I don’t why we place more emphasis on some birthdays than others. Why is 16 more significant than 17? Why are multiples of 5 more significant than multiples of 4 or 6? I don’t who decides these things or on what basis, but I suppose 25 is significant because it marks a quarter of a century. Though it is an uneven number it somehow feels like a round number—a particularly meaningful one.

Today is Nick’s 25th birthday. Or is it better to say that it would be his 25th birthday? I’m not sure. Either way, though a quarter of a century has passed and so many memories have been lost to time, there is still so much I remember about March 5, 2000—the excitement of knowing the day had come at last, the helplessness of watching Aileen in labor, the awe of witnessing childbirth, the joy of meeting my firstborn. It is a day that remains set apart in my mind and memory, set apart in our family lore.

For 20 years we celebrated March 5 and for five years we have mourned it. For 20 years it was a day that evoked gratitude for a wonderful gift and for 5 years it has been a day that evokes grief for a tremendous loss. Of course, gratitude and grief are not opposite to one another and do not cancel each other out. It is possible to be grateful and grieved. And that is how I feel today—still grateful for Nick’s life even as I grieve his death.

It’s rare for me to read my books after they’ve been published, but I do find myself picking up Seasons of Sorrow from time to time. Seasons was written as blog articles and journal entries long before I imagined it being collected, collated, and bound into a book. In that way, it is an urgent and in-the-moment series of reflections on loss. I find myself increasingly glad that I wrote it as I did, for so much is different now. I have become a seasoned sufferer instead of an unseasoned one. I have learned to live with sorrow instead of being crushed by it. I could never go back and capture the poignancy, urgency, bewilderment, and brokenheartedness of those early days. I would necessarily make it seem easier than it was, to transpose my five-years-later settledness onto those days when I was so severely tested. The book captures moments in time that I’d never be able to re-capture today.

Aileen and I often consider that bound to missing Nick is missing our old lives. The loss of our son and the loss of our innocence are inseparably bound together. Our old lives were good. We had many pleasures and few griefs, many joys and few sorrows. But now grief is always close at hand, always just beneath the surface, always able and willing to swell up at the smallest provocation. Yet joys and pleasures are also always close at hand and we are determined that we will not neglect these joys nor allow sorrow to overwhelm them. If we are responsible to steward our griefs surely also our joys, and to entrust them all to the Lord. We are grateful that each March 5 without Nick is just a bit easier than the one before.

The reality I struggle to admit to myself these days is that Nick is beginning to fade into the past. Photos of the two of us look a little less familiar than they once did, almost like they are snapshots of someone else’s life rather than mine. It’s not that he has become a stranger but just that he’s so much less familiar than he once was. I don’t think I could prove it, but I’m pretty sure a day has now gone by when I didn’t think of him even once. I still miss him dreadfully. I still long to see him. But he exists in my past, not in my present.

Yet my confidence has not wavered that he exists in my future as well, that after a few more birthdays have passed, or perhaps many more birthdays have passed, we will be reunited. And nothing has dimmed my anticipation of that day. Nothing has diminished my longing for the joy he and I will experience when we can finally throw our arms around one another and rejoice in God’s salvation. Nothing has dimmed my confidence that Christ has risen and, therefore, Nick and I will rise as well—rise to be with Christ and rise to enjoy him together.

Finally, here are a few glimpses of March 5 in years past:

There are a number of Christian doctrines that, though important, do not necessarily have a significant impact on our lives or relationships. It may be good to have convictions about infralapsarianism over against supralapsarianism, but that conviction will probably not make a great difference to day-to-day living or to life in the local church. There are other doctrines, though, that have a seismic impact so that your convictions will have significant consequences to your life, to your family, and to your church. An obvious example is gender roles and whether your convictions lead you to complementarianism or egalitarianism.

