About Priorities

Well, my name is René and I'm one of the pastors here and it's great to be with you. Many of you know if you were here last weekend, I mentioned that right after this service, I took off a week ago, just literally during the final song, walked right out the door before church was over, hopped in my car and drove away, which was fun because people who didn't know what was going on saw me leaving the parking lot thinking, "What just happened? What did I miss?"

But I was driving to the San Jose airport to catch a flight up to Portland, Oregon where my mom, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease and has been living with my wonderful sister, Heidi, and her family for the past several months, had taken a rapid turn for the worst. This is a picture of my sister, Heidi, and myself just this past Mother's Day. This was just like three weeks ago and mom was still ambulatory and doing fairly well. And then this past weekend, one week ago, the hospice nurse told us she could go anytime.

And so my sis and I were blessed to be together at mom's bedside, keeping watch over her for most of this past week until she passed away peacefully in her sleep this past Thursday morning, very, very peacefully. And many, many of you have been in a similar situation. And you know what a strange feeling it is to be with, say, in my case, my sister at the death of your last surviving parent. But you know, it's difficult, but it's actually also a very beautiful time. It's a beautiful time. I'm so glad that I was there.

Last Sunday night when I drove down from the airport, my sister and I held hands with each other and with my mom, and we whispered to her, "Mom, you did a good job raising us, and your job's finished now, and you can go to Jesus." And we kept reaffirming that on Monday we told her that, and on Tuesday we told her that, and on Wednesday we were saying, "Mom, seriously, you can go to Jesus now. We think He's waiting for you, Mom. Don't make Jesus wait." But, wow, it was profound.

The last few years of her life, as I mentioned, she'd been suffering with Alzheimer's disease, and had really become childlike in so many ways. And so the last thing I said to her late Wednesday night, when I went to sleep for a couple of hours, I said, "Mom, you know, you can go even if I'm not by your side." And then I sang her a song, and it was an old Swiss German lullaby, our family is Swiss. It's called "The Dag ich Vogangme," and the lyrics in English are this, "The day is now past, and I'm going to bed. In bed will I pray, and then go to sleep. The dear Lord in heaven my soul will He keep."

And it's a song that she used to sing a lot to me as a little boy in Swiss German. And so it was profound to be singing it to her as the last thing I said to her, and then I kissed her and I said, "Goodnight, Mom." And that's exactly what happened, isn't it? The day was past for Mom, and she went to sleep. But the Lord was with her the whole time, and He did keep her soul, and He brought her home to Him.

And right now we're feeling that strange mixture that I know you can relate to, about 20% sadness for us, but about 80% true joy for her that she's free. And I cannot express to you how much I've appreciated your prayers. My sister and I, she really wanted me to mention that to you too, because we have really felt them through the tears and the joy and the love all mixed together as we remembered our childhood with her, and sadness for that nostalgia, but so happy that she was released from her bondage to a mind that had aged prematurely due to her disease.

But of course what we discovered as we comforted each other and as we reminisced with family and friends over the last week or so is this. What you remember about a person's life when they're passing, really you only remember one thing. You remember love, right? You really don't talk about anything else. All we talked about was either what she loved, "Mom really loved it," "Oh, Mom really loved this," or "Who she loved," or "How she loved." And yet discovering in times like that, that love really is what matters most.

Now let's talk about that. I'm going to tell you another story about mom in just a few minutes, but for now grab your message notes that look like this from your bulletins as we continue this little series we're in called Debating Jesus. And what we've been doing is looking at the three times in a row that three different groups debate Jesus in the Gospel of Mark 12.

And in this passage a man approaches Jesus seeming to want to get into a debate with Jesus about priorities. What are the priorities of life? Really the subject of his question is this, what matters most? What matters most when all is said and done? And there could not be a more important question for you to ask because all of us, every single one of us in this room, without exception, is going to be right where my mom was this past week, right at the end of life. Will you have done what matters most? Or will you have wasted your life on trivial pursuits?

In this key passage of the Bible there are three things. There's the question posed to Jesus, there's Jesus' answer, and then there's an intriguing response to that answer. So let's look at those three things. Number one, the question really that we all have. This is the question we all have and it's posed in Mark 12:28. It says, "One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating," the two debates that we've looked at so far in this series. "Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, 'Of all the commandments, which is the most important?'"

Really he's talking about deciding what to do with your life. And this is so important, yet so difficult for every single one of us. Do you ever feel overwhelmed with all the decisions you have to make in life? You ever feel just swamped by all the choices and all the options that are out there for you? Raise your hand if you've ever felt kind of decision overload. Probably every single person here.

