The above is a picture of my brother Steve. My apologies if it takes a while to load. I was having trouble turning it into a gif file tonight for some reason. If you can’t see it, go to my web site and it should load much more quickly. My brother is a bit older than I was and was a paratrooper in the army when I was a very small child. since my father was older my brother took the job of teaching me many of the things that my father couldn’t. He taught me to fish, including letting me fall into the water once when I was six, he taught me what little I know about fixing cars, he taught me me a lot about life, business, and I still consider time spent with him to be priceless. In short he was what everyone wants in a big brother. A teacher, a mentor, a reader of scary stories to very young children (I still remember spending the night over at his house after he was newly married and I was about nine or ten and he read me a story of a killer who carried around a head in a bowling ball bag; I still hate bowling to this day). Of course I did things like this to my own son, it’s a rite of passage and now he hates bowling.

My point here, and I do have one, is that one day, years ago, an elderly may came up to me and started giving me loads of compliments. He went on and on and on about how he appreciated what a good guy I was and how I had been such a help to him and how valuable I was to the church. I was taking all of this in and doing all that I could to not let it get to me, but enjoying it nonetheless. As the older gentleman finished his long, involved, list of compliment’s I stood there with my toe in the dirt looking down saying aw shucks. He then looked at me and said words that I will never forget. “I’ll see you later Steve.”

It was at that point that I remembered my dad’s advice that “you are only as good as your last sermon, and often not for that long.” John Piper says that “God hides much of the results of our work from us because the glory is due to him and not for ourselves.” I try not to take anyone’s compliment too seriously because I know that it is very likely that they have the wrong name.

That’s not a bad lesson. My brother deserved the compliment more than I did anyway. He is a great brother and I thank God for what I have learned, and continue to learn from him.

As my great Greek teacher Dr. Murray Harris always said “The greatest compliment anyone can pay you in the church is to be mistaken for the janitor.”

Joe the Janitor,

SL