Life is Short

Once again, my spe­cial Guest Blog­ger on the Hori­zon is Dan King of BibleDude.net, an online Bible study resource.

Life is Short

by Dan King

I got some news recently about a young man that I know. I first met him when he was a middle-schooler and I was a youth group vol­un­teer. He was quite an ener­getic young man, and I always enjoyed being around him. I was his small group leader in the youth group for a while. After my wife and I stopped work­ing with the youth so that we could focus on hav­ing a child, I lost touch with him.

I actu­ally ran into him about four or five months ago at a restau­rant one morn­ing while meet­ing some other friends for break­fast. He told me about how he had just been released from sev­eral months in jail that morn­ing, and was there to meet his par­ents. He was in jail for get­ting into a fight that got a lit­tle too car­ried away because some­one was using racial com­ments about his girl­friend. He was so fresh out of jail that I could even still smell it on him. He hadn’t even been “home” yet, and really didn’t have a home to go to anyway.

As I spoke with him, he shared with me about how his life had got­ten way out of con­trol since he stopped com­ing to church. I got the idea that he just started head­ing down the wrong path, and step-by-step, before you knew it he was knee-deep into a pretty bad lifestyle and was run­ning with all of the wrong people.

But I also heard a des­per­ate cry. One that was reach­ing out for a hand to help him get out of the lifestyle that he was in. So I told him that my wife and I were now lead­ing the young adults min­istry at our church, and that I knew that there were sev­eral guys there that had come from rough pasts that he could really con­nect with and help him to get on the right path. He told me that he would come, but I never did see him …

Any­way, my wife tells me that for the last few months he had been meet­ing with one of our pas­tors that he knew. Appar­ently he had given his life back to the Lord, and was coun­sel­ing with him to get his life back on track. She also told me that his body was found dead this morn­ing. At this point we still don’t know any details about how or why, but I don’t need to know. I already know that his old lifestyle had caught up with him somehow.

This whole thing sad­dens me deeply. It is always dif­fi­cult to hear about a young life end­ing way too early, but it espe­cially hurts when it is some­one that you have had the oppor­tu­nity to min­is­ter to and get to know so well …

I just want to take this oppor­tu­nity to say that some­times your life catches up with you. So each of us has a deci­sion to make every day. Which God do you want to serve? If you live the life of right­eous­ness, you will be able to walk in the peace and bless­ing of the Lord. This doesn’t mean that every­thing is per­fect, but there is a com­fort in know­ing you can be sep­a­rated from the world and walk on higher ground. If you choose a dif­fer­ent path, then who knows where you’ll end up. I don’t mean this as a scare tac­tic; it is just the real­ity that your life can catch up with you…

May God be with the fam­ily as they deal with the loss of Chris …

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