“For the Lord… with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven and the dead in Christ will rise…” (1 Thess. 4).

Yesterday in the brilliant fall colors and dazzling warm light of Los Altos we buried my friend Jim McKnight in the columbarium of our old church. Jim and I had a strange relationship. He is my parent’s age. We first met when he was in his fifties and full of wisdom. And yet he had just been ordained the year before and so he didn’t know what I did about running churches.

For ten years he was my assistant rector. I don’t know if I’ll ever work so closely with anyone again and we accomplished such surprising things together. He had a wry sense of humor, loved opera. He was humble, dutiful, faithful, very orderly, methodical, detail-oriented, kind, thoughtful, a little high-strung, kind of tense.

Jim was still fairly corporate. He would have joked that he was a little neurotic but he wasn’t. I still carry lots of advice from him in my thoughts but the first thing that comes to mind is how he said, “trust the process.”[i]

[i] I suppose he was the Felix Unger and I was the Oscar Madison in our odd couple.