Thursday, March 12, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
It’s a gift
Jesus was driving out a demon that was mute,
and when the demon had gone out,
the mute man spoke and the crowds were amazed.
When John my friend who had been a Mormon, self-named apostle, Pentecostal and short-time Jehovah’s Witness decided to walk around the neighborhoods of Champaign and Urbana to reclaim our streets for the Lord … I had never loved him more. Results of his prayers, powerful as they were, might not have shown up in cleaner streets or better weather, in fewer accidents or less divorce … or on the other hand, perhaps they did. We don’t measure these things very well, but God does.
John carried a vial of oil in his pocket, so he would be ready to anoint something or someone at a moment’s notice. His white beard reminded me of Santa Claus, but even more, now that I think of it, of Samuel. And he sometimes spoke like Samuel, strong, stern and convinced of God’s touch on his words.
We met in a Vineyard small group and became friends. His serendipity mixture of certainty and doubt appealed to me. I learned from him. John no longer worked for an income; after graduating from Knox College and the University of Illinois he had been an accountant for Motel 6, community college vice-president, attorney, and a pastor with the Metropolitan Church. His focus changed one afternoon in a Santa Barbara church balcony while he was listening to a choir singing. Â God sang to him even louder. No longer wondering, he settled into obedience to God. He carried his gifts from God lightly, seeking less to understand than to use them.
His wandering also ceased. He found a way to live on low, subsidized income and used his time as a missionary. He lived in a home and then in an apartment, then in a low-income subsidized housing apartment, then in an assisted living facility and finally in a nursing home. I kind-of lost track of him then. Covid-19 prevented me from seeing him (or anyone else, for that matter, including my mom). Nursing homes were off limits in 2020. I talked to him once, or twice … but we had to rely on his hallway pay phone, and the nursing home attendants didn’t always help.
And then, he died.
What did Alec Guinness say at the end of Dr. Zhivago? (he played Yegraf, Dr. Zhivago’s brother). About Lara, his poet-brother’s love?
She’d come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I too was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.
Oh, I kind of felt that way about John. Over the years I helped him write and rewrite his autobiographical obituary; he wanted to tone down both his pride and his shame and give God all the glory he could. In his will, he named me as his funeral officiant, and the Rantoul funeral director called me to let me know he had died. Before the funeral, she invited me to view his body and pray. I shared stories with her, and I remember us both getting emotional.
Not many attended John’s funeral, and then the big black hearse carried him from the Lux Memorial Chapel 101 miles west on Rte 136 to Havana, Illinois, where he was born, where his gravestone, already erected and etched with everything but the date read, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.”
A couple of years before his death he prepared a number of postcards complete with “Forever” postage and addresses. The cards read “I am NOT sorry to inform you of my passing.” He left the date (turned out to be Wednesday, October 21, 2020, a week before his 78th birthday) blank.
Yevgraf said something else at the end of Zhivago, to Lara’s daughter, Tonya. The Soviet general is talking with Tonya and her boyfriend David in his office high above a new dam they are all working to build.
Yevgra: Tonya! Can you play the balalaika?
David: Can she play? She’s an artist!
Yevgraf: Who taught you?
David: Nobody taught her!
Yevgraf: Ah… then it’s a gift.
(Jeremiah 7, Psalm 95, Joel 2, Luke 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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