You may have seen the news story from earlier in the week. Arch West who invented Doritos snack chips has died. He was 97 and lived a long and, by all accounts, a good life.  There will be a graveside service in Dallas tomorrow and the well-wishers (mourner doesn’t seem to work) will be encouraged to scatter Doritos in and around the hole where the ashes will be buried. Arch West’s daughter said her father would think the scattering of the chips to be hilarious.

Somewhere along the way, hilarity has become the mark of a good funeral.

I have conducted hundreds of funerals over the years. In my previous church, an older congregation in an older community, twenty funerals a year was average and two or three a month was not unusual. It is true that hilarity has become the mark of a good funeral. In fact, avoiding the word funeral has become the mark of a good funeral. So has denial of the reality of death. Continue reading →

Like creeks, streams and rivulets in distant mountain valleys that eventually flow together to form a mighty river, this story begins in different places and times but surely flows to God’s purposes still unfolding.

We begin in the Cameroon, French speaking West Africa. Jeanine and Gabriel Takoudjou are young Christian workers serving with Campus Crusade for Christ.  Their area directors are Kamate and Kavira Basolene (photo).  When Jeanine gives birth a son in 2004, she and Gabriel give him the name Kamate in honor of their friend. In time Kamate and Kavira are called to serve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but stay in close contact with Jeanine and Gabriel and young Kamate.

In 2001, John Cropsey was graduating from the University of Michigan with a BS in biology.  He had married Jessica, his high school sweetheart, a year earlier and was headed to medical school, also at Michigan. Like John’s father, a general surgeon who had spent ten years as a medical missionary in Togo, West Africa, John and Jessica sensed God’s call to the mission field and hoped to serve in Africa once John completed medical school and his residency. Continue reading →

At some point this weekend most of us who are over twenty years old will answer the question, “Where were you ten years ago when you first heard the news?” The memories will be solemn and sobering. Our world was jarred, knocked off its axis. Assumptions crumbled. In time we would come to know some of the names and stories of innocent office workers just arrived for another day on the job, courageous first responders and the bold passengers on Flight 93.  But during that long Tuesday morning, we watched and listened and worried. Continue reading →