Lee's Legacy
The other week I had the opportunity to share a little about the legacy my brother-in-law, Lee Rickman left for his friends and family to carry on. However, as I've reflected over what it is Lee did and said, it's clear to see that the legacy we refer to as Lee's, wasn't really Lee's at all. Instead, all Lee did was to point others to Christ and his legacy - to never stop doing big things for the Cross. Here is a little bit of what I had the opportunity to say about Lee this past week (check out the chapel video here):
You should probably know that I didn’t know Lee all that much or for very long. I didn’t grow up going to Wesleyan Christian Academy, nor did I go to college with Lee. I married his older sister while he was still at Bryan and then my wife and I lived in Kentucky while he was in graduate school and when he had moved back to North Carolina. So, I actually got to spend very little time with Lee; but I did know this about him: Lee was all about decision day. Jenny and I were married living in Kentucky and so we came down to Bryan College to be with the rest of Rickmans for Lee’s graduation from Bryan College. Lee had decided that he wanted to go off after school and enter into a graduate program to pursue a Masters in History. However, he was undecided between two schools: Florida State – his all-time favorite school from boyhood, and Kansas State – a recent interest influenced by mentors of Lee while at Bryan.
I remember Tim and Patti being all in a wreck because they did not know where Lee was going to choose to go. We all sort of imagined that he would go to FSU knowing how much that school had meant to him throughout the years. But, then again, Lee was all about the drama of decision day. He had told all of us that the color of his tie at graduation would be his choice and so all we could was wait to see what color his tie was as he walked across the stage. Finally, Lee’s name was called and he walked up on stage and turned to us in the crowd and, yup, a bright purple tie. Lee had decided to go to Kansas State.
Now that decision certainly had an impact on the future trajectory, especially for the next 3 or so years in Lee’s life, but there was another decision that had a much larger and further reaching impact for him. Lee mentions in his testimony that at some point in his life he made the decision to stop living for himself and to live for God and others. It is this decision to follow Christ that has allowed Lee's life to impact others beyond his death. We see the importance of this decision gets magnified in Scripture because, after all, all of the Bible is written to help you know the truth and respond to the truth. The impact of this decision is echoed in a story many of us have heard repeated throughout your time in elementary school or Sunday school – the wise and foolish builders.
Now I know that you’ve heard this story since you were young but I believe that there are some deeper truths that as adults or soon to be adults, you should take notice of. After all, Jesus doesn't share this story with kids but to a crowd of adults. The first is rather self-evident. We are all building a house – but not all of us are building our house in the same place. Christ uses this metaphor of building a house to relate to the way in which we are living our lives. As you grow up you build your home and make additions. But Christ’s focus isn’t on the fact that we are living our lives and building our houses. Instead, he zeroes in on the foundation of the house – all of us are building a house but not all of us are building it on the same thing. He distinguishes between the two builders in two ways. One builder is wise and one builder is foolish. One builder builds on rock and other builds on sand. Now I shouldn’t have to explain to you why building a house on soft ground is a bad decision but apparently I do because it keeps happening in the world!
Back in the 1930’s the company Exxon was quickly become a giant corporation. As such, they built a new refinery plant out in Texas which led to many of the upper management to build some luxurious homes in a nearby town in Brownwood, Texas. On the outside, this neighborhood was immaculate. There were pristine houses, swimming pools, water-front housing – the perfect suburbanite neighborhood. Everything was perfect…for a time. Over the next 20 or 30 years something started to happen – the whole area started to sink. In fact, by the 1970’s, the area had sunk over 9ft! All of this happened because the area was not built on bedrock – something solid. Instead, the whole neighborhood was built on what scientists called a “gooey land, a clay-ey gumbo.” Houses began to sink and fall apart. Others became incredibly flood-prone in that people would keep their appliances on cinderblocks just because houses could flood at any moment. These people built their houses on soft ground and watched their neighborhood slowly sink into the ground over the years.
What Christ is getting at from the very beginning of his story of these two builders is this – your decision on where you build your house is incredibly important! All of us are building a house, or walking a road, or doing any other sort a metaphor you want to use for living your life. But, every single one of you choose where you build your house. Will you choose to live for yourself and watch as the world and your desires sink away OR will you live for God and others and build your house on the rock.
We also observe something further from Christ’s story about these two builders. The foolish man lives in the house he builds and the wise man lives in the house he builds. In other words – you have to live in the house you build. Your decision and all the subsequent decisions have consequences to them. Because the foolish man built his house on the sand, he had to live in that house and suffer through the consequences of his decision.