Check this out. One of the leading scholars in the field of decision making, there is actually a study of decision making in our day. It's a field. She's at Columbia University. She's named Sheena Iyengar, and she wrote this book called "The Art of Choosing." Now Sheena went to college just kind of up the road here at Stanford, and Sheena noticed in that gourmet grocery store in the Stanford Shopping Center. Do you know what I'm talking about? How many of you have ever been to that store? A lot of you, right? Well, she noticed that there were so many options in that store that when she would go in there to shop, it overwhelmed her.

She's from a different culture where she's not used to so many options at the market, and in that particular grocery store when she was going to school at Stanford, in Palo Alto, there were over 300 choices for jams and jelly alone, and it boggled her mind. It overwhelmed her, and she thought, you know, if this is overwhelming me, maybe it overwhelms other people too. And so she ran a study as part of her course of study at Stanford where some customers at the store went past a display table with 24 varieties of jam, and they did that for a day, and then the next day they had customers coming into the store, going past a display table with six varieties of jam.

Now, marketing people had assumed up until then that the more choices you give a customer, the more likely it is that they'll buy stuff, right? More choices, more options, more purchases. Well, what they discovered was the customers who saw the six jam display were, get this, 10 times more likely to buy jam, 10 times more than the customers who saw the 24 jam display. And Sheena coined a phrase here, "Option overload." She said, "We live in a world today where we have that kind of option overload about everything, or at least we imagine that we do." And so she said, "What happens is, contrary to what you might expect, it freezes your decision-making process, where instead of advancing in any direction, you're just paralyzed. It's paralysis by analysis. And we live in a world today where we have option overload about almost everything."

They say we make 70 decisions, 70 every single day of our lives, 70. Like it or not, that adds up to about 25,000 decisions you make every year, about 2 million decisions over the course of your life. And some of them are very complex. What school should I go to? What should I major in? What career should I go into? Should I date this person? Should I marry that person? Others are not quite as profound, but still we can take forever trying to decide. I take forever trying to decide what book I'm going to read next. And then I take forever trying to decide what I'm going to do with the pile of books that I said I was going to read that apparently I'm not going to read, right? And not to mention other choices.

Anybody relate to this? Most of the time when I go to Netflix to watch a movie, I spend about an hour looking at all of the options, and then I turn the TV off and I don't watch a thing. Anybody relate to that, right? Sometimes we just get overwhelmed with options. My wife and I and my sister and her husband, we all had to make all these choices about my mom's care over the last year and a half, right? And I kind of assumed that that was all done when she passed away on Thursday, but instead the last two days have just been this forest, this jungle of options, right? That have just been peppering us.

Like, what mortuary do you want to go to? What kind of burial? What kind of funeral? Where? When? What? Who's going to speak there? What about the headstone? What about the obituary? What newspaper? Will the obituary go one thing after another? And finally yesterday on some minor decision like, how do I have my eggs cooked for breakfast? I just told Lori, I cannot make one more choice. How do you want your eggs, René? No, don't make me make another decision.

Ever feel like that? But the choices that you make are important. How you make those choices are important because they will be based on your priorities. And your choices determine the life you live. They determine the person you become. And so the question is, how can I choose what is really important? Really the question this guy is asking Jesus is the question we all have as we try to make good choices in a world of choices. And it's, what's the most important thing to God? Ever begged God to tell you this? God, I got some choices here. Please, please, please tell me what to do.

Well, in Jesus' day people felt that kind of option overload too. It says this person is a teacher of the law. Now that doesn't mean like civil law. That means religious laws. And there were so many laws. The ancient rabbis decided that there were 613 laws. These weren't all biblical laws. Some were interpretations that became laws. Then there were all sorts of other, what they called fence laws that were extra, hundreds and hundreds of extra laws to keep you from breaking any one of the 613 laws. And the Pharisees were just obsessed with all these laws and love to ask questions like this.

Well, of all the hundreds and hundreds of laws, which one is the most important? Because it was clearly impossible to keep all of them so they had to know, well, what are really the priorities to God? See, the Pharisees focused on the boundaries. This is why they had all of these rules. They had what John Orper calls boundary marker spirituality. Now let me just explain a little bit about what that means. The British scholar James Dunn, check this out, did some great research on rabbinical writing in the first century. In other words, in the time of Jesus Christ, what were the other rabbis writing about? And so we analyzed all the surviving rabbinical teaching from the first century.

