church via the “prayer meeting.” Dave prayed. Dave also farted. Both well and often, and I’m betting he did them frequently at the same time. And God laughed.
[4] “Cornerstone Music Festival” is a huge “Woodstock” type event put on by Jesus People USA on the Cornerstone farm in Bushnell, IL. Dave and I went half a dozen times in the 1990s, camping, talking, laughing, mocking bad music, and enjoying the good stuff. Since Dave died, I’ve never been able to bring myself to go back. Maybe someday.
[5] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1953; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
[6] Ibid., 252-53.
[7] Keith Green, “He'll Take Care of the Rest,” Ultimate Collection, Chordant, 1977, CD.
[8] Frank Laubach, Letters By a Modern Mystic (New York: Student Volunteer Movement, 1937), 21.
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