Just an update to make sure I’m keeping track of my journey into CrossFit (while staying out of the expensive boxes and on a budget).

Today, even in the middle of the worst season for fitness and junk food imaginable, I gave my first set a try.  This is the same set that I cut in fourths on my first attempt and then in half on the next.  Today, I kept it at half for a total of 50 pushup and 50 squats.

Last time it took me 2:51.

Today’s time was 2:13.

Pretty happy with that.

10 years ago today – on Christmas Eve in 2003 – I had the honor and the heartbreak of preaching my brother’s funeral.  It was one of those moments that you pray you never have to experience, and yet, once you’ve experienced it, never stop thanking God for allowing you to experience it.

My brother was my hero, and was the hero of many others, as well.  To my knowledge, the words I spoke that day were never recorded, and so here – as best as I can recall – are the words that Jesus helped me deliver to those who were there.

I pray that they speak to you now as much as they did to all who heard them then – and even more to me as I spoke them.

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Before I speak to you about Stephen, let me read three verses found in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians.  I’m reading from The Message translation because it describes perfectly the life of my brother and how he impacted so many of you here.

Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. (1 Corinthians 1:27-29)

My brother loved to ask questions, and if you ever met him, chances are good that he asked you any or all of these three:

1. Do you know Peggy Grigg?
2. Do you know Jesus?
3. When is Jesus coming back?

No matter who you were, the first question Stephen would ask you was, “Do you know Peggy Grigg?”  Now, Mrs. Grigg is an amazing person that everyone is better for knowing, but the question was more than just a social one.  It really mattered to Stephen that we all knew her, and each other.

Stephen was really concerned that we all get along, and he had a knack for bringing people closer to each other by bringing them closer to him.  If you knew him, you know that he would use any opportunity to achieve that result.  I saw him do just that once during an event at the Special Olympics (I’m going to embed that story here instead of trying to type all of it.  I shared it at our church once and it was recorded, so we can use it here!)

See, Stephen had learned how to use his disability to his advantage.  He had learned how to use it to positively manipulate any situation – even one in which he seemed to have lost – in order to bring people closer.  In that regard, Stephen was a peacemaker. Matthew 5:9 says “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

Stephen was a peacemaker, and many of us here today will never be the same because a disabled young man – a weaker person by the world’s standards – was used by God to bring peace to us.

There was another question that Stephen would ask, and this one wasn’t a peacemaker question.  “Do you know Jesus?”  This is a preacher question, and Stephen would ask that question anytime, anywhere, of anybody.  Heck, he’d ask the devil if he was here!  He had no fear, and when I was a younger man walking far from God, it was a question that embarrassed me and often put me in uncomfortable situations.

A little back story might help you understand why.  As you know, Stephen lived with Cerebral Palsy, and the severity of his CP affected a lot of his fine motor skills, and that in turn made his speech sometimes hard to understand.  And when you’re a family member of someone like Stephen, that makes you the translator in everyone else’s eyes.  Now, when you’re not walking with Jesus and Stephen is asking people if they know Jesus, you don’t really want to translate that!  I remember once when he and I were at Food Lion buying some groceries.  As we’re getting our items scanned, he looked right at the young lady on the other side of the counter and – with arms flapping – said (in a very loud voice, I might add), “DO YOU KNOW JESUS?”

I turned a couple shades of red until I realized that she hadn’t understood his question.  She looked at me with a curious face and asked me what he wanted to know.  Without missing a beat, I seized the opportunity to get out of the situation with a less than accurate interpretation. “Um, he wants to know where the CHEESE IS.”

“Aisle 3.”

What a strange way to save the world, sending a preacher in a body like Stephen’s.  How I pray that I might preach with just an ounce of the relentlessness that he did.  If we’re not careful, we’ll miss the Jesus that Stephen was pointing us to because of the appearance of the one pointing.  But God chose Stephen when none of us would have, because he chooses what appears weak in order to show His strength.

