My First Ebenezer...

 

There are moments in my life which I remember with perfect clarity-- the day Kristin and I signed our first contracts for our first teaching jobs, the snowy afternoon I opened my acceptance letter from Moody, and that snowless, dreary February day when I reached the first real turning point in my faith...

February 12, 2000 was an unseasonably tepidly cool Saturday.  I was sitting on the couch, and the phone rang.  I looked behind me out the window.  The grass was brown, dead, with the snow long-melted but the spring still far off.  I didn't know what the phone call was about, but really, I did.  Dad came in and told me that Tim had died, and I cried.  I went upstairs and turned on my late-90s Christian music and leaned against my tall dresser and cried.  I opened up my journal-- a Veggie Tales journal that still bore the traces of girlhood-- and I wrote what had happened, my mascara-tinted tears staining the page.  As I think back ten years, I remember that girl, sitting on her bed, crying.  Her heart was broken.  She didn't understand.  Her life had changed and she didn't think the pain would ever, ever subside.  She certainly couldn't see ten years into the future, and how this event would forever change her life.

Let me back up even farther.  It's May, 1998.  I was about to graduate eighth grade.  I was to leave the friends with whom I'd spent nine years of my life and enroll in a Christian high school, full of beautiful tall, blond, Dutch models... and I didn't know a soul.  As if that weren't frightening enough for a fourteen year-old, my parents had dropped a bomb on me.  We were leaving the church in which I'd grown up.  This was the church where I'd met my closest  friends, been involved in AWANA for years, and created countless memories.  We were leaving and I didn't understand.  My whole world capsized, and to a fourteen year-old with deep emotions and a lack of control over them, this was unbearable.  

We started church hunting one Sunday, beginning at Grace Fellowship Church... and we never left.  Immediately I was welcomed into the youth group.  The girls liked my homemade "glow worm" dress.  They took me on a walk during the church picnic with the intent to witness to me, because they didn't know if I was a believer.  They showed me the love of Christ.  Their leader was Tim Yetter, a young Moody grad with a wacky sense of humor and a deep love for the Lord.  This youth group and its leader began something in me that would change the rest of my life: I think it was sometime after joining this youth group that my Pharisaical faith became real.  What I'd always heard about and known in my head finally entered my heart and I believed it and wanted to live it the way Tim lived it.  I'd never seen someone so young be so on fire for the Lord.  He inspired the whole youth group to be "fully-devoted followers of Christ."  The lessons I learned as I entered high school were the building blocks of my true faith, and little did I expect that I would soon need to rest on those blocks when the storm came.

The youth group wasn't perfect.  We probably idolized Tim too much.  But even so, he always pointed back to Christ, quoting John the Baptist: "He must become greater; I must become less."  But one day, on a youth retreat in Minnesota (the picture at the top of the post-- he is seated front left), Tim mentioned some fleeting health concerns.  We made fun of him, put Ambersol in his Billy Bob teeth, and forgot about it on the eight-hour ride home in an un-airconditioned bus with vinyl seats.  But just a couple months later, he was yellow.  Jaundiced, because he had a rare disease of the liver.  And as if that weren't enough, by winter we knew he had liver cancer.  He was 27.  He was our youth pastor.  This wasn't supposed to happen to him.  His ministry was thriving.  Things like this didn't happen to people like him, right?  His name went on the transplant list.  I recall one night around Christmas, youth group had been canceled because Tim was on his way to potentially get a transplant.  We gathered anyway in the sanctuary that was lit with Christmas candles and prayed.  We sang.  We made the choice to trust God rather than blame him.  

The transplant didn't pan out.  So we had an all-nighter.  Tim spoke to us and fed us the words we'd heard him say before: "He must become greater, I must become less."  He was weak, yellow, dying.  But there were words of praise, not words of pain coming from his mouth.  Two weeks later was the day Tim went to be with Jesus.

And that's where you meet that girl on the bed.  I say "that girl," because I am no longer "that girl."  Because that day, I knew I had a decision to make: I could choose to not trust this God who had allowed something so terrible to happen to such a wonderful leader and teacher... or I could choose to trust that this God was sovereign and good, with a purpose so beyond me that I could not understand.  And here I raise my ebenezer: I trusted him.  I trusted him, and that test of my faith grew me more than I could have ever imagined, because I (and the rest of the youth group) was forced to depend on the Lord and trust and hope that good would come from this painful situation.  

It wasn't easy.  I remember going to bed each night and praying that God would make me not miss him as much the next day, that it would hurt a little less.  I thought I'd never heal.  But I did.  Years passed, and the series of events that have played out in my life are sovereignly connected to Tim's impact on my life.  I attended Moody Bible Institute, which forever changed my life and my relationship with the Lord, and it led me to move to Florida where I now have my own ministry to young girls whom I teach to be fully-devoted followers of Christ.

I can't let February 12 go by without remembering Tim Yetter, being thankful for his spiritual legacy, and most importantly, giving credit to God for orchestrating events in a way that changed my life more than I could have ever imagined (and I know I'm not the only one).  The point of this blog is a memorial and a reminder to me from whence I came, and an encouragement to myself to continue trusting God for my future.

I pray that if you read this, you think about your spiritual legacy.  I pray that if you read this, you remember the fact that God is sovereign and good.  And I pray that you strive to be a "fully-devoted follower of Christ."

And God, the next time you see him, please tell Tim "thanks" for me, and let him know that I'm keeping the main thing the main thing. :)