Check this out. Most first century rabbinical writing focused on circumcision, Sabbath keeping, and dietary rules. Now, if you would have asked any of those rabbis, is this what the law is all about? None of them would have said, oh yes, this is the core of the law. Yet over 90% of their writing was about circumcision, Sabbath keeping, and dietary rules. Why did they focus on these things? Well, sociologists have a word for it, cultural boundary markers. Follow me here. Cultural boundary markers are visible practices that serve to distinguish people inside of a group from people outside of a group. They're things that you say, look, this is what makes us part of this group. And if you don't do these things, then you're not part of this group.

Now, this happens in every culture, every subculture. If you start looking for these, you will see them in subcultures all across Santa Cruz. Like, look at a couple of snapshots when you're on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. And you see this van with peace signs and mushrooms and love written in '60s font. And you see a guy inside listening to The Grateful Dead with long gray hair and a tie-dye t-shirt. You know, that person is an old hippie because they are displaying their cultural boundary markers, right? If you stroll by and you go, wow, cool van, and you want to go inside and listen to The Dead and stuff, then, well, you're in. And you think, well, that's crazy. Well, you're out, right? Cultural boundary markers.

Now, if you see this car downtown today with stickers all over it saying things like, "I love, therefore I am vegan," or "I support the right to arm bears," you probably know this person is not going to the hindquarter for a steak dinner, right? Their boundary markers are showing. And Christians do this, too, like the old joke about the driver who is furious that the car in front of him didn't go through a yellow light. Do you remember this one? And he honks his horn, screaming in frustration because he has just missed his chance to get through the intersection as he's still in mid-rant, angry that he's at the red light. He hears a tap on his window, and he looks up into the face of a very serious police officer.

Officer orders him, "Exit your car, please, with your hands up," takes him to the police station. He's placed in a cell. After a couple of hours, he's escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer says, "I am so sorry for this mistake, but, you see, I pulled up behind your car while you were honking your horn, flipping off the guy in front of you and cursing. And while I noticed the 'What would Jesus do?' bumper sticker, the 'Choose Life' license plate holder, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk, so naturally, I assumed you had stolen the car." Now, there's nothing wrong with boundary markers, right? In fact, some boundaries, it's important to know where the boundaries are.

There are definite standards in the Bible for morality. And theology, for example, and we live in a culture where those borders are trying to be swamped by our secular culture. And there's nothing wrong with defining. Now, remember, these are the boundaries on the boundary markers. They're theologically and morally and so on. But here's the problem. When you're in a time where the boundaries are under attack, what you long to do is you want to rush to the boundaries and defend them, and pretty soon your faith starts becoming about the boundaries. And you start teaching, or at least implying, that what it means to be a good Christian, or in the case of the first century, a good Jew, is you keep these boundaries.

When really, of course, you could keep all the boundaries and not be a good Jew or not be a good Christian. And that's why Jesus is something completely different from the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. They were focused almost entirely on the boundaries, but Jesus focused on the center. What's at the center of it all? What's actually the point? And here's where you get to the answer that we all long for. What is Jesus going to say? What's the cliff notes on the Bible? What's the cliff notes to all of life, really? What's the most important command, Jesus? What are God's priorities so that when I make choices in life, when I make decisions in life, I kind of put them through this grid.

Jesus says the most important one is this. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Jesus is completely upsetting the apple cart here. Instead of going, well, the most important boundary marker is circumcision. Well, really what it is, it's about eating kosher. Really what it is about your phylactries and the length of your tassels. And instead he goes away from the boundaries right to the center.

In a world of options, he's saying, if you do these two things, you will do well. First Jesus says, love God. He says in a world of bewildering options, when you're overwhelmed by choices, remember the place to start is to love God. And this is very practical. It's not theoretical. When you're troubled, when you don't know what to do next, when you feel you don't have enough resources to handle something or when you're puzzled, when you're bewildered, start with God and love God. You start there.

Now, I'll be honest, when I think about my own life, I have to admit, I rarely start with loving God. In fact, I would say almost always I start with the demands made on me. The pressure that I'm feeling in the moment, instead of looking to the God who's going to lead me through the pressure. I'm so wrapped up with the problem, I can't get my mind off of it. And on to God. But Jesus says, start with loving God. Because when you start with God, you start with the one who sees the whole problem, not just the part of it that you see, but the whole problem and everything involved in it.

