Swallowed Up by Life

Saskatoon will never host anything like the Olympics. The airport, though modern and altogether satisfactory, could be described as intimate. Not a popular tourist spot, this prairie town happens to be a regular destination for me because of its centrality to ministries working among First Nations communities in western Canada.

John Revesz was born near Saskatoon. Before departing for there four weeks ago, I saw John in church and made it a point to tell him where I was going. I knew he would be interested. He was always interested in people, me included.

John couldn't see very well lately. Helen did all the driving. But he was always in church ... until a couple of weeks ago. Helen told us he was weak. Last Sunday afternoon I started a five-day meeting in Brightwood, so I wasn't home when Valerie got the call, "John is dying. Do you want to see him?"

She did, and when I got home, I phoned. "Yes," Helen said, "he is about like yesterday." So I arranged to be there in a couple of hours. But a little before it was time to go, his daughter called back. It was too late. John saw his opportunity and took it; I had missed mine.

An earthly pilgrimage is a thing of wonder. Here was a 97-year-old man whose parents had been born in Hungary, one of 10 children, Canadian-born but immigrated to America. He had worked as a farmer, preacher, mechanic, furniture fabricator, homebuilder, woodworker and handyman.

Without any religious background, John had come to faith in Jesus Christ when he was 30 years old. Astride a farm tractor one day, he heard the voice of God. So he stopped the tractor and knelt in the dirt to invite Jesus into his life. "He identified immediately with God's great grace and tender mercies," as his son, Richard, put it.

John immediately began leading young people to events where they could make the same discovery. He knew Jesus now, and it was important that other people have the opportunity for the same relationship. "Our dad made Jesus a 67-year theme," Richard said.

A good choice. The only choice, really. At the end of 97 years, he slipped away, and that's the best part. He is gone from us, but he did not go to silence, gloom or fear. He did not, in fact, go to anything less than what he knew for 97 years. No, he went to much more. His mortality, as Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, was swallowed up by life.

“Someday you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody of East Northfield is dead," wrote the famous evangelist of an earlier century. "Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal – a body that death cannot touch …”

So it is for John Revesz. So it can be for you.