(Page 3 of 9) - And so every week or so I’d see David there, whenever he wasn’t travelling on assignment. He soon became friends with B.J. and Jim, whose investment banking offices were close to 30 Rockefeller Center, where David worked at NBC. Through them he rather quickly came to find what he was looking for and for the first time in his life to finally understand the basics of the “Gospel” as we call it: that faith in God and Jesus is not about trying to be a morally perfect person. It’s about recognizing that you cannot be morally perfect -- which is why you need a Savior. The simple fact is that we need God’s help to be the person He created us to be. So instead of redoubling our efforts and failing again we turn to Him and ask Him to come into our lives and change us. There’s a humility in that that is the core of the Christian faith and that flies in the face of anyone trying to appear morally superior. Jim and B.J. especially are great at making this plain, without the usual religious trappings and jargon, so that people can see it in a way they’ve never seen it before. And it changes lives.
David’s was no exception. Through his friendships with Jim and B.J. he seemed to find God -- and inevitably, himself -- in a way that was entirely new for him. And whenever he was at the New Canaan Society on those mornings you could see how genuinely happy he was to be there, how he thoroughly enjoyed it. I remember not long before he’d left for Iraq, after a number of weeks away (he’d been down in the DC area covering the sniper case) David returned and stood up in front -- which he’d never done before -- and told us all how much the group meant to him. It had become easy for some of us to take the group and comraderie for granted, so it was especially moving to see how much it had come to mean to this man whom we all admired so.
But as with all of us who are a part of the New Canaan Society, it was and still is always the time apart from Friday mornings where the real business gets done, where the real life of our friendships with each other existed It’s in those phonecalls and lunches where we would privately share our hearts with one another and where we would challenge one another and pray together and for each other. I knew that Jim’s friendship with David was important for both of them and that much of their friendship was in their lunches together at “30 Rock” and in their phonecalls, where they would always share the reading from a daily devotional titled My Utmost For His Highest, written by Oswald Chambers, a Scottish preacher from the early part of the 20th century. That little book, which its devotees often simply call “Utmost” or “Oswald” is a legendary book, in that it seems to capture and to distill the ineffable essence of faith in Jesus in a way that very very few books ever do. Many of us in NCS read that book every day, and it’s become a kind of unofficial handbook for us -- the closest thing there is to Scripture, as some have said. * *
The last time I saw David was in B.J.’s home here in Manhattan. We learned that he would be leaving the very next morning for Kuwait City, and then on to Iraq. We were excited for him, and envious, in a way -- but we were also quite naturally concerned for him, especially those of us who were husbands and fathers. We knew that our friend was going into the heart of an unknown warzone on the other side of the planet; so we talked about it with him and before he left we laid hands on him -- the whole group of us did -- and we prayed earnestly that God would protect him and bring him back safely to his family and friends.
And then, once the war started, we saw him again, sort of. I’d shout, “Hey, honey -- it’s David!” and my wife and I would watch him, our friend, reporting from his eponymously named vehicle. Many of us continued to pray for him daily, to have a particular burden about his being there in the midst of so much danger, but I never imagined he would not return home. Frankly we couldn’t wait for him to be back; at the New Canaan Society we’d give him a huge hero’s welcome at some appropriate venue, with wine and cigars, and inevitably we’d all rib him mercilessly about what a bigshot he now was, about how lucky we were that he deigned to hang out with us, now that he was world famous. I was already laughing about what I’d say. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page › |