My convictions align with complementarianism—the view that God, while creating men and women equal in value and dignity, has ordained a kind of complementarity between them so that in the home and church men are to take a position of Christ-like leadership. But while I find the Bible leading me to complementarian convictions in a relatively straightforward way, what has been far more difficult is working out exactly what this looks like in real life. It is one thing to have complementarian doctrine, but another thing to have a complementarian life and church. In other words, it is one thing to acknowledge the doctrine, but another to truly embrace it.
Let’s not act as if this is the easiest challenge we will ever face, because as we attempt to be consistently complementarian, we will face a host of questions that will need to be answered: Does God mean for only men to be elders? Does God mean for only men to be deacons? If only men are to be teachers in the church, can a woman lead a Bible study? What about a youth group? Can a woman lead worship on a Sunday morning or would that be to exercise authority over the men of the congregation? And what if my understanding of some of these questions differs from another nearby church or from the teaching of a well-known “celebrity” pastor?
This is exactly where a new book from Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher has proven so helpful. Embracing Complementarianism is meant to help Christians—and Christian leaders in particular—turn biblical convictions into a positive church culture. “Our conviction,” they say, “is that teaching and practising a robust complementarianism leads people from a reluctant acceptance to a joyful embracing of God’s word in this area.” Their strategy is not so much to defend complementarianism—something that has been done elsewhere and often—but to advance it by helping Christians work it out in the life of their church.
They begin with a lay of the land—an assessment of where culture is at with its understanding of gender and gender roles and they are blunt in describing how both the wider culture and the Christian church have often failed in protecting women and in freeing them to do all God desires them to do. They describe some of the debates in the church and explain how a teacher like John Piper differs from one like Carl Trueman. With this done, they provide a relatively brief defense of the complementarian position and its understandings of both equality and distinction.
The heart of the book begins in chapter 4 where the authors show that we tend to fall into two equal and opposite dangers—the danger of overemphasizing the differences between men and women and the danger of underemphasizing them. They want their readers to understand that, though there are some gender-specific commands in the Bible, the great majority are given to men and women alike. Yet with gender being so fundamental to who we are, we must expect that these commands will be fulfilled in gendered ways. “The way in which we are kind, or express encouragement, or love our neighbor, and so on, will be shown through our gender—and that will, on average, look somewhat different between men and women. And that is a good, right and enriching thing to be embraced.” There are implications to this. While some roles in the church may be reserved for men, the church must be a place where life together welcomes and displays expressions that vary according to gender.
A chapter about the goodness of men leading in ministry shows how and why God has called men to lead in the church, but introduces questions that leaders will need to wrestle with: Does this include deacons? Does this include ministry leaders? And so on. Chapters on understanding church and understanding ministry continue to answer some questions while introducing others, to solve some of the biggest issues but to leave the peripheral ones to be worked out according to context and conviction. Two final chapters continue to guide leaders in faithfully working out complementarian doctrine in their churches. Here they describe and urge a “mapping exercise” in which leaders will think carefully about how convictions can be expressed in the whole life of the church.
To be complementarian has always been to be counter-cultural. If that was true a few years ago, how much more today when society’s questions have progressed from “what can women do as well as men?” to “what is a woman, anyway?” Yet I agree with these authors that church members tend to respond to a confident, convictional, and robust complementarianism. I very much appreciate their desire to encourage believers to truly embrace complementarianism by practicing it in a way that is worth embracing—one that is faithful to God’s Word, that celebrates both the distinction and equality of the genders, and that frees both men and women to serve in all the ways God permits and invites them to. It’s my hope that many church leaders will read this book and carefully work through it as they attempt to implement a complementarianism that honors God and is faithful to the Scriptures.

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This week’s Free Stuff Friday is sponsored by Radius International.  They are giving away a conference package that includes: 2 tickets, a Radius pullover, and 2 books.

The winner will receive two free tickets to the Radius Missiology Conference being held June 29-30, 2022, at Christ Covenant Church, Matthews, NC. This event will be live in person or available as a live stream. Kevin DeYoung, Alistair Begg, Ian Hamilton, Wayne Chen, Brooks Buser, Chad Vegas, and others from the Radius world will be live and in-person to teach on the Great Commission in today’s world with free books from 9Marks, Banner of Truth, and others.
The winner will receive a Radius International branded pullover. Size and gender option to be selected by the winner from available stock. And a Radius branded Yeti Travel Mug.
The winners will also receive two books that Radius International highly recommends:
No Shortcut to Success
A Manifesto for Modern Missions
By Matt Rhodes
Avoid “Get-Rich-Quick” Missions Strategies and Invest in Effective, Long-Term Ministry
Trendy new missions strategies are a dime a dozen, promising missionaries monumental results in record time. These strategies report explosive movements of people turning to Christ, but their claims are often dubious and they do little to ensure the health of believers or churches that remain. How can churches and missionaries address the urgent need to reach unreached people without falling for quick fixes?
In No Shortcut to Success, author and missionary Matt Rhodes implores Christians to stop chasing silver-bullet strategies and short-term missions, and instead embrace theologically robust and historically demonstrated methods of evangelism and discipleship—the same ones used by historic figures such as William Carey and Adoniram Judson. These great missionaries didn’t rush evangelism; they spent time studying Scripture, mastering foreign languages, and building long-term relationships. Rhodes explains that modern missionaries’ emphasis on minimal training and quick conversions can result in slipshod evangelism that harms the communities they intend to help. He also warns against underestimating the value of individual skill and effort—under the guise of “getting out of the Lord’s way”—and empowers Christians with practical, biblical steps to proactively engage unreached groups.

Missions By The Book
How Theology and Missions Walk Together
by Chad Vegas and Alex Kocman
Across the church, there is a rift between theology and missions. Bad theology produces bad missions, and bad missions fuels bad theology.
We wrongly think that we must choose between making a global impact and thinking deeply about the things of God. But the relationship between theology and missions is symbiotic—one cannot exist without the other. They walk hand-in-hand.
Enter Here
Again, there is one package to win. And all you need to do to enter the draw is to drop your name and email address in the form below.
Giveaway Rules: You may enter one time. Winners will be notified by email. The giveaway closes on Sunday, April 24th, 2022 at midnight.