My teammate, best friend, and roommate for 4 years at SWU and I would go on an end-of-the-year hike after school each year. Last year we kept our tradition alive by hiking through Georgia on the Appalachian Trail. But while in school we would normally hike the Foothills Trail that starts at Table Rock Mountain in SC and moves up past White Water Falls in NC. The best way to describe our packing technique is to say that we were minimalists. We tried to keep our packs under 20/15 pounds because we were going for speed and not comfort. So we would pack trail mix, candy bars, beef jerky, and other foods like that in order to pacify us for the next 3 or 4 days. We’d have water filters, change of underwear and socks, and jackets, flint and tinder, and other little tools. But for shelter, all we brought were two blue large waterproof tarps – the kind of tarps you throw over a woodpile to keep it from getting wet.
On our second night on the trail we decided that we would try out this new design for our shelter. Before, we had tied up our tarps like taco shells and laid inside them individually. This night, however, we went for luxury. We laid one tarp
completely flat on the ground and then tied the other tarp just above us at an angle so water/rain would run off. This gave us more room to move around. At some point during the night, though, it started to rain and not just a little rain…but a LOT of rain. We woke up and had water come up over the sides of our tarp laying the ground and so we curled up the sides and cuddled up next to each other and just endured through the night. In the morning we woke up and tried to assess what went wrong – we quickly found out why our luxury shelter was a horrible idea. The trail was just above us, a small hill climb. Our shelter was in a flat area right next to a small crick. So, when it started to rain, all the water that landed above us came down the trail and settled in our flat area next to the crick. We had set up camp in a flood zone!
In the middle of the night we couldn’t change our shelter to set up something next without getting all our gear and food wet. We had to live in the shelter we built. You’ll have to live in the house you build. The decision where you’ll build is up to you – will you build on the rock or the sand.
The last thing we notice about Christ’s parable is that both houses get tested by the storm. The wise man’s house has to face the storm. The foolish man’s house has to face the storm just as well. The storm, the hardship and suffering of life, does not discriminate. Whomever you are and wherever you build your house – you will experience some amount of disappointment, heartache, pain, sorrow, suffering. When it comes to the storms of life, it is not a matter of IF, it is a matter of WHEN.
There’s a video I took and I’m not sure anyone has ever seen, heard it. I don’t even think Mr. Rickman knows I took it. I’d show it to you but I don’t want you to have to listen to me sing – so, you’re welcome. Because Lee died in a different country, there was the whole issue of getting his body back to North Carolina. Eventually the family was able to work it out for him come home. Once we got the call from the funeral home that Lee’s body had landed over at GSO, we all went over to the funeral home. We all stood in a circle outside that funeral home and waited for the opportunity to see Lee. I don’t know how it started or who started it but we all slowly began to sing together. I’m sure we sang a few short hymns but the one I have recorded is one you all might know from Lamentations 3 – "The steadfast love of the lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning, new every morning; great is thy faithfulness O Lord, great is thy faithfulness."
If you talk to someone who doesn’t believe in Christ, this baffles them. How can a family who just suddenly and devastatingly lost a son be singing songs together? How can they have any joy at all in a moment like this? How can they laugh and smile? If you know Christ and you've built your house on the rock, you know how. The storms of life come for us all – we just have to choose where we want to build our houses. The rock endures all things but the sand does not.
There’s something you need to know about Lee. Harry mentioned it earlier - Lee wasn’t anyone special. While he was here at Wesleyan he was just a normal kid from Kindergarten through High school – like a good number of you. He wasn’t the strongest, smartest, or fastest. This isn’t me badmouthing Lee but rather, I’m just trying to bring some reality to why we have and host this Lee Legacy Run and why Pastor Paul asked Harry and I to share with you all about Lee. The only reason we have the run and support the Lee scholarship is because Lee only did one worthwhile thing in his life: he chose to live for God instead of himself. Even if Harry and I are the only ones who have been impacted by Lee’s decision to live for God and others, which I know we aren’t, then Lee’s choice for Christ was worth it. We do all this just for the chance to hopefully let Lee’s decision to live for God impact one more person – maybe one more person might decide to live for God and have their lives forever changed. We do all this so that we might be reminded to keep building our house on the rock and that we might never stop doing big things for the Cross.
