……I’m in serious trouble.

It was Youth Sunday yesterday, and traditionally the graduating seniors deliver the sermon. There were no graduating seniors in this year’s youth class, however, so they reached back to one from a prior class. The student they picked, Josh, graduated the last year I taught the youth class.

I am so proud of that man I could have just burst. He brought his message, and in it I heard echoes of myself, shaped differently, of course, as if they were bouncing off an irregular surface. He’d actually paid attention and learned something!

Through him I have reached into and affected the future; my own little bit of time travelling. But I’m not proud so much for myself, for my own accomplishment. I’m proud of him, because through it all he’s stood tall (in more ways than one). He’s taken what I taught, and mixed it together with his own experience and ideas he has gained elsewhere, and made it his own. He may echo some of my own conclusions, but he’s doing so not from rote memory, but for reasons consistent with himself.

His life hasn’t been easy; he’s felt serious pain, both physical and psychological. But through it all he’s stood with God, and God has stood with him. He truly believed God had set out to make a man, and he kept himself out of God’s way during the process; truly a great example for us all. Where’s he’s going I can’t tell, but, wherever it is, he’s going to get there, and that place will never be the same again. You can take that to the bank.

And I feel sorry for any mere mountain that gets in the way.

Goliath, you are mighty, but you cannot win this war
For the one who stands before you is standing in the Lord
The power and the glory are mine in Yahweh’s name
So Goliath, in this hour, you’ll be the next giant slain.
~Scott Wesley Brown