I went to Mr. Park’s memorial service yesterday. Many of you knew him. He passed away from pancreatic cancer. He left behind a young wife and 3 little children. He was only 43.

About 9 month ago, as I was resigning from TFBC, we were discussing the future of the youth ministry. He came up to me and told me several times that he is concerned about the future of the youth and wanted to get the church to hire a full time youth pastor rather than a part timer as the church was planning to do. I could see in his heart and in his working with the Korean youth via soccer that he cared a great deal for the younger generation.

That was only 9 months ago. He seemed perfectly healthy then. Since, he discovered he has pancreatic cancer and finally succumbed to it yesterday…

It is quite possible that one of us getting this email has something developing in our body that will take our life away in 9 months.

What if you had 9 months to live? What if at the end of this year, you’d be leaving behind your family and friends to meet God face to face?

I’ve read that nothing focuses our lives like facing death. Most of us presume that we will live till good old age, but that is not guaranteed as we well know. The problem is not that we do not know that our life could end any day, but that we are not doing anything about it. When we hear a news about someone dying, for that moment we examine our own lives, but most of us go right back to our default mode.

I read this this morning: Romans 8:35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” 

Whenever I read this passage, I found comfort in the fact that Christ’s love will never leave me no matter the circumstances. But when I meditated more deeply on it, it was disturbing! It was disturbing because Paul faced these difficulties – hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, & sword – BECAUSE Christ’s love compelled him to travel all over the world to present Christ to the hostile crowd, resulting in these difficulties 

In other words, it was Christ’s love that caused him to face those difficulties. How different is this from 21c American Christianity?

Have I faced hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, etc because of Christ’s love? Have you?

What would our lives look like if for the next 9 months, we lived like we were dying? What would last?

In Love,

PH