Book From My 1990s Pastor

I was told recently that a pastor from my growing up years passed away this last month. To me he was a part of all the change going on in my life between that transition from elementary school to middle school. He must have only been the pastor about three years which might be another reason why those few years seemed to pack so much in them more then any others.

I missed some of his sermons because he would have a talk that was focused around the kids and then we were sent off to Sunday School. I remember going to talks at night where I ran the spotlight but I can’t remember much from that. His kids were my age so I think half of what I knew about him came from the way his sons talked about him rather than from him. Now that I think about it that is an interesting second child like perspective.

Rick’s talks I remember the most came from as a teenager. Particularly when he came back to the church at the point when I would have been in choir. We were all singing at an event after coming back from a trip and we were sitting around him in a group. He told us that the Bible had “nearly everything you need to know about in life.” I’ve heard similar statements before but I clearly remember him adding a qualifier to it like “nearly” or maybe it was “almost.” It was a word that meant you can’t get 100% of your life’s knowledge from the Bible.

Some audience might have believed that everything you need to know came from the Bible. Perhaps it was that in enough of an educated setting maybe he knew that this would have been too much of a silly claim to make. If he was going to say “nearly everything” I would have to wonder, why not just tell us this small amount we can’t get from it? I honestly think the people who believe this do not research much outside of their own religion. The more I learn about outside philosophy the more I understand the importance what each of these different frameworks teaches.

The other thing he said was that “if you think that there is something you are really good at chances are that is something you are really bad at.” How did he get to that conclusion? We are not told. In his first book that was released right at the end of his life he tells of a time when one of his favorite teachers told him that he was a better student then most of the others. This teacher had higher expectations of him than the work that he was currently producing. His excelling at being a student came from the belief that he had something that he was good at yet being good at something is something we are told to find as untrue. He didn’t see it as untrue at the time because the belief in his own life guided him to reach further then he had been.

I wonder why he waited to put out a book until the very end of his life? It is a series of short stories a bit like the things he would intersperse between a main message of a sermon helping to convey the message of one of his longer talks. Reading Low Hanging Truth I feel will work as a companion piece to Bazan’s pentalogy on places he lived especially the fifth album in the series that will be about Seattle. I will like to see how this book and that album might have a few similar topics?