And when you love, this is why worship is so important. Worship is not just like the prelude to the sermon. You know? It's not like the pastor's really like that, then the speakers are the A-team and the worship people are like the opening act or something. Worship is the most important thing. It's how we get refocused away from our limited perspective and on to God who has unlimited perspective. Jesus is saying, so you start with God himself. But think of this, God himself actually does not begin there. There's something that precedes our love for God. And it's that God loves us first.

The Bible says, we love because he first loved us. This is important because if all we were faced with was a demand for love from a God up there somewhere, you know, hey, love me. He would seem like an executioner or a judge or something. But the Scriptures never really start with our response. They start with his love to you. Maybe you're overwhelmed with choices right now like I feel. Maybe school, you're in the midst of finals or graduation or there's all kinds of stuff going on. You start with God's love to you.

Right now, God's love is reaching out to you right now on every side. Think of the beauty that we see around here. God's love is reaching out in creation. It's reaching out in everything that's being given to you day by day. All the things you enjoy, the food, the air, the sights, the sunshine, the shelter, they all come from the hand of God. It's God who gives them. It's God's goodness. So when you think about the love of God and especially the love that redeems you on that cross, then you love God back with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and then you begin to love people.

You see the order it goes in? You start with God's love. Then you're ready to turn to whatever your particular problem is. Your relationship with your spouse, with your kids, a neighbor, a friend, a boss. Then you're free to love other people as you yourself are loved because you can show them the same love that you have received. Now, listen, if you start with, "I must love my neighbor," you get so wrapped up in all the hurts, the difficulties, the friction that you start responding in the same way that they treat you. But when you start with God and you experience His love and you respond to it with your love, then you can pass on that love and that peace to your neighbor.

It never works when you start with, "Love your neighbor first," like I'm always trying to do. How do you love people that irritate you? When you're upset, you're angry, you're hostile, you feel like striking back, right? Well, you don't start with, "Love your neighbor." You start with loving God. And you remember His love to you, remember His forgiving spirit, how He wipes out everything without requiring anything from you. You respond to that, then you immediately pass it on to whoever you're involved with. So Jesus says, "Here's what matters most, loving God and loving others. Everything else is going to flow from that." You put all your decisions through this grid.

And this radical refocus on what the law is all about, you have to see the genius of this. Jesus says to a generation that has spent 30, 40 years looking at the boundaries and defending them. He says, "Let's look at the center. This changes everything." See, if I look at the law through the lens of legalism, I feed my pride and my fear. My pride because if I'm doing the boundary markers right, as to find my group, then I feel superior to other people. And it feeds my fear because I'm always afraid I'm not picking up on kind of the right boundary marker that everybody else is going to approve of. It doesn't lead to peace.

But Jesus is saying when you look at the law, the same exact law, you see the genius of this, the same exact scripture. He's not changing anything about the scripture. He's not saying any part of it is invalid. But if you look at the law through the lens of love, you see evidence of God's love. Suddenly you see the Ten Commandments, for example, are really all about love, aren't they? They're all about the first four, love God, the last six, love people. Think of any one of the Ten Commandments right now in your mind. You see that command through the eyes of boundary marker Pharisees, and it's just another rule. But if you see them through the lens of love, they're all about loving people, loving God.

You know what? Honestly, you won't even have to be told the commandments. Don't kill, of course not. I love people. Don't commit adultery. Don't steal. Don't lie. The more you love people, the less you're going to do that. This is the genius of Jesus. In these two commands, he said it all. It's just stunning. You know, Paul kind of summarizes this in Romans when he says this great verse, "Whoever loves others has fulfilled the law, because the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet." And whatever other command there may be are all summed up in this one command. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.

That's why Jesus says, "Love is what it's all about." This is God's priority. This is the grid through which you make all your other decisions. And this is when you get to the choice we must all make. There's a choice we need to make once we're presented with this reality. Look at it in the next verse. "Well said, teacher," and that always cracks me up, you know, "Well said, Lord of creation." You know, thank you so much, mister. "Well said, teacher," the man replied, "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but Him. To love Him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifice."

It's interesting, Jesus actually didn't say that. But this man is getting it. He's putting it. This is how you know this isn't just flattery. He's starting to connect the dots here. But He's going, "That's actually more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." Now, remember, He represents the temple hierarchy. Herod's temple, as we've been discussing, was built by King Herod at a cost of what today would be billions of dollars. And burnt offerings and sacrifices were the industry. And so this guy's going, "Oh my goodness, that actually, that is more important than this multi-million dollar industry that's happening behind me on the temple mount." This was a dangerous thing to say.

