So, I had a garage sale this weekend. It was pretty exciting! First, it stormed the night before and then it got super hot outside. It still went pretty well, I made $88 out of it. God is good and faithful to provide.
Anyway, I brought that up in order to tell you about something else that happened. Getting ready for the garage sale, I went out to my roommate’s garage, to look at boxes I had stored there years ago. I found a ton of stuff that I had forgotten I even had. It was a lot of fun, and even more fun to get rid of stuff that I clearly don’t need anymore.
In, one of the boxes, I found an obituary.
It was for a girl name Ashley. Ashley and I worked together for a company that took care of people with mental disabilities. We didn’t always work together, but it felt like that summer, it was more than usual. She was smart and funny and beautiful. I loved working with her because at 19, she was tough and knowledgeable about what we were doing. Overall, she was just fun to work with.
On my last night at work that summer, (I was getting ready to go back to college) Ashley and I were working together with a couple other women. They were having a conversation about some hard situations that were going on in their lives. Ashley mentioned that her aunt went to consult a medium to find out what the future held.
The conversation, from that point, took a turn into whether or not mediums could actually predict the future and how many of them were charlatans and how to tell the difference. I didn’t participate in this conversation, partly because the client who was in my charge that day was a little more needy than most, but mostly because I knew that my views as a Christian wouldn’t be particularly welcome.
At the end of the night, Ashley and I were parked next to each other. As we walked out and got ready to go home, she stopped me and asked what I thought about mediums. I felt the Holy Spirit tug on my heart to share the Gospel with her. I let fear take over and instead, I mumbled something about being a Christian and not believing in that sort of thing. I said goodbye and drove home, not feeling particularly pleased with myself, but thinking I would get another chance next year.
A month later, I was talking to my mom and she asked me if I had known Ashley. When I answered yes, she told me that Ashley had died in a car accident a week or two earlier. Ashley was 19 and I was 20, so that was almost 11 years ago. I still carry that guilt and regret with me.
I plan to take that obituary with me as I go out into the world on the Race. I’m going to take it to remind me that time is short and people are precious. Tomorrow is not promised to anybody. And not to be ashamed of the Gospel. One person who was ripe for the message died not knowing because I was ashamed and afraid. I want to carry her obituary to remember that mistake.
But God is a God of redemption. He has given me a chance, not to correct that particular mistake, but to correct it by bringing the Gospel to many other lost and broken people.
