Names, faces & stories
This past week a friend I knew from his student days at the University of Delaware came and stayed with us. Naturally we got to speaking about other students we both knew and what they were doing now. Names came back to me. Some fuzzy faces returned! And we shared stories. It reminded me of a time when my colleague at UD – Greg Baker – was going through a list of alumni stretching back 2 decades and he just kept telling story after story as he remembered their names and faces.
The apostle Paul writes to the Corinthian church, ‘Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it – not with ink, but with God’s living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives – and we publish it’ ( 2 Cor 3: 2 The Message).
There are times when I wish I could more tangibly measure what I have spent the last 10 years of my life doing; it might make it easier to explain to others! But in the end it is all about those names, faces and stories … those living letters that Christ himself has written and I have had the joy of walking alongside for a paragraph, or even just a sentence.
Students I talked to about Jesus and I don’t know what happened next. Students who became children of a great Father. Students who caught a vision for their lives that came from God Himself. Students captured by His love. Students transformed by His grace. Students filled with doubts about His existence. Students struggling with pain in His presence.
My friends, by God’s grace I have had the joy and privilege to be a part of these letters that Jesus himself is writing through His Spirit and to the glory of His Father.
And so, to alumni who are reading this – thank you for allowing me into the letters of your lives. And to my prayer and financial supporters - thank you for allowing me to be a part of these divine letters.
Yours Gratefully,
Bruce
