I recently attended the funeral of a friend from my past who died.

It wasn’t COVID that took him, but one of the ways that you would have expected a young man to go if you didn’t live in a pandemic society — a particularly aggressive form of cancer.

The presbyter at the funeral said that even a week before he would have been surprised to hear we would all be gathered in that church on that Saturday for that purpose. The same was true for me, who had only followed his diagnosis and treatment from afar, via social media, for the prior six months.

My friend wasn’t supposed to die.

He was a few years older than me, a late Gen X to my elder Millennial. We were both young when we met through church circles, but he had already spent time as the head disciplinarian at a local children’s home, and so he knew how to connect with kids without being the creepy guy in college who was hanging out with the youth group.

He eventually started exploring an early call to ministry by teaching a Sunday school class and occasionally preaching when the youth pastor needed a fill-in. He wasn’t a great preacher at that time, not in the sense of oratory, stumbling and often using the phrase “and stuff” as a filler, but as a teacher, his style was one of humility. He was one of the few preachers and teachers I knew whose lessons often included discussions of his own mistakes and failures as warning against developing certain spiritual pathologies. To the best of my recollection, he was the first person I ever heard warn against the pitfall of thinking that participation in the consumption of evangelical media made one more spiritual than those who did not....