The world reeled under my feet yesterday when the phone call came. I was walking across the Baylor campus, on my way home to pick up a car and drive to dinner with our dean and a guest lecturer who had been on our campus all week. Rick Carpenter called, telling me he had just received news that Clint Dobson had been murdered in his office at Northpointe Baptist Church in Arlington.
My initial reaction was that he had his information wrong. What I’d just been told would not filter through my ears and into my brain. Clint was only 29. I’d seen him just two weeks ago in the seminary building at the Winter Pastors Conference. I had embraced him. We’d talked. We’d made plans to have lunch after church with our wives one Sunday soon now that I was serving as an interim pastor for a Dallas-area congregation. And I was being told he was gone.
I’ve known Clint since he was five years old. For six years or so he was my son’s best friend. Even as an adult, whenever I saw him he always asked about Taylor. Clint decided to pursue a calling into ministry while he was an undergraduate at Baylor. He began his seminary training at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, but when Hurricane Katrina closed that school for a while, Clint came back to Waco and finished his work at Truett. He returned to UBC to do his internship with Jeff Waldo, serving in the Emerald Pointe Apartment ministries one summer.
He created friends and admirers wherever he went. He was tall, handsome, smart, enthusiastic, and inherently likeable. Professors who had him in class bragged on him, as if they had something to do with him. People who worked with him loved him. He was selected the outstanding student preacher his last year and preached in chapel. Clint served a small congregation while in seminary and then became pastor of Northpointe when he graduated. My last summer at UBC I invited him back to his home church to preach when I had to be out. He did an outstanding job. I was proud , as if I had something to do with him.
Last Sunday, I’m told, he preached on "The Testimony of the Martyrs," and his text was Acts 12 and 1 Peter 3:13-18. Then on Thursday he was senselessly murdered.
I have been interviewed by two Waco television reporters and two newspaper reporters today. Two of them asked me how I made sense of this. I don’t have a nail in my mind to hang this event on. I don’t have a way of making sense of it.
I decided some time ago that evil is irrational. To attempt to make sense of it is foolishness in my mind. It leads to saying things about God that don’t fit the Father revealed by Jesus Christ. This event was not God’s will. God states his will about murder in the Ten Commandments. It is not his will that anyone commit murder. To attempt to drive a nail to hang this on by saying, “This was God’s will,” sounds to me like foolishness.
I do believe that God’s sovereignty extends to such irrational events, however. I really do believe in the promise of Romans 8:28, that God works all things together for good to those who love him and who are called according to his purpose. By this I mean that the God who could take the worst, most irrational thing that human beings have ever done, nailing the Son of God to a cross, and sovereignly use that to reconcile the world to himself, is capable of sovereignly using any event to his purposes, I believe. Even the tragic, horrible event of yesterday. He did not stop it, but I do not believe he willed it. Apparently the freedom God gives human beings to choose and to act is something he takes seriously.
I take great hope in the promise of eternal life in Jesus Christ and I believe with all my heart that Clint shares Christ's victory over death. I hold Paul's words dear: "to live is Christ and to die is gain" (Phil. 1:21), and to depart and be with Christ is "far better" (1:23). But honestly, I feel robbed, pillaged, to have Clint taken out of my world. The church and the world are poorer for this senseless deed. Many in our seminary feel the same sense of loss. The people of Northpointe church certainly do. And his family most of all.
On Wednesday we will celebrate Clint’s life, mourn his death, and cling to God in the face of the senselessness of this act.
The words of Luther’s hymn have been on my mind all day:
Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also.
The body they may kill.
God’s truth abideth still.
His kingdom is forever.
John wrote of Christ's promise to those who offered their lives for him:
Then I heard a voice from heaven say,
"Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on."
"Yes," says the Spirit, "they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them."
(Rev. 14:13)
So Clint's rest begins earlier than I would have imagined.
Well done, good and faithful servant.
Amen.
You may view Clint's memorial service at FBC, Arlington, TX here.
2 comments:
Robert, our thoughts and prayers are with you, friends, and family. Words can't even express the sorrow we have for such an act.
Robert, Not meant to post to your blog, but.....
Even from our remote spot here in north alabama, our ties to Clint are almost humorously numerous...through our time at UBC when Clint was maturing, to Dennis Wiles, former pastor of FBC-Huntsville, thru Richard and Louann Bussey and their daughter Audra and most importantly to our common God and Savior. The unseen tragedy that shook the ground beneath me is looking forward.....How many locks will be placed on churches across the nation to keep out those who might do harm, but will also prevent countless persons in need from crossing that church's threshold? Even now in this time of such great need for people to reach out to each other, to help one another through rough times, we might choose to not do so for fear of abuse or violence. The tragedy of this "senseless" act might go way beyond the events of last Thursday, when a young mother tries to ask for help outside a church in anywhere USA only to rebuffed by a policeman stationed at the church's door to "protect" those inside.
I am saddened by this tragedy clearly at the doorsteps of UBC, at Northpointe, at FBC Arlington but also at the threshold of many churches across the land.
I share your hope in our imminent victory over death. I am convinced that this event will result in many being excluded from eternal salvation for no other reason than fear. I will pray that God is honored throughout the memorial tomorrow, just as Clint would have wanted it. May God Bless you and yours.
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