a true story about a christian i once knew

click the image for a closer look

Over the holidays some tweeker rummaged through the landlady's trash cans and left a huge mess behind. My neighbor and I took it upon ourselves to clean it up.

The trash cans were filled with what was left of Reverend Mike's stuff.

Reverend Mike was a guy who rented one of the storage units from our landlady. He was an evangelical Christian, so every conversation you had with him eventually went that way.

One day there were some people cleaning out Reverend Mike's storage area- turns out they were his family and he had suffered a stroke and was in a long-term care facility.

His storage unit was filled with Christian stuff- books, videos, tapes, posters. They filled most of the trash cans with it. Cassandra and I found this poster of "The Ressurrection" (above) leaning against the trash can and took it home for ourselves (I mean LOOK AT IT it's AWESOME)

It was pretty depressing, seeing his family not knowing what to do with his stuff (there was a LOT of it)

Soon after that our landlady told us the Reverend Mike had passed on.

Flash forward to tweaker day- I was pretty surprised to see a bunch of Rev. Mike's stuff lying about- the landlady kept these cans behind a derelict van on her proerty so they never got emptied. The neighbor and I used a shovel to load it all back into the cans.

So here they were again- old reel-to-reel tapes, Christian seminar cassettes, a water-logged Bible, and photographs of all sorts of people.

As I was shoveling the remains of this man's Mission on Earth into the cans, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him- he had a message he wanted to share, the Glorious Good News and all that, and here I was, someone who's not so much of a, a-hem, "churchgoer", shoving it all into the trash, throwing away his life's work ... again.


And then a handwritten note caught my eye. It read:

"If you worry, you're going to die.

If you don't worry, you're going to die.

You're going to die anyway, so why worry?"

I don't think that's a direct quote from JC. Maybe it came from some inspirational poster.

Maybe it was a Reverned Mike original.

But it sure is true, isn't it? Nice work , Reverend.


Nobody really knows where we go when the time comes. I hope for Reverend Mike that the skies opened up and all those smiling people were there so happy to see him.