This is one of the hundreds of letters to my grandfather spilling out of an old, cracked leather satchel, most of which are from listeners of his radio Gospel broadcast. This one is from “Jeffrey L. Woody…at Sandy a Ridge Prison Camp,” requesting a tape of his “Country Talk” (the name, I suppose, of a compilation of recitations, songs, sermons and the like). He indicates in his letter that he sent enclosed with his request “nearly every dime [he had].”

I found the letter paper-clipped to a copy of the response my grandfather sent (copied likely for bookkeeping, likely by my grandmother) that read as follows: “I am returning your $7.00 and will be glad to send a tape to your wife without charge, and if you send the address of your parents, your brother and son, I will send them a tape without charge. Prayerfully, Barney Pierce.” Below this personal note was a copy of a poem he had written, who knows when, perhaps just then, perhaps just for Jeffrey, called “Orphan’s Trial.” It is about a criminal who found an advocate with the Father in Jesus, and, as an orphan, found much more than even that. The last line reads:

“The lawyer was Jesus, the crucified one;

the judge was his Father, now I am his son.”

The last letter in the clip was Jeffrey’s response, in turn, full of praises to God and the addresses for his family.

And so the Gospel was heard, the captives were set free, and the kingdom of God advanced.

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My grandfather has had a greater Gospel influence in this world than anyone I have ever known. I have read about the spiritual giants in Church history, and I am not necessarily skeptical of the Gospel influence they had, but I do know that if they had any such influence it was not because they were giants but in spite of it. It is because they were the kind of people who could broadcast the Gospel across the globe by day and write to a prisoner named Jeffrey by night. It is because of all those little things history doesn’t tell us about that grandchildren find evidence of in untold testimonies while cleaning out the attic. The Gospel always comes to us swaddled in smallness, because how else can such a giant God convince such little people of his love?

Despite his Yoda-like stature (or perhaps because of it), Granddaddy was always a spiritual giant in my eyes. I realize now it is precisely because, despite his far-reaching influence and unscalable faith, he always met me at eye level. It is because his God-sized faith never tried to outgrow his childlike heart. He made it easy for all the little people to understand gigantic Love. I learned from my grandfather that the reach of a man’s impact for Christ can only be measured by the size of his willingness to shrink.

Granddaddy died yesterday at the ripe old age of 98. His testimony is now complete. Death delineates every life, carving it out of time as a single word left to the world with greater power than any of the many uttered before it. It both reveals and expresses the testimony of a life in the fullest sense, as legacy, or more precisely, as momentum.

Every life passes through this world like a semi on the highway, pulling life and matter and memory in its wake. Some lives, when buried, pull on the lives around them like a black hole on light. But some lives, when finally broken, release an outpouring of spirit that fills the sails of generations for generations. Granddaddy has left a mighty rushing wind of momentum pushing against the backs of his family and countless others with guidance and confidence and encouragement, indeed a kind of power, to stay the course, resolutely, to follow him Christ-ward headlong into death. We will finally, next weekend, sow his life into the ground, side-by-side with his beloved, where he and my grandmother will together continue to yield an orchard of blessing for all the lives living in the wake of their memory.

Thank you, Granddaddy, for showing me how to live and, more importantly, for showing me how to die.

“He who is faithful in very little is also faithful in much” (Lk. 16:10).

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn. 12:24).