My friend Dan Boone has moved upstairs...

Most of the world knew Dan Boone as a car dealer and a sportsman. I knew, at least for a brief time, a man who was captured by a higher claim on his life.

Following the surrender of his family to the Lordship of Christ, Dan began to attend our worship services with them. Through this we began to develop a personal relationship. This led to transparent discussions about his lifestyle as we met at the country club for luncheons. He was willing to share his deep struggles and finally, over two spinach salads, he made a simple confession of faith in Christ.

There followed many weeks of our meeting daily at his home in the mornings. For 11 weeks, I prepared a daily devotional for an hour discussion with him about the core values of a Christ follower. These were moments when I could sense the deep struggles of a man torn between inner conflicts and a desire to break loose from a well entrenched pattern of activities.

Eventually I published the material I originally wrote to mentor him as A Survival Kit for New Christians. It became widely used with over two million copies now distributed in many languages, used around the world. As a result, Dan and I flew to Nashville where he was given a plaque by Broadman Press for inspiring the book to be written for him as a new Christian.

We drifted apart when my own journey took our family to serve as missionaries in Viet Nam and Singapore. The years went by.

Dan and Pat moved away; upon return to Houston, we found Pat was active in a fine church, growing in the Lord. But no one invested much in helping Dan continue his walk into Christ’s Lordship. As a result, the seed sown into the soil of his life was crowded out by the thorns of old lifestyles.

I was then contacted by Dan when Pat was found dead with an open Bible in her lap as she was called home by her King. At the funeral, several key men spoke to me about their concern for Dan. The lack of solid Christian community had left him drift.

My attempts to keep in touch after that were minimal because of my own travel and the schedules we both kept. I deeply regret I did not continue my friendship with him.

While his life was not a dramatic testimony of personal faith, my friend is in the care of the Christ who died to redeem him. He chose to be owned by the saviour of the world.

Did his life reveal a deep walk with Christ? It did not. Yet his and our salvation does not depend on our lifestyle but the integrity of a loving God who has made it very plain in this inspired verse:

“By grace are you saved through faith; not through your own works, lest any man should boast.”

Is Dan with the Lord he never fully yielded to? We can be sure he is.

Was Dan never fully drawn into a servant lifestyle? We know he was not.

But in eternity, he will find there is no other lifestyle available. With the destruction of the human flesh his spirit is finally released to be all it was meant to be.

C.S. Lewis wrote of a waiting room where recently deceased people were waiting to enter heaven. The complaints, the angry comments of those present, reflected all the personality traits of these unhappy earth people. The main character in the story is horrified and says to himself, “Shall I enter heaven to put up with these people for all eternity? How can there be anything but more hell in what is called 'heaven'?”

Then, one by one, the waiting room is emptied and people pass into heaven. To his astonishment, he sees amazing transformations in each of the people in the waiting room! They are all totally transformed when the weight of earthly transgressions are stripped away.

I am waiting to greet my friend Dan Boone when I join him in the next life. It will be amazing to see him divested of his humanity and to see him as God has always seen him: a blood-bought son of God, pure and unhindered by the habits of the flesh.

I often wonder what I will be like at that time? The weight of sin drags all of us down. It is so sad that in this life we fight so hard against what we could experience here and now: the eternal peace that comes into the dimension of time when we stop struggling and enter into His rest.