At the Foot of the Mountain

This has been on my heart for several weeks. If knew what was coming, would we do it again? Dealing with grief, hope, God’s kingdom

Transcript:

Hi friends. I have had something that God has really been pressing on me to share with you. And I’ve really wanted to get back into the Monday morning coffee and chats where I answer reader questions and talk about books and life and stuff. But God is really saying you need to do this first, and then you can get back into the Monday mornings.

There was a time when Moses was standing at the foot of the mountain—the foot of Mount Sinai. And the way that he described it later in his life was that the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven with darkness, cloud, and thick darkness. And it was Moses’s job at that point to go up the mountain. And that was where everything sort of began.

This question was posed recently: if you knew what was coming—if you knew that there was going to be terribleness, the golden calf, where a huge portion of the population of the Israelites was swallowed up by the earth, the broken tablets, forty years in the wilderness—Moses eventually doesn’t even get to go into the promised land even though he had gone through everything with the Israelites—if he knew all of that was about to happen, would he still go up that mountain and still endure the next forty years?

And so that question had me pondering, and I want to tell you a story.

Scott and Jeb went to Space Camp several years in a row, and the 2020 Space Camp was kind of strange. Jeb was twelve and Scott was fourteen. They had to be masked, and the sleeping arrangements in the quarters were very strange. And even in the cafeteria they had certain spatial areas you couldn’t go beyond. You had to sit so far away from everyone. And even in the midst of all of that, in Jeb’s class they had formed this kind of close-knit group. They had a text—or it was either a text or a Discord group—where they kept in contact with each other for the next couple of years.

Jeb was killed about three weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday. And we’re going to fast forward to his eighteenth birthday, and we get contacted by one of the girls that was in that group who had spent one week of her life with Jeb in 2020. She wanted to come talk to us on his eighteenth birthday. So she came from Virginia and spent the night in a hotel, drove like ten hours to get to us, and then spent the morning with us and had lunch and talked about Jeb’s impact on her life—basically just talked about Jeb and the time spent with him and how much he affected her.

Then we found out that she had just finished her freshman year at Wheaton College. And in the course of the conversation, she found out that I was a writer and we found out that she was a writer.

Write to Publish conference takes place at Wheaton College, and it’s a beautiful conference. It’s run by Becky Antkowiak. We call her Becky Blue because who can say Antkowiak? And it was founded by Steve Laube. And it’s just a phenomenal conference.

So Becky Blue contacted Gregg and me sometime last year and asked if we would mind if she had a Jeb Bridgeman scholarship for young writers. And so it’s for writers under the age of twenty-five. I advertised that scholarship on social media, and the conference director, Aunt Becky, told me that they received enough money to send nine young adults to the conference. It’s about eight or nine hundred dollars, and it covers room, food, and the conference itself. So we were able to raise enough money to send nine, which was really incredible.

So I asked the girl first if she wanted to go to this conference, and she very much did want to go to it. And so I contacted Becky and I said, “Do you have any more Jeb Bridgeman money left?” And she started crying and said that she had just hung up the phone from a scholarship recipient who had had to cancel because of a scheduling conflict, and she suddenly had a full scholarship available to give. So I connected her with this friend of Jeb’s, and she went to that conference.

So now let’s go back to Moses standing at the foot of the mountain, inside of the dark smoke and in the darkness. And so now put Gregg and me at the foot of that mountain, and knowing what was going to happen and all of the terribleness that was going to come with it—would we be willing to go up? Would we be willing to stand there and say, “Yes, God, send me”?

And my answer is adamantly yes. Yes, I would face all of the pain and the grief and the destruction that came with the death of my son, because I have no idea what lasting effect his life and death are going to have for the kingdom of God. I cannot see it. But I know that at least nine young writers out there have been immersed in learning the craft of writing at the Write to Publish conference, and that what they’re going to do is go out into the world with this craft that they’re learning and use it for the kingdom of God.

And I know that MidSouth Christian Writers Conference has a Jeb Bridgeman scholarship. And I know that Kentucky Christian Writers Conference has a Jeb Bridgeman scholarship. And overall we have no idea what impact these writers are going to have, and we will not see it in our lifetimes.

There’s power in the written word. If you want to take C.S. Lewis, for example—he has been dead way longer than he was ever alive. And his books today are still showing up in the top fifty most popular books in Christian writing. And why? Because they’re powerful. Their words are powerful. They talk about how to heal from grief. They talk about how to fight Satan and his wily ways. They talk about mere Christianity. They talk about allegorical stories that bring us closer into the kingdom of God and teach us how light can battle darkness. And it’s all through these written words.

And that is one man’s impact. And how many hundreds of thousands of people’s hearts and minds have been made better because of that one man who followed God’s direction of writing in his life?

Do I want my son to have died in a violent, violent way three weeks before his fifteenth birthday? Do I want my son and daughter and husband and me to go through what we’ve been through the last three and a half years with grief and with suffering and with heartache and with sadness?

No. Of course I don’t want that.

But I also know that the power of the written word is something that God definitely utilizes for the glory of His kingdom. And the fact is there is going to be a ripple effect of the way that Jeb lived his life and his testimony and the way that he loved people and the way that he encouraged people. And now his legacy is living beyond his death into the way that the writing world has embraced teaching young people how to write for God. And I know that that is going to be something that just hits and hits and hits and ripples and ripples throughout eternity.

And so I would go up that mountain. I would do it. I would do it knowing what was coming. And it will suck the whole time. And I don’t want to be living inside of this grief. But I would do it. I would do it again.

And I know that the Apostle Paul says, do not be surprised, but rejoice in suffering. And so it’s not easy to rejoice in suffering. It’s not easy to be thankful in all things. This world is hard and it’s broken and it’s fallen and it’s dark. But I have hope, and my hope has a name, and that name is Jesus Christ. And I know that my son is in His arms. And I know that my son’s legacy is going to live on long after I am gone. And I know that I will get to stand in heaven one day and see exactly the impact that Jeb had on this world.

And so yes, I would go I would go up that mountain.