We met more than a quarter century ago in an ecumenical
meeting, and liked each other soon after.
Like most of his friends, we called him Bob who likes to stay
anonymous. Bob once said that if any one
turned out to be anything special, it’d be a work of the Holy Spirit. We share the belief that God called and
turned the ordinary into someone special.
Bob was a pastor in the Bay area for almost 30 years before
being called to be a faculty member of a seminary. Now he faces his ‘second’ retirement by the
end of the current semester. As the news
became public, I could sense that at least his students began to miss him
already.
We traveled together quite a bit to several meetings
internationally, tried building the dialogue/communication between the denominations
as well as the inter-faith communities. We
shared the hotel rooms and ate in the so called Asian hotdog stand often in the
past that he even picked up the menu interestingly.
What we shared essentially the most is how the sermons we delivered. While I believe that a preacher should put
one's heart
into the sermons, Bob pointed out that he often invested his life
in his sermons as if he is preaching his final sermon. As I joked with him asking how many “final”
sermons has he preached, “As many as the Lord allows,” Bob said.
Besides sharing “heart-felt” and “life-threatening” in our
sermons, we also share an important friend we call him Jilo who is a retired
church Elder and a semi-retired businessman.
What Jilo has done for us is beyond comprehension and we simply treat
him as a God-Send-Angel.
When the last time we said prayers together, we had done that in our
mother tongues and yet we shared the harmony deeply.
