Third Sunday of Advent, Â December 17, 2023
Chris Sandel’s 43rd birthday
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Praying for Chris on his birthday
I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord!
And on Chris’ birthday I wonder when that was him crying out, if he remembers when that was him, unsatisfied, relentless, searching, looking for God.
In all the wrong places? Not so much. Chris looked and found. He was willing to do the work: in his eleventh year he read (with me) The Chronological Bible cover to cover. We also read (aloud) The What’s Happening to My Body Book for Boys. We left home four times on weekends for retreats, just Chris and me, and traveled far enough away from Urbana, Illinois to feel like we were on an adventure.
Toward the end of his precious eleventh year we traveled again for an hour to the Beefhouse, premier steak place in our neck of the woods. After dinner Margaret (with us in spirit) and I gave him a promise ring, and he took his vow of sexual purity seriously, although he did lose and have to replace his ring a year or so later.
Chris’ search for God was not always easy or conventional. He spent a week at Little Galilee Camp that eleventh summer and came home surprised to be speaking in tongues. He was baptized immediately upon his twelfth birthday, a kind of Christian bar mitzvah, a moment of commitment on which God has built his life. Is still building his life, 31 years later.
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me. He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners. He sends me to announce a year of favor from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God.
In college to study graphic design, he decided to live at the Christian Campus House on the University of Illinois campus. His housemates chose him to be prayer leader soon after he arrived. Then not too long later, he decided to become a youth minister and transferred to Lincoln Christian College, where he lived with his grandparents, still graduated in four years, and followed two internships with a job as youth minister in Springfield, at West Side Christian Church, where he and his wife Melissa have worked as pastors ever since. That’s about 20 years by now. Maybe a little more.
Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test them all. Then hold on to what is good, and reject every kind of evil.
The confidence and calm Chris shows on the surface runs deep. That along with his humility allows anxious teenagers to rest in him, his own (Jack and Aly) and hundreds of others he has spent time with over those two decades. He does not provide easy answers but instead spends time and listens to them. He has not forgotten that not long ago he was one of them kids himself. Kind of still is. Hope he always will be. We are so glad to pray for him.
May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.
(Isaiah 61, Luke 1, 1 Thessalonians 5, John 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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