Worth Repeating.

As I’ve prepared this week for a Journey Class I’m teaching Sunday night, I’ve been moved by these words from Tony Snow.  Tony was a classy man, full of life, and served as a White House press secretary for George W. Bush.  He died of cancer in the summer of 2008.

(excerpts from an article in Christianity Today – July 2007)

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages.  In my case – cancer.

I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of (without) fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies.

There’s nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue—for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Faith. Fearless.

Inspiring. Challenging.