On the first day of class, the professor (Bobby Clinton) put a piece of paper in front of each student. The page was mainly blank except for an empty tombstone. He says, “What do you want people to say about you when you are dead? Your assignment for Thursday is to write your epitaph.” At one sentence, it was the shortest assignment of my life, so I thought, “This won’t be too hard.” But actually, it was brutal, one of the most difficult assignments of my life. I struggled with it non-stop for two days. What did I want people to say about me when I was dead? After an agonizing process, I finally found something that fit: He loved to give others a love for God’s word.
Nine years later, our family was getting ready to move back from England to the US for me to teach OT at Biblical Seminary. I had been teaching children’s Sunday School during most of my doctoral program (primarily for the classes where my sons were), and one of the mom’s came up to me and said, “Thanks for teaching my children. They will miss your teaching. It’s clear you love Scripture and you pass that on to the kids, it’s contagious.”