Early on in my move to full-time ministry, there was barely enough money for the bare essentials. My wife and I were young, or so we thought at the time, and there was a couple at our church who took us under their wing in a way I've never forgotten.
The church had planned a ski trip. We had a bus, everyone was excited, and Linda and I wanted badly to go. We didn't have the money. We hadn't said a word about it to anyone — we were just quietly going to sit that one out. But this couple had already gone to the trip planners ahead of us and said five words: "David and Linda are covered."
That's the kind of people they were. Love wasn't a doctrine to them. It was something you did before anyone had to ask.
The husband passed away a couple of years ago. I sat in his memorial service, grateful for a man who had shaped so much of what I understood about generosity long before I understood much of anything else.
What I Heard That Day
Partway through the service, the message turned, the way these messages often do, toward an invitation. Accept Christ — that's "us" — and avoid what happens to everyone else — that's "them." I've sat through a hundred sermons built exactly that way. I used to preach them that way myself.
But sitting there that day, grieving a man I loved, I had a thought I couldn't shake: he's seeing folks he never dreamed would be there.
I don't say that to be clever. I mean it plainly. If the Larger Hope is true — if the reconciling love of God really does reach as far as Scripture keeps suggesting it does — then a man who spent his whole life quietly covering people's ski trips and rent and heartbreaks is now watching people walk into the presence of God that he was taught, his whole life, to write off. And I don't think that would surprise him nearly as much as it would delight him.
Who I Was Actually Grieving For
Here's what caught me off guard about that day, and it's the real reason I'm writing this post. I wasn't afraid for myself. That old fear — the one that used to keep me up at night wondering if I'd gotten the doctrine wrong, if grace had a smaller ceiling than I hoped — that fear didn't come back. It's genuinely gone, and I don't say that lightly, because I know some of you reading this are still living inside it.
What I felt instead was grief. Real grief, sitting in a room full of people who loved this man, listening to a message built to make some of them afraid. I looked around and wondered how many people in those pews had heard "us and them" their whole lives and were sitting there right then, quietly doing the math on which side they landed on. I know that math. I did it myself for decades. It is a miserable way to grieve someone you love.
I used to be one of the people delivering that message. I don't say that with shame — I said what I believed, and I believed it because it's what I'd been taught by people who loved God as much as anyone I've known. I want to be clear about that: the man preaching that day, and the people who taught me to preach it my own way for thirty years, were not the problem. Good people, doing exactly what they'd been taught, in good faith. The teaching is the problem. But I understand now, in a way I didn't understand then, what that message actually does to a room. It doesn't just describe a doctrine. It hands people a private arithmetic problem to solve in the middle of their grief.
What I Still Believe, Sitting in That Room
Paul writes to Timothy that God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). I used to read that verse as a description of God's wish — sincere, but ultimately overruled by how the story actually ends for most people. I don't read it that way anymore. I think it describes what God is actually doing, not just what God would prefer if things were different.
Isaiah pictures a day when the Lord "will swallow up death forever," when He will "wipe away tears from all faces" (Isaiah 25:8) — not from some faces. All of them. I don't know exactly how that promise lands on every specific life, every specific choice, every specific person sitting in a memorial service pew wondering if they're in or out. I'm not writing this post to hand you a mechanism.
What I have is the same thing I wrote about a few weeks ago, sitting in a different room with different tears — hope that "does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts" (Romans 5:5). That hope doesn't stay in the hospital room with Mason. I carried it into this memorial service too, and I've found I need it here just as much. I don't have certainty about how reconciliation reaches every person in every pew. What I have is a Father I've come to trust more than I trust my own math, and a friend who spent his whole life being generous to people who never had to ask, now — I believe — watching that same generosity poured out further than either of us were ever taught to imagine.