A while back, Dr. Lamar Cooper asked for a time to visit me in my office. (He has since passed.) I wondered if he was going to update me on his recent writings or the Qumran dig. Instead, he entered with a thick quarto-sized volume and offered it to me as a gift: an encyclopedia of astronomy. Being aware of my astronomy pastime, he wanted me to have the book as a friend. But he also wanted me to know why he had obtained the book at all.
As a young man, he loved astronomy and was headed pell-mell into a career in science. But he made the “mistake” of visiting Glorieta, the formerly Baptist campground in the mountains of New Mexico. There, God called him to ministry and changed his life. Pursuing the will of God, he left his career in science behind. He earned his doctorate, pastored a church, became a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament, influenced millions of believers from his post at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, preserved the college’s accreditation through a challenging review process as the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, and led the college through its tumultuous transition to independence in one of his two terms as interim president—an impressive list of accomplishments for anyone, made even more so by what everyone who knows him also knows is true about him, that he is a man with neither selfishness nor guile. My favorite picture in the president’s office is of Dr. Cooper shaking hands with Menachem Begin.
He sacrificed a career in his former passion so that God could use him to do all of those things.
I received an M.Div. from and serve in a college I did not build. We all receive the benefit—like a book handed to us by a mentor—of sacrifices made by people we often know nothing about. They heard and yielded to God, planned and built for the future, wept when they struggled and celebrated when they succeeded, and have now walked into our lives and handed us their trust that we will be faithful not to them, but to the God who derailed their lives and gave them a purpose worthy of His derailing our lives and calling us to be faithful to them by being faithful to Him.
May we be faithful stewards of the day, world, and opportunity faithful men and women have left to us.