Napkin 3: To My Mentor

37,000 feet. 3:15 AM.

The pain has become a presence. No longer something that comes and goes, but someone traveling with me. The morphine has less effect. Time is running short.

Dear Dr. Harrison,

In six hours, I'll be in Zurich to attempt one last desperate try at stealing a few more months from death. But tonight, on this napkin trembling in my hands, I need to confess something I should have told you forty years ago.

You ruined my life.

Not with malice. With the best of intentions. You taught me that a servant of God cannot afford uncertainties. That a pastor must always have the ready answer, the right quote, the argument that silences every doubt.

"Jonathan," you'd tell me while I prepared my thesis, "people come to us because they know we know. If we start saying 'I don't know,' we lose credibility. And without credibility, we're no longer guides but blind leading the blind."

So you taught me to build fortresses of certainties on foundations of sand. You showed me how to hide every doubt behind masks of theological confidence. How to turn every uncomfortable question into an opportunity to display erudition.

For forty years, I lived like incense without fragrance, like a lamp without light. I preached Christ's love with a heart of ice. I spoke of God's grace with lips of stone.

I consumed myself in empty rituals while He sought something else.

Do you remember that November Sunday when Mrs. Thompson came to see me? She had lost her son in an accident and asked me, with eyes devastated by grief: "Pastor, where was God when my son was dying?"

You had prepared me for that question. Theodicy, divine sovereignty, mystery of suffering in God's eternal plan. For twenty minutes, I bombarded her with theologically impeccable explanations.

She thanked me and never came back to church.

Only years later did I understand that mother didn't want explanations. She wanted someone to sit beside her in the darkness and admit he didn't understand anything either. Someone who would cry with her instead of explaining why she shouldn't cry.

She wanted a traveling companion in grief, not a professor of theodicy.

But you had taught me that admitting ignorance was betraying the calling. That showing vulnerability was failing as a pastor. That doubt was the enemy to fight, not the companion to welcome.

So I spent forty years counting my works instead of weighing love. I built towers of doctrine on foundations I knew were fragile. I got lost in numbers - baptisms, church members, conferences given - forgetting that God weighs only the weight of the heart.

That night in 2018 when you called me at two AM because you couldn't sleep, and confessed that for years you hadn't felt God's presence in your prayers anymore, do you remember what I told you?**

I quoted Romans 8:28 - "all things work together for good for those who love God." I spoke to you about Job, who in the end saw the Lord's glory. I reminded you that "His ways are not our ways" and that "God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts." I gave you everything you had taught me to give:

Answers.

What I didn't give you was what my heart screamed to give you: "Me too, Professor. I, too, have been praying to emptiness for years. I, too, wake up at night terrified by God's silence. I, too, no longer know if we're serving someone or if we're just reciting an empty script."**

But I was too afraid of disappointing you. Too afraid of admitting that your best student had become exactly what you had taught me to be: a whitewashed tomb.

Beautiful outside. Dead inside.

Now, at thirty-seven thousand feet, with death breathing down my neck and Matthew not speaking to me for years precisely because he saw the empty man behind the pastor's mask, every fortress finally crumbles.

Every construction falls apart.

Dr. Harrison, you were wrong.

But you know what I discovered tonight while writing on this napkin trembling in my fingers?

I was wrong, too. I took your teachings and used them to build prisons instead of bridges. You gave me tools to defend the faith, and I transformed them into weapons to wound those who asked uncomfortable questions.

But there's something you never taught me and that I'm learning only now that I'm dying:

God is big enough to survive our mistakes. Strong enough to use even our errors to write stories of grace.

That Mrs. Thompson, who never came back after my theological explanations? I ran into her by chance three years ago at the grocery store. She told me, "Pastor, your words hurt me. But that pain pushed me to seek God in a different way. And I found Him. Not in explanations, but in silence. Not in answers, but in the embrace of those who wept with me."

Professor, even my greatest mistakes became roads to grace for someone. Even my arrogance taught others the value of humility.**

If I should die before seeing you again, I want you to know this: I've forgiven what you taught me because I understood that even through our mistakes, God weaves stories of redemption.

But I've also learned this: it's time to stop building fortresses and start breaking bread. It's time to be children who seek instead of professors who explain.

Among the rubble of everything I thought I knew about God, I hear a voice whispering softly: "Son, give me your heart. Not your lessons. Not your defenses. Your heart that doubts, that seeks, that trembles but loves."

Your student who has learned that mistakes can become grace and that humility is the beginning of wisdom

The napkin is almost illegible. The ink has mixed with something that tastes like freedom.