Jack was a man whose whole life fell apart in the span of about a year. His wife left him because he was a workaholic. His 15 year old daughter left home, his college age son dropped out of school, and the business he had built up collapsed around him. His business partner turned against him. And then on top of that he found out he had an advanced form of bone cancer.
In desperation he sought out religion to help him through the disaster, but religion offered him no answer. He tried self-help books, but they didn’t help either. Then he started reading the Bible. There was nothing there for him either. Then one day he got to the gospels and began to read about Jesus. It struck him that the Jesus he was reading about was different from the Jesus he remembered from Sunday school decades ago. This Jesus was involved in the lives of real people, people experiencing divorce and separation, alienation and illness, disappointment and even death. In the process he forgot about why he had opened the Bible in the first place--to find a cure for the cancer. He found Jesus gradually become visible to him.
Three months later when the cancer claimed his life, he was found in bed surrounded by notebooks full of all the things he had discovered about Jesus. And the remarkable thing was that when they gathered for the funeral there in the front row sat his wife, his daughter and grandson, and his son, and even his business partner. Each one stood to tell the story about how, in the last several months, their lives had been touched by the gift of grace through this man. Each had
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