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:9)

The last question Stephen would ask – and I’m sure I’ve heard him ask it in the tens of thousands of times – was a question that a prophet would ask: “When is Jesus coming back?”  Stephen never let any of us forget for a moment the imminent return of Jesus.

He was a lot like John the Baptist in that way, wasn’t he?  He was always pointing to something coming that was much greater than us and that we’d better be preparing for.  John’s message was recorded in John 1:23: “I am a voice shouting in the wilderness, ‘Prepare a straight pathway for the Lord’s coming!'”

Stephen said the same thing. He just reduced it to a 5 word question: when is Jesus coming back?  And as much as Stephen really did want an answer (in fact, I’m pretty sure this is the FIRST question he asked God when he saw him 3 days ago), I’m not sure it meant as much to him as making sure that we NEVER FORGET that Jesus IS coming.

Many of you know that my dad is a doctor, but Stephen had a way of examining us, too.  How we responded to this question when he asked it revealed a lot about where we were – or weren’t – in our relationship with God.

It still does, and today – even at his funeral – that question probes us.  How do you answer it now?

There is something about all of this – Stephen’s death and mom’s death just 3 weeks ago – that makes me feel so small.  Well, honestly, it makes me feel hollow like the passage we read earlier.  Isn’t that what made Stephen’s life so powerful?  “(God) chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies.”  Stephen’s entire life pointed people to 2 things: Jesus, and their need of Him.

Standing here today, I know I need Jesus now more than ever before, and you probably do, too.  And we have a disabled peacemaker, preacher and prophet to thank for that.  I love you, Stephen.  Well done, and thank you.

As I write this, the sun is just beginning to wake up, and slowly, this day is starting to come to life.  The neighbor across the street is warming his car, and the Keurig is preparing some Italian Roast to warm my belly.  Life is good, and if you had asked me 10 years ago if I’d be saying that today, I’m not sure the 10 years younger me would have been sure.

Because that was the day I watched my brother die.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it this year, maybe more than most years.  The days from Black Friday until Christmas Eve of 2003 were, literally, the worst days of my life.  My mother’s brain aneurysm the day after Thanksgiving left her speechless and motionless – and the rest of us breathless – while we waited in her hospital room for a miracle.  We prayed, sang, laughed, cried, and slept with our eyes open not wanting to miss the moment she died or sat up and told us to stop making such a fuss.  Ultimately, though, she was gone on December 1, and as we packed up our things and walked out of the hospital, none of us knew that within a few hours we’d be back, this time with my brother, Stephen.

If you ever met Stephen, you never forgot Stephen. Born with cerebral palsy and some of the mental disability that often comes with it, Stephen was an arm-flappin, hankey-turning evangelist for Jesus.  He asked everyone he could if they knew Jesus, and no matter what their answer was, he would then ask if they knew when Jesus was coming back.  Needless to say, I lived my rebellious teenage years in total fear because I shared a room with the world’s only living rapture clock.  When you’re lying in bed wondering if you’ve just sinned your way out of heaven, a deep guttural voice asking when Jesus is coming back isn’t very comforting.

Stephen in the early years, cutting a cake and lighting up the room with his smile.

My relationship with Stephen was special, and not because he had special needs.  When he was younger and really didn’t understand his condition, he had a smile that stayed glued on his face, and it infected everyone around him.  As he grew, he became like every other teen I’ve ever known – frustrated with his life, his body, and most of all, his limitations.  His smile was still just as engaging, but not quite as permanent.  We lived through flashes of rage when things near him could be destroyed in a snap.  I guess I can thank Stephen for teaching our family that stuff really is just stuff.  Things break, and they can be replaced.

But when a man’s spirit begins to break?  Well, that’s different.  And on Monday morning, December 1, as my mother was lying in a hospital bed, Stephen’s spirit began to break.  Even as we prayed for a miracle, the reality of mom’s passing was settling in on all of us, especially Stephen.  He was inconsolable, and eventually he found himself sedated and lying in a hospital bed in the room next to mom.  And that’s when two people who couldn’t talk had a conversation.

