Love, all blessings, Jess Trip with Doug Doug and I were traveling from Phoenix to Sarasota in the Chevy pickup with a camper on the back. I think it was 1975 – it was summer and my kids were spending it with relatives on their dad's side. I don't remember why we were going to Sarasota, but one or all of us - the Ott kids – would travel back and forth between the two places at least once every couple of years. Doug would have been around 19 or 20 years old at the time of this trip. Somewhere in the middle of the area between Sonora to Junction (Texas -- that's about a 60-mile stretch in the middle of nowhere), the truck broke down. Doug tried to fix it but couldn't, a part needed to be replaced. So we were out in the middle of nowhere, way off the interstate system on what was supposed to be a state highway, but there wasn't a whole lot of traffic. The interstate goes through there now but it was still being built back then, at least in that part of Texas. While we were waiting for someone who could help us we discussed a lot of things. One of the subjects that came up was religion - specifically Christianity – and it became a heated discussion on my part (not on Doug's). I remember that Doug was in the driver's seat and I was back in the camper. There was no glass (or any other kind of) partition there to hamper communication. I don't remember how it started. I just remember Doug saying that God is good. And I asked him how he knew that. I wasn't sure back then that I believed in God. Doug replied that the Bible says God is good. Being an agnostic, I wasn't about to take the Bible as a source of evidence for God being good. So I started asking Doug if God was so good, why did the truck break down; it grew into a series of questions mainly about how bad things happen to good people – it ended up with my bitterly asking about the Holocaust. For me, that was proof positive, because the Jews were supposed to be God's chosen people, but six million of them died in Nazi death camps. Now bear in mind that this had been a monolog diatribe on my part. I had spit out all these bitter questions non-stop and Doug wouldn't have been able to get a word in edgewise. The strange thing was, he didn't try to. He was quiet for about a minute, long enough for me to think that I had won the argument with all this "proof" I had thrown at him. Then, without looking at me, he told me quietly that God didn't screw up the truck - that I never got it serviced or maintained, no oil changes, nothing. That God didn't kill the Jews, the Nazis did while the German people and the rest of the world looked away. So I interrupted him, almost yelling at this point, why didn't God do something to stop it? And he looked at me finally and asked me if I thought people have any responsibility at all for what happens in the world. In other words, why didn't people stop it? Aren't we here to help others? I couldn't tell you now his exact words, only that this is what I took from his words: If people say they are Christians, God's people, why don't they do the work He wants them to do? Why do Christians do things they're not supposed to do? I do remember that he said something about the fact that we all have free will and that God wasn't going to take that away for any reason. This line of reasoning led me on to exclaim how Christians not only don't do what God would want, they are hypocrites, and how I would never join a church until I found one without hypocrites. Doug said that a church without hypocrites doesn't exist but that I should check my own behavior before I judged other people (I now know that as 'take the beam from your own eye before removing the speck from your brother's). Doug also said that Jesus never said to for us to follow hypocrites, that He told us to follow Him, and that the church was a place for sinners, not perfect people. Years later I would read the Gospel where Jesus's enemies ask him why he's always hanging around with sinners and He tells them that well people don't need a doctor, and I'd remember what Doug said. Now I had known at least from the time I was a kid that no one gets through life without being a hypocrite; everyone contradicts what they say with their own behavior. Some people do that much more than others, but everyone does it at different points. I had caught myself too many times in hypocrisy to try to pretend I wasn't one too, but I wasn't going to admit that to Doug. So I railed on about examples of church people who stole the money of poor people and some Christian minister guy who was sleeping around with women when he was married, etc. etc. There was no shortage of examples. Doug just said that if they repented, they would be good with God and be saved and go to heaven. Well, that made me furious. What right did thieves and cheats have to go to heaven? What about people who never stole or cheated or killed or anything but didn't turn to Jesus, why should they not go to heaven instead? But Doug just said that nobody is perfect, everyone has some kind of sin. And I started going on and on about if that was how God is, He is very unfair, blah blah blah, on and on and on, but Doug never said another word and it was at least 20 minutes later I finally discovered he'd gone to sleep. I thought about what he said for a long time. I thought he must have gone to some fundamentalist church, because the Episcopal churches we went to as kids never taught us anything like this. (I didn't know there were Episcopal churches that were different from the ones our parents took us to, but our parents went where they would never be told that drunkenness was sinful, or anything else for that matter). I had stepped into churches during the "Jesus Freak" years where they said things like what Doug told me. And I realized that Doug must have been saved and I knew that further argument was useless. I actually felt sorry for him, thinking he had been conned. I thought it was all a bunch of bull. Ten years later, in a desperate situation where a friend I turned to just kept talking to me about Jesus, I brazenly threw up a challenge to Jesus to prove Himself, to do something in a situation that I knew couldn't be done. It took me a few months after He met that challenge, but I finally surrendered my life to Jesus. And learned slowly that Doug had been right about everything he'd said. Did Doug live up to that faith in Christ? Not always. Did I? Nope. I don't mean to be cavalier about it; it's just the way human nature is. I want to be good and I try to be good. And sometimes people at church (or work or school, but most of all church because they're supposed to know better) make it a lot harder and I have to try to forgive them the way God forgives me – see that's just one place where my own hypocrisy comes in, I know God forgives me but somehow I don't think others should be forgiven too quickly and it just chokes me to have to forgive them myself. I think that's one of the big reasons we're supposed to be in church (yes, we are commanded to be in fellowship with other Christians), because we need to learn humility, something I never wanted to learn! I think it's in 1 John (the lessons near the end of the Bible, not the Gospel of John) where is says that if I say I love God and yet I hate my brother (and 'brother' here means fellow Christian) then I am a liar, for if I DO NOT LOVE (see my excuse that I don't actually 'hate' my fellow Christian go down the tubes) my fellow Christian whom I have seen, how can I love God Whom I have not seen? I've always found this scripture (the whole book, actually) to be very hard because I have been very angry at other Christians whom I believe have sinned against me or someone I cared about. This is what the General Confession in the prayer book says as "We have not loved others as ourselves" – the reason we confess this is because it's sin! There's nothing in there that says if it's justified anger or lack of love, then it's alright. It isn't. The night before Jesus was crucified (the ultimate unfairness) He gave us a new commandment – that we must love one another as He has loved us. If the only way we can only love others is by not interacting with them, then we don't love them at all. Now when Doug joined St. Mary's he knew very well that there would be hypocrites there, just like anywhere else. He wasn't stupid or blind. He could've bought a Bible and just stayed at home and read it and prayed by himself. Instead Doug went to St Mary's and took his family and became active in the life of the church. From everything I've heard he GAVE of himself very, very generously to that church. Why would Doug do such a thing? He didn't have to. My oldest brother and I were amazed when we heard all that Doug did at St Mary's – we've both been active in our churches and Doug ran circles around us. Ask yourself why he would do that, for a bunch of people who didn't deserve it. I remind myself of this every time I think of how I'd like to quit my church and stay home. Doug loved God. I saw it in the little bit of communication I had with him in the last two years of his life. Doug has become a shining example to me and I have a long way to go before I can live up to it. He wasn't perfect, no. But he reflected the love of God as brightly as I've seen anyone do. So his example is more than good enough for me. As for God allowing awful things: I don't think those things are His plan at all. I think all the cruelty and unfairness in the world are the work of someone else; He doesn't promise us perfection until the next life, the world to come. Neither does He say that we won't suffer the consequences of our own mistakes or the mistakes of others. I don't think I can ever explain it as well as Doug did, but it's mostly up to us to alleviate the suffering in the world, on His behalf. That's not to say He doesn't perform miracles now and then, but He mostly seems to want us to choose to help each other. He's given us His Word so we can determine right from wrong. But there again, I point to Doug's example. Doug knew there is evil in the world and that very bad things happen. He didn't blame God for these things or expect God to keep them from happening, he didn't turn his back on God because of them. Doug did whatever he thought would make the world a better place. He absolutely made St Mary's a better place, and Kathy says he made life brighter in her family. I sometimes get angry too when I think of all the bad parents out there who will live out their natural lives till they're old and yet Doug is gone. Kathy's heard it from me before. No it isn't fair. But Doug didn't believe the world was a fair place and it didn't stop him from loving God and trying to do the work God prepared for him to do. It's not just that I want to live up to the example my baby brother set, although I do; I want to see him again, and it will only be through the mercy of God that I do. And Doug was full of God's mercy, not holding the fact that I was not as good a sister as I should have been against me as he had every right to (and the Christians are not as Christian as they should be, and God does not act as we want Him to). Doug had his share of forgiveness to dole out, and he did. Doug loved as I have seen few people love. That's what I want to be like, how I want people to remember me. I don't know if I can do it so I ask the prayers of those who loved Doug. Reply Forward