The Real Deal: Jack and Charlene Mackenzie

David's funeral was well-attended -- it seemed like a thousand people were there. And I was one of them.

My friend David Mackenzie died in 1974 during his first year of college. He had been a gifted musician and actor. Leaving home in eastern Canada, he had ventured to Kansas to attend a Christian college. It was there that he died in a small plane crash, along with the plane's pilot and two other young college men.

The funeral was packed with what seemed like hundreds of former high school friends, church friends, and others. I was there with the young woman I dated at the time.

I only remember one thing from the funeral service itself. At some point, David's father stood, waved a handkerchief in the air above his head, and shouted, "Glory!".

It caught my attention.

Jack and Charlene Mackenzie were parents to David, his two brothers and a sister Elaine. The Mackenzies pastored a church in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. In their younger days they had traveled as music evangelists. Jack was wiry and energetic. Charlene was hard-working and seemed to have 500 best friends.

Within eighteen months I would be living in their home (briefly) and working in their church. I learned that they were the "real deal" -- what you saw was who they really were. People of integrity and grace, their emotions relatively unguarded. They seemed to love everybody.

As a young man, Jack had longed for more of God's power in his life. Together with a friend, he had prayed in the hayloft of an empty barn, and experienced a spiritual breakthrough that changed his life and ministry forever.

In 1979, the Mackenzies' daughter Elaine also died (at age 19) after a nine-year battle with amyotrophic lateral schlerosis.

How can a family bear up under such a weight of grief?
With grace and faith and love.

Jack and Charlene are unsung heroes. They continue to serve God faithfully -- sweetly -- thirty years after these tragedies. This is grace under fire, the persistence of hope in the face of overwhelming loss.

The Mackenzies can smile and live life to the full, for they expect to see David and Elaine again in a land where roses never fade.