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Notable and Quotable

Posted on October 14, 2007 by Kendall Harmon

“If I died right this minute, I would be able to say, ‘God, what a ride! What a ride!'”

and

“If I were to die today, I would be nervous about what people would say at my funeral. I would be happy if they said things like ‘He was a nice guy’ or ‘He was occasionally decent’ or ‘Mike wasn’t as bad as a lot of people.’ Unfortunately, eulogies are delivered by people who know the deceased. I know what the consensus would be. ‘Mike was a mess.'”

— Michael Yaconelli (1942-2003), whom we sorely miss

Update: A Christianity Today article on him and his death is here.

Posted in * Christian Life / Church Life, Parish Ministry, Youth Ministry

4 comments on “Notable and Quotable”

  1. Kendall Harmon says:
    October 14, 2007 at 5:16 pm

    Mike had a tremedous impact on me from afar, as he did on so many others.

    He said a lot of wonderful things, but to me the most profound was this:

    I live in a small, rural community. There are lots of cattle ranches around here, and, every once in a while, a cow wanders off and gets lost . . . Ask a rancher how a cow gets lost, and chances are he will reply, ‘Well, the cow starts nibbling on a tuft of green grass, and when it finishes, it looks ahead to the next tuft of green grass and starts nibbling on that one, and then it nibbles on a tuft of grass right next to a hole in the fence. It then sees another tuft of green grass on the other side of the fence, so it nibbles on that one and then goes on to the next tuft. The next thing you know, the cow has nibbled itself into being lost.”

    Americans are in the process of nibbling their way to being lost. . . We keep moving from one tuft of activity to another, never noticing how far we have gone from home or how far away from the truth we have managed to end up.

    That last paragraph I believe is one of the true prophetic statements in the last generation.

  2. bob carlton says:
    October 14, 2007 at 6:15 pm

    i had the glorious gift of working with mike for a year, just before he died

    he was a glorious, complex, audacious prophet – messy, a prankster, wise in ways that challenged me to reframe what I understood as wisdom

    one of my fav yac quotes:

    We’d like to have it all neat and orderly. We want to be able to measure it and control it, but the reality is that Jesus is a mystery. The Christian faith is a mystery. The disciples spent their entire time following him going, “Uhh, what the heck are you doing? We don’t understand what you’re doing and we don’t know why you’re doing it.” And when he would explain why he was doing it, they still didn’t get it.

  3. Rob Eaton+ says:
    October 15, 2007 at 1:22 am

    It always bothered me that TECusa never considered making Youth Specialties (especially with someone like Mike) an official youth ministries resource. Can you imagine if YS had simply become “the” youth ministry program and resource for TECusa? If the Yac had been brought on board as the Youth Ministries “Unit Leader” at 815? (Leaving him in Yreka, of course). Him and Hugh Magers working together?
    But then, so many Episcopalian youth workers, paid and unpaid, DID follow YS and make use of their materials, and go to the National Youth Specialties conferences around the USA.
    So close, so close….

    RGEaton

  4. Kendall Harmon says:
    October 15, 2007 at 2:36 am

    Very interesting about the overlap, Bob in #2. Amazing how the threads of human lives weave together in what we call history.