And that's why Jesus, when He saw that He had answered wisely, He said to Him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on, no one dared ask Him any more questions. Now, why does Jesus say, "Well, you're not far from the kingdom." Why didn't He say, "Welcome to the kingdom." I think it's because this man had the head knowledge. He was starting to connect the dots. He was going, "That makes a lot of sense." He knew the right thing, but now would He act on it? And that's always the question for you and me. Will we make that initial choice to follow Christ, and then will we make this daily choice, the choice to live this way, the choice to put all of our decisions through the love God, love people grid.

So how do you know you're doing this? Well, you know what's super helpful for me is to ask this one question. If it's true that love God, love people is what it's all about, then what I need to ask myself is what drains my love for God and for people. Do you see how this is an important question? You know, what drains my passion for God? What counteracts short circuits my passion for His people? Well, here's just a few thoughts. Now, this is what I see in my life, all right? Some of these may be transferable to you, but I'd encourage you to look at these adjectives, and maybe you'd fill in the blanks a different way. But in mine, here are some of the common culprits that rob me of love for God and love for people if I let them.

First, an unbalanced schedule. An unbalanced schedule. You know, the Bible says that God made life to be experienced in a series of seasons. It says there's a season for everything. There's a time for everything. There's a rhythm to life. But when you don't live the rhythm anymore, when you're always giving, always helping, always serving, always working, always being generous, never taking time to recharge eventually, you'll get compassion fatigue. What's compassion fatigue? You just stop caring. You actually, you don't care about God anymore. You don't care about anybody anymore. You don't care about anything anymore. Why? Because you're burned out.

Listen, you have to take time to intentionally nourish your spirit. Because let me just tell you something. If you don't do it, nobody else is going to do it for you. It's not their job, honestly. They can't tell, they don't have x-ray, heart vision, they don't know what's going on inside your heart. You do. And so you need to take time to intentionally nourish your spirit. How? Well, by spending time in worship, spending time in God's creation, spending time with positive people. Here's another thing you can do. Give thanks. If you feel your spirit start to wither, make this decision. Try to pray nothing but this two-word prayer for a week. Thank you. What it does is it changes the narrative in your mind from negative to positive.

And you need times away to recharge. Honestly, this is one reason why we have a sabbatical policy here at TLC. Every seven years, the pastors get three months off, and this is my year. And we found that pastors here need to have that season of recharge. So please pray that I am recharged this summer. Honestly, I don't feel, if I'm truth-by, I don't feel completely like my batteries are drained. And that's good. The time to recharge is before they're absolutely on empty. I still feel passion for God and for you, for this ministry, but I would love for that to be taken to new heights, you know, this summer. I appreciate, in fact, I plead for your prayers for me about that.

So, unbalanced schedule. I don't know if anybody, probably nobody here relates to that. But anyway, for me, that's an issue sometimes. And then secondly, uncontrolled media. Uncontrolled media. You know, you tend to hear a lot from pastors and so on about things like, you know, looking at pornography and so on, that kind of media, which is important not to do. But I think that there's a lot of things that fly under our radar that can really rob us of love for God and other people. In fact, this week, the BBC News carried this story. Listen, this is going to blow your mind.

A recent study found that some media users developed the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder merely by viewing violent or disturbing content. And they're talking about the news. What is PTSD? PTSD can develop in some people after exposure to major stress, most often associated with combat veterans. Symptoms include flashbacks, avoidance of crowds, sleep disturbances, mood changes continuing for at least a month after the traumatic event is witnessed. The article says, "To the untrained observer, the idea of secondhand or vicarious PTSD might sound incredible. How could somebody who merely watches events on a screen or reads about them in a book or a magazine suffer the same problems as, for example, a combat veteran?"

But mental health expert Walter Bousetil says, "Vicarious PTSD is a well-established phenomenon." In fact, I did not know this, but he says that now most major news agencies like the BBC actually in their Human Resources Manual have paragraphs where they warn their, especially their editors who are doing video editing, they warn them about vicarious PTSD. And they say, "You have to watch yourself for the symptoms because if you keep editing this war footage, you can experience combat-level PTSD." So the, you know, CNBC and CNN and Fox and the BBC are warning their employees about exposure to war video, and then they show it to you 24/7 without a warning.

What I'm saying is you've got to be so careful about this. I think a lot of people are addicted to what I call "news porn," where we are vicariously and voyeuristically wanting to know every last horrible thing that has happened. We live in a world where we're connected to every drowning, every lost person. Every bad thing that has ever happened could potentially be right at your fingertips. You can keep up with it on the internet like this, but what it does is it produces God-like knowledge almost that you and I just don't have the nervous systems to handle. And so you need to be very, and again, nobody can control this for you. This is your responsibility, and you need to take that responsibility, and you need to be self-controlled. And maybe it's not the news.

