My Dead Friend’s Gift

My friend died a couple of weeks ago. His funeral was last week. I watched online from interstate as his friends, family and wife shared funny and heartwarming stories about his life.

He was a gifted musician, a cellist, among other things. He was the kind of musician who could organise, orchestrate and conduct entire musical events. He was instrumental (sorry not sorry) in recruiting musicians for ministry.  

He played at my wedding. I’ll never forget him playing ‘When I Survey’ with the tenor as people took photos. He loved to worship the Lord with his music. He was a good friend, gentle and generous, with a keen sense of humour. In short, he was a great person to be around.

And now he’s gone.

In grieving this loss, particularly for his wife who survives him and for the musical world of which he was such a vibrant part, I have been reflecting on the power of legacy. This man leaves behind the gift of a musical legacy where others will play on his his absence, worshipping the Lord with their whole hearts.

I know it’s a cliché, but what we do on this planet lives on long after we have gone.

So what will you leave behind? How do you want to be remembered? For me, some of these ponderings are frankly terrifying. What if I leave nothing behind? What if people remember, not my worshipful outpourings as I might hope, but my temper tantrums, impatience, cynicism—in a nutshell, my worst flaws? What if none of my words or music last? What if my half-formed ideas never see the light of day, gathering figurative dust on my iPad until consigned by time and a dead battery to oblivion?

This is where I need faith. The voice that tells me everything I do is a waste of time and therefore meaningless is the voice of Fear. And that’s not from God. By contrast, the voice of Faith tells me my days and creations are in God’s hands, the safest place for them to be, and he will take care of them. I don’t know what form that will take. But I can do my best to trust him with it. Because I am not writing just for now. I am writing for eternity.

We are not working just for now. We are working for eternity.

We are not working just for now. We are working for eternity.

God is generous. Sometimes our work does outlive us. I think of giant trees growing for a hundred years or more, their trunks too thick for me to wrap my arms around, their uppermost branches too high to see. Someone planted those trees. That someone is no longer here. They never got to see the full potential of that seed or seedling. But they had faith that something would survive, or they never would have planted in the first place.

Like the parable of the sower, we scatter our seeds, hoping and praying something will land on fertile ground. God does not give guarantees about this, but he does give us hope and the will to carry on when our strength fails.

My friend scattered many seeds over the course of his life and from what I have seen, many landed on fertile ground. With God’s grace, may they yield a great harvest, blessing scores of musicians and worshippers for decades to come.

R.I.P.