September 11, 2005

• This is the TRIBUTE I shared with everyone at Julie’s Memorial Service:

  I met Julie my junior year of college.  Someone from Harvest fellowship introduced us after class.  I think I just knew right from the start that we were meant to be life-long friends because a week later when I saw her reading a Richard Foster book at the Price Center in the middle of UCSD campus, I just plopped myself down next to her and began to talk to her.  There was just something about her.  We clicked right away.

  My memories of college consist of going over to her apartment almost every afternoon after classes were over.  We’d spend hours reading books together.  We would lay on opposite sides of the bed reading our own books and come up for air every once in awhile to share with each other what we were reading.  We called it our ROTB time:  Reading On the Bed time.  I can’t even tell you how many times she read Anne of Green Gables.  But come to think of it, that was the perfect book.  She was dreamy and idealistic, and just like Anne Shirley, her entrance into someone’s life was like sunshine on an overcast day, she brought light to gloom and warmth to cold.  Every person’s life became richer for having met her.    

   

  Other memories I had with Julie:

  - Running together and finding that we both ran exactly the way we lived life.  She would lag behind at times but then there’d be these sudden bursts of energy and passion.  Meanwhile, I would keep on going at a steady pace.

  - Jumping into the car at times not knowing where we were going but knowing that we’d have an adventure doing it.

  - …which always inevitably led to us getting lost together.

  - Rollarblading together around her college apartment complex and whooping with so many shouts of exhilaration that the management put up signs the next week that “rollarblading and skateboarding was prohibited on these premises”  oops.

  - Playing guitar and worshiping God at the top of our lungs with all of our hearts even though neither of us knew how to play guitar and, well, we were a little off key. 

   

  In this last year, my favorite memories with Julie have to do with spending a whole afternoon at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble – I loved this.  We would go in, sit down, take out all our books, our journals and our Bible, look down for five seconds at our separate book or journal and then look up at each other and talk.  We’d talk for hours about everything.  Conversations with Julie felt like walking into a room and finding another door to another room and then another room and another room.  It would just get deeper and deeper and by the time we got to the end we didn’t know where we had started from.  But it was always so satisfying because we would cover all our worries and fears, our dreams and our wishes, our questions and our doubts and everything else in between.  We’d argue about things, hashing through things, looking at different issues from every angle and come to no conclusion.  But God was always at the center of it all.  And that’s what made it so deeply satisfying.  Because no matter what, no matter what, we both believed that it’s only in Him, it’s only in Jesus, that we have true life.  We may not understand everything, we may not have all the answers right now, but if we could just place our lives into His hands, then He will take care of it all.  That was the Reality with which Julie staked her life on.

   

  And that’s what drove her.  For as long as I have known her, we have always talked about God and missions.  That’s because we both knew that you can’t talk about God without talking about missions, because the truth is, God loves the WHOLE world.  He loves every single person in the world – me and YOU, the richest person in the world and the poorest.  Julie had a heart for the poor, the truly lost and the totally broken.  She was passionate about helping people who were really hurting – those who had been beaten, cheated or abused.  I think it was because she understood brokenness in a way that most of us do not.  She knew what it was like to be broken AND she also knew what it was like to be made whole by Jesus.  And that’s what she wanted the whole world to know.

   

  I am inspired by Julie.  I am inspired by how she was able to see everyone the way that God sees them.  And I am inspired by the way that she went out of her way to love them.  On July 16^th, Julie wrote, “If someone can tell me that I’ve encouraged them further on in the Lord, that will be my highest compliment.”  Well, I want to proclaim publicly today that Julie has encouraged me and inspired me on in the Lord in ways that I don’t know how to express.  She ran the race well and finished well, and now I too want to finish my journey just as well as she did. 

  • 7:33 pm
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