When David and I moved to Northern California we attended a church plant that met in a synagogue. We made fast friends with a few young couples there, and the men were beginning to pass around CDs they’d burned of sermons from a pastor in New York City. His name was Tim Keller.
I think the first teaching I heard from Tim was about emotions. Most reformed teachers I’d heard up until that point were generally allergic to human emotion; strong emotions were one tick off from outright sin, and they ought to always be controlled by the intellect. (I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.) Rather than letting emotions drive us up and down, or refusing to interact with emotions, Tim saw a third way (stop me if you’ve heard this one before).
I picked up his book A Reason for God as a potential resource for doubting friends; what I didn’t expect was that it deeply ministered to my own soul. I’ve already told you of the influence of his book The Prodigal God. We have a shelf full of his work, ranging from vocation to prayer to suffering.
I saw Tim speak a few times — once at Redeemer, where I was struck by his casual way of sidling up to the standup microphone and talking to a huge room of people as though he was sitting next to each of us. Kathy and Tim did the pre-conference at an event I went to once. He clearly delighted in his wife — such a fierce, intelligent, and funny woman.
We got to meet him once. He did a book signing here in Charlotte when A Reason for God came out. We waited in line and confessed to him that occasionally we referred to him as “Uncle Tim.” He chuckled and said, “Well, that’s alright. We’re probably related somehow.” Then he proceeded to unfold a brief Keller family history, tracing his family roots through the mid-Atlantic, until we had to gently call him to a halt and awkwardly excuse ourselves for holding up the line.
One thing I admired about him was his curiosity about the world and about people. In the five minutes we spoke to him, he wanted to know more about us — not because he was expected to, or because it was good manners, but because he was genuinely interested. When he heard Kathy talk, he wanted to know more about something she said or thought. The pattern continues in recorded conversations and interviews; he wanted to learn. His deep well of illustrations for preaching sprung from an unending desire to know more about God’s word, God’s world, or God’s people.
I was emotional the Sunday after he passed away. In church, we sang about Heaven, and I pictured him there, realizing what he’d clearly longed for his entire life. His teaching on vocation always included Tolkien’s story “Leaf by Niggle,” a story that has ministered deeply to my heart as I’ve tried and failed to accomplish so many things here on this fallen earth. When Niggle, the main character, reaches Heaven, he realizes that his work on Earth, though artistically frustrating, was not in vain. None of it was lost or wasted.
Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. “It’s a gift!” he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally. He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time.
Keller wrote in reflection:
Once or twice in your life you may feel like you have finally “gotten a leaf out.” Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree. Whatever you are seeking in your work—the city of justice and peace, the world of brilliance and beauty, the story, the order, the healing—it is there. There is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others. Your work will be only partially successful, on your best days, in bringing that world about. But inevitably the whole tree that you seek—the beauty, harmony, justice, comfort, joy, and community—will come to fruition. If you know all this, you won’t be despondent because you can get only a leaf or two out in this life. You will work with satisfaction and joy. You will not be puffed up by success or devastated by setbacks.
(from Every Good Endeavor)
I’m thankful for the good endeavors of Tim Keller’s life. I pray that I and others will have the same curiosity and joy in our earthly work and play until our race is run.
Kelly Keller 