(Page 6 of 9) - Well. Who could fail to be moved by this profound and extraordinary email? It was transcendent; it was a miracle. I could hardly fathom what I had just read. How could David have written these words one day before he died without knowing that he was going to die? It was all just too much. How could a man who doesn’t know he has one day left on earth write this? There was only one answer: God knew. Just as God seemed to speak prophetically through Martin Luther King in his “I Have A Dream” speech, in which King seems to allude to his imminent death the next day, so God seemed to me to be speaking through David here. That was the only thing I could compare this to. Suddenly I felt like I was holding a very precious document. I held the paper in my hands and just marveled at it and smiled. When I looked up I saw that Jim and B.J. were smiling, too.
The next morning, instead of our usual Bible study, we had a special memorial for David, right in Jim’s living room, where we had always met. But this time there was a handful of women in our midst: a number of David’s colleagues at NBC news, including his Weekend Today Show co-host, Soledad O’Brien. The speaker was the Rev. Tom Tewell of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and it was a powerful service. At the end of it Jim asked me to pray aloud. It’s not often that this happens to me, but as I began to pray I felt God’s anointing so that my words were more than my words; I could sense the presence and touch of God. As I was praying, I was shaking and on the verge of weeping, and as the words poured out of me I thanked God that David was with him and that that was true, that it was truer than anything we knew, that it wasn’t just something that we tell ourselves to feel better, that it was not a fairytale, that it was the Gospel truth.
* *
Over the next week I continued to marvel at that email, and I realized that it was God’s way of telling us that it was okay, that He was with David and with us, that this wasn’t something that had just happened. It was a measure of comfort.
And not long afterward I learned something else that was comforting: the funeral service for David was going to be held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral right here in Manhattan, and Melanie had asked Jim to speak. She had wanted Jim to share something about his profound friendship with David, and about David’s faith, and I was greatly comforted that somehow now, despite everything, others would hear.
As the event approached, Jim began writing the comments he would make at the service and he showed them to me, inviting my suggestions. And in reading Jim’s comments I learned something else that was extraordinary. I already knew that Jim and David had been reading Oswald Chambers’ Utmost for His Highest together for months, and I knew they had even continued to do this when David was stationed in Kuwait City, waiting for the war to begin. But once David had been part of the Third Infantry and their advance toward Baghdad, David and Jim had been unable to speak directly, but they had still continued to trade voicemails with each other. In that way Jim continued to encourage David with the readings from Utmost, only now in the form of long voicemails which David heard every day as he famously bounced through the Iraqi desert. But what I hadn’t known was what Jim had read to David in his last voicemail.
Jim’s last voicemail to David before he died was the April 5th entry of My Utmost For His Highest. And two things about the entry seemed undeniably extraordinary. First of all, the April 5th entry concerned Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the day before his death, on what we call Maundy Thursday. And of course Jim had read this to David on the day before his own death.
But there was a second way in which this entry struck me as perfectly stunning and which was most evident in its very last line. This is what Jim had read to David: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page › |