Maybe it's reading books that you can tell you're experiencing some emotional effect of reading some fiction book that is just really dire and grim. You need to be responsible and self-controlled and go, "If uncontrolled media use is draining my love for God and draining my love for other people, then it's not good, and I need to be self-controlled." Maybe go on a fast for a while. And then one of the greatest passion killers, I think, is this unexamined grace. We forget that it all starts not even with our love for God, but God's love for us, as we said earlier. You trip out on that, on Jesus Christ dying for you. If you'd been the only one, the eternal creator of the universe, God, doing that for you, man, your passion for God will increase. You don't have to drum it up. You just think about His love for you.

So you want to know what God wants you to do in some decision? Well, you start with this. Love God, love people. You put everything through that grid. Jesus says you do this and you fulfill the law. You do this and you're doing well. If you're aiming at this as the center, then you don't really have to worry very much about the edges. Make your decisions on this grid. I talked earlier about being with Mom this week as she entered the presence of Jesus, but I've got to tell you, I almost didn't go.

I made the plane reservations before we knew that she had gotten so bad. She was just kind of at her normal level, a week before last, when we made the reservations. And I told Laurie, I said, "You really think I should go up?" I was just up there for Mother's Day a couple of weeks ago. And she said, "You know, I think you might regret it if you don't go up there." And I said, "Yeah, I got Memorial Day off. I'll just kind of pop up there." And after I made the reservations, just the day before my flight was when the hospice nurse said, "Your mom might not make it through the week."

But before I knew that, I made the decisions to go up there. Now, this was a tough decision because, listen, this was the week before my sabbatical. I had a ton of meetings that really I should have been at. I had a ton of stuff on my checklist that I had to check off on before I'm gone for three months, you know? But instead, I thought, knowing that I was going to be preaching this subject, I always have the benefit of that, you know? I thought, "You know what? I've got to put everything through the grid of love God, love people, and so I know the right decision to make."

And you know what? A lot of that stuff didn't get done. I didn't make it to any of those meetings. And a lot of that stuff did not get checked off. And I just told Val and Mark and Adrian and everybody, "I trust you guys. Make the right decision." You know? I didn't do a lot of that stuff on the list, but the most important stuff got done. I was in a place, being with my sister at mom's bedside, I just knew I was right in the center of God's will.

You know, yesterday we were filling out the obituary form from the mortuary, and the mortuary in Portland asked questions like this. "Did the deceased accomplish anything notable?" And then in parentheses it said, "i.e. military decorations, graduate degrees, political office, etc." And I wanted to write, "Yeah, she accomplished something notable. Nothing on your list. But she was faithful. She was sacrificially loving. She raised two children devoted to God. She influenced hundreds with her hospitality and her smile, and she made our house a place where all of the single moms and divorced moms and kids without dads would feel welcome. She gave my sister and me a sense that we were loved by somebody unconditionally, her, so we could understand. When we later learned about God's love for us, she loved so well. Yeah, she accomplished something notable. Because in the end, according to Jesus, that is what matters most.

I'll close with this. You know, Mom couldn't speak much due to her Alzheimer's disease, but to the end there were three phrases that she could say. She couldn't say these all the time, but they were the three phrases that remained, and they were this, "thank you," which in her accent she said as, "sank you." "Schatz," which is German for "dear one" or "treasured one," and "I love you." "Thank you, dear one. I love you." To the end, she still had her priorities straight. And as I leave on this sabbatical, let me just say, "thank you, dear ones. I love you." Would you bow your head with me for a word of prayer?

With her heads bowed, you know, ultimately those three phrases are the best things you could say to God. "Thank you, dear one. I love you." And I want to just invite you to say those words right now, silently. "Thank you, dear one. I love you." And again, still with all eyes closed, let me just say this. I was just with someone who was entering eternity, and we all will die. So let me just be blunt. Are you ready? Have you received the love of God for you, available as a free gift through Jesus Christ? Why not do that or make sure of that right now? Why wait? Just say, "Lord, I don't understand it all, but I do understand that you love me so much that you made a way for me to spend all eternity with you." Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so I receive your grace and your promise now. Help me to grow and to change as your spirit empowers me. And Lord, I pray that all of us would make our decisions based on our love for you and our love for others. In your name we pray. Amen.