It was one of my sisters who first noticed it.  Most of us were sitting around mom’s bed, listening to the strangest breathing pattern any of us had ever heard.  I’ve been around a few people who were near death, and I’ve heard the death rattles, but this was different.  There were distinctly deep breaths, and long exhales.  There would be a pause and then another, this one not as long as the previous, or maybe longer.  “Breathing SOS” is the only way I can describe it.  It was peaceful and beautiful, like she was saying something to someone.  It was then that my sister, who had been walking back and forth between my brother’s room and my mother’s room, told us that Stephen was breathing the same way.  EXACTLY the same way.

And that’s when we knew that mom was saying something…

…to Stephen.

I wish I knew what it was, but my guess is that she told him she loved him, and that he was going to be ok.  That he was surrounded by people who loved him, and that even though it would be very different with her gone, he would be taken care of.

Mom and Stephen were inseparable in life and in death.

Shoot, for all I know, maybe she told him when Jesus was coming back.  But whatever she was saying, it was over in minutes, and then within a few more minutes, my mother was with Jesus and Stephen wasn’t.  He walked out of the hospital that Monday morning, and shortly after lunch we wheeled him back in with an oxygen level in the 50s.  For those of you like me who aren’t medical, that’s not good.  Skin looks blue at that point, and so he went into the ICU, and for the next 20 days we replayed what we had done for a weekend with mom.  Pray, sing, sleep, eat, laugh, beg.

It was surreal, like the dramas that we normally buy a ticket to watch.  He would improve and then decline. There would be hope and then despair.  And finally, it all led to a family meeting in a cold hospital break room where we had to decide how long we’d put off what seemed so inevitable.  He had pneumonia in both lungs, the doctor said.  It wasn’t fatal, the doctor said.  Most people recover from it, and Stephen would, too – if he wanted to, the doctor said.

Stephen didn’t want to.  The next day was spent praying that he wouldn’t die on my nephew’s birthday (because who needs that for a birthday present, right?), and in one final, beautiful, giving act, my brother took his last breath just shortly past midnight on December 21, 2003 – the day after my nephew’s birthday.

I wish I could tell you that the end was peaceful and calm, that we stood around and sang hymns as my brother passed.  But it wasn’t.  It was hard, violent, painful.  His last breath didn’t come easy, and by the time it had come we were begging him to go be with mom and Jesus as much as we had been begging him to stay with us.

And he did.  I leaned over his bed and watched him as he died, and as he did, something was born in me.  Never before and never since have I felt that kind of grief – the kind that opens deep ravines into the soul, the kind that in one moment can plant something so deep within us that we know we’ll never be the same again.

There are moments that change us.  They change us because they stop us, even if it is only long enough for us to think, to hurt, to cry.  They can’t be stopped, or in most cases, even controlled.  They come and go as they please, and leave us stuck in places we would have never believed…wondering if we will ever move, laugh, or dance again?  They seem like periods, but they are more like commas, something that my 8th-grade English teacher said I didn’t understand.  But I understand them better now, because one day I stared into the eyes of my brother as he died.

And the next day, I chose to live.

Of course, life is different now.  In the 10 years since 2 of the most influential people I’ve ever known stepped out of my life, I’ve learned how to live “life past the comma.”  I’ve found that on a night when my brother’s eyes closed, grief opened my soul so wide that God was able to plant grace and truth and hope so deep within me that it cannot be pulled out.

Life is full of moments that will either define us or refine us.  And when we come to the worst days – and we meet Jesus there – he has a way of making sure that what appeared to be the end of the road is really just a bend in the road.  And that, my friend, is when stopping is no longer an option, because no matter how dark the worst days may be, our best days are still ahead of us.