I went to a funeral on Saturday. David Cabe was married to my cousin. He passed away on September 22 from complications from ALS. While there, I was keenly aware of the difference between attending the funeral of someone who successfully finished the race versus that of someone who didn’t seem to know God.

For a long time, I didn’t particularly know David. A big part of that, I guess, came from my living out of the country for 15 years. It was just the last few years that I got to know David more.

David was a regular reader of this blog and a regular commenter. He commented a few times on this site, then settled on commenting to me personally, by email. His comments were insightful, helpful, and encouraging.

David’s obituary can be seen here. He apparently wrote it himself. and included at least one joke.

He also wrote his own blog after being diagnosed with ALS. I linked to it a time or two in the Links To Go. His family compiled the blog posts and made them available online at http://bit.ly/davidcabe. I’d like to close this with a quote from the last post that David was working on, but never finished:

The Bible is full of imagery about finishing the race, of persevering to the end. In a letter to his protégé Timothy, the apostle Paul wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”. As I look back at my own life, I’m painfully aware of so many missed opportunities, so many detours from the course I set out on, so many moments when my faith waivered. Knowing what I do now, I would have done so many things differently. But, like every one of us, there was no way I could have finished the race by myself. Paul, the man who wrote to Timothy that he finished the race, confessed in an earlier letter, this time to the Christians in Rome, “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing”. That described Paul; that describes me; that describes everyone.