I’d made two laps around the church parking lot, and was starting a third, when a man pulled into one of the spaces, got out of his car, and walked toward me.
He introduced himself as the pastor of this church that bordered my college campus. Asked if he could be of any help. Embarrassed, I said no. Just working through a personal problem, I said.
He offered to pray for me, and warily, I said he could. He did. And it helped.
He smiled, told me where to find him if I needed to talk, and walked off toward his office. I made it a point to remember his name.
A decade later, when my wife and I were looking for a new church, I thought of him, and of how so many of the best folks I knew belonged to his congregation. We decided to visit First Southern Baptist Church of Phoenix, to see if we could discover why.
We arrived a little late that next Sunday morning, so we were still sliding into a back pew as he was explaining to the church that he’d been diagnosed with cancer. My wife and I looked at each other. “Do we join a church where the pastor is dying?”
We did. And it changed everything.
With the rest of the church, we watched, listened, and marveled, over the next year-and-a-half, as he endured the painful treatments, gloried in his remission, swallowed the hard news of the cancer’s return, and then gracefully accepted the final, unbending prognosis.
We watched, astonished, as he threw off the shackles of fear, and the diet of the dying, and started eating hot wings and French silk pie again. As his family opened the doors of their apartment to near-nightly visits from the people of his congregation, who filed through in long, chatty lines to say their goodbyes, to offer their love, to feed on his calm confidence.
Came the time to celebrate his home-going, and what a night that was. The auditorium overflowed. The overflow room overflowed. We sang and wept, laughed and remembered.
And a young man he’d once paused to pray for, out on the edge of the church parking lot, was privileged to share a bit of what a lot of us had seen, and would never forget.
* * * * *
“But I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.”
Matthew 26:29
Gary Young had long dreaded what it might feel like to learn he had cancer. When he finally found out, his fear, at first, was something to see.
His congregation saw it – wet on his forehead, cold and clear in his eyes – and heard it, trembling in his voice – for it was not the man’s way to pretend, or to be something he wasn’t.
He was what he was, and what he was, that long-ago Sunday, was a man scared very nearly to death of Death itself.
Looking into those wet eyes and hearing his heartbeat as audibly as Gary himself, we shivered with the realization that our general was sorely wounded … and awfully close to retreat.
It is a hard, aching thing for a man who finds life intoxicating to look down and see the cup nearly empty.
So many pass their arid existence here dry and thirsty, rarely taking a sip. They have no taste for the strong stuff … the tangy laughter and bitter loss, the rich bouquet of vintage sights and aromas, songs and souls.
But Gary had tasted of the fruit of the vine, rich with the flavor of life itself, and he found it heady stuff, indeed. He drank deeply, and often, and he happily passed the cup.
Now that cup was running low.
And, for a moment, or two, his own courage melted and his heart became like water.
But then the One Who, in His mercy, had given Gary Young that wonderfully sensitive palate – that rich taste for life – poured Himself out in that frightened man again.
And, as is always the case when the Savior pours, all that water streaming from a trembling pastor’s forehead, from an anxious people’s eyes – all those puddles where hearts should have been – turned to wine.
“I have decided,” Gary said – and something warm drove the cold fear from his eyes – “to stop spending my life trying not to die. All of my life, I’ve been trying not to die. Beginning now, with whatever time God gives me, I’m going to live.”
Then, he offered us an apology. He had spent his years as our pastor mostly teaching us, as a church, “how not to die.” That, too, was about to change. “Beginning now – for however long I’m still your pastor – we’re going to live.”
It was a toast. And life bubbled again in the laughter and music and happy conversation of people who loved their pastor and their God. That God’s blessings overflowed into another 20 months of fellowship for Gary and his congregation, and they found, as folks did in Cana those long years ago, that a gracious Master saves the sweetest wine for last.
We had life in our cups, at First Southern that last year, and we knew it, and drank deep.
When Death finally came – to keep the appointment Gary had missed so many times – he found, like the rest of us, that he’d have to wait his turn. So he sat, quietly watching from some small corner of that living room, while raucous, teary, teasing, gentle friends by the hundreds stepped over to sing, or smile, or drop off some hot wings, or just visit awhile, with a man who’d never tried to be anything he wasn’t.
And what he wasn’t, now, was afraid.
For what he was, more than anyone else in that room, was alive.
And so, when Death took his turn, all he could do was step over like the rest of us for a moment’s visit, to pay his own peculiar respects to an old acquaintance who – unlike the rest of us – he wouldn’t be seeing anymore.
They’d grown apart.
Today, Gary Young is tasting some heady stuff … the kind that only fits in new wineskins.
And finding, as will every one who truly believes in the Host, that the God Who pours the wine has saved – always saves – the best for last.
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