Crumpled Notebook

I had an interesting/cool sunday school class this morning. At the beginning I shared with them a little bit about a friend of mine from high school that passed away this week and a story about him. I then went on with my lesson, which tied in with my story and then came back to that part at the end.

The story goes like this:

When I was about 14 or 15 years old our school FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes/Anybodies) came and did the Sunday night service at my church one night. I was part of the FCA group and we usually went to a couple different churches a month on Sunday nights. This particular night, it happened to be my church. I was in the back running the sound and video. One of our group leaders, William Shearer, was giving his testimony. I don’t remember much about it, but he said one thing that caught my attention. He said, “I know I’m going to heaven when I die.” He said it a couple of times. At first, I thought it was kind of presumptious. “How on earth could he know that for sure? Only God knows that.” The more he talked, the more I understood. He wasn’t being arrogant, he was merely showing faith in God’s promise to us–redemption through Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection. It didn’t matter how good we were–we were saved by grace, and that includes eternal life in heaven. For the first time in my life, I truely got that. I got it.

Now, at the time, it didn’t seem like that much of a revelation since I already supposedly knew that much. However, over the years, that is the one thing I would always come back to. Knowing that I had a place in heaven no matter how badly I messed up here on earth. No matter how discouraged I got, I would just remember those words, “I know I’m going to heaven.”

I shared this story with the teens in my sunday school class and told them about William’s cancer and how he passed away this week. At the end of class we came back to that and I asked them to raise their hand if they knew without a doubt, 110%, that they were going to heaven. All of them raised their hand, mostly of habit, except for one. The one kid I expected to be first, wouldn’t raise his hand, so I questioned him. He’s also the one kid who wouldn’t raise his hand if he wasn’t sure about something. He stumbled around, talking about how much bad stuff he had done, etc…I told him it didn’t matter. He tried to get in a few “Buts…” but I again told him it didn’t matter. I told him I knew he had accepted Christ, and he said that he had. I explained to him that part of the deal with that is that its all erased. Past, present and future. That it didn’t matter what he had done, it was forgiven. He didn’t really want to accept it, he had done some “really bad stuff.” I told him no matter what he had done, I had probably done worse. Other people have done worse. We talked about how Paul killed Christians and yet he was forgiven. We talked about how the wages of sin was death and that no one was sinless and how if that was the case, we all deserved death, but also how Jesus’ death erased all of that. Anyway, I think he(and the other kids) got tired of me telling him none of it mattered. You could see he was perplexed and putting heavy thought into it. In the end, he said he knew he was going to heaven. I’m not sure if he totally bought it, but he was closer to it. And I mean, I think he knows it, but it is hard to accept sometimes. He had the same look on his face as I did when I first heard William say it. The exact same thoughts and excuses I had when I was his age. It took me a while to accept it. It took years of reminding myself of that to get it.

It was a good reminder for me. It was also cool to see how one little, seemingly minor thing can change someone’s life. Those six words years ago changed my life and hopefully they changed someone else’s today–13 years later from a person who was laid to rest today and who “knew he was going to heaven.”