What it's all about

A member of my church home bible study group died today. I think, though I'm not yet certain, that J. died peacefully in his own bed. He was in his late eighties.

Was J. a long-standing member, a pillar of the church? No: though in his childhood he had some church contact, he was really a life-long non-church-goer. He started coming to our church about five years ago, some time after his wife died (she had been a member of the women's fellowship).

It was obvious that J. was desparately lonely. He joined everything there was going - even the Women's Fellopwship, which had to change its name. He used to tell us that he wished God would take him away too. Without his wife, life was empty and pointless.

But J. started to make friends at the church. Among the young, more so than the old, actually. He started to get out of himself a bit more. But it wasn't just the friendships which meant he stopped saying that he wished he was dead. There was work going on in his spirit, too. It wasn't just that he attended a lot of Alpha courses (he must hold some sort of record there). It wasn't just that he took to reading the bible from cover to cover several times over. It was that, through all those things - relationships, teaching, and reading - God changed him.

A good example was just a couple of years ago. We studied forgiveness in our bible study. We agreed that where there is deep hurt, forgiveness takes a lot of time, and effort, and will. It's a process, not an event. But J. said, more than once, that he had seen such terrible things in the Second World War, he could never forgive the Germans. But God had other ideas. Over the next few months, he was able to change that around. And that was so obviously a burden let go. It changed that little corner of his memories, and there was a little bit of extra peace brought to his life.

J. was frail character: there were so many things wrong with his health, we thought we'd lost him many times. The highlight of this past year was when J. was baptized. He went though with full immersion: almost literally a heart-stopping moment. Could he have succinctly explained "the gospel"? I doubt it very much. But there was a heartfelt confession of faith there.

I'm glad I knew J. I was hopeless at really connecting with him: he and I used to joke about the fact that I never seemed to have time to go and visit. But several others did. And that made a real difference in his life. Not just because it made him less lonely, but because through those relationships he so obviously gained a new perspective on life, and God, and much else beside. And it seems to me that that's what church is all about.