Never in Vain

In 1974, Dr. Daniel V. Taub learned the secret of an abundant life. It was an important lesson then. It took on even greater meaning for him twenty-two years later, in the fall of 1996.
 
As soon as I walked into his hospital room, I knew he was dying.  Six weeks earlier his doctors diagnosed colon cancer. On further examination they found another tumor in his left lung. Then a CT scan uncovered suspicious spots on his liver. As I moved toward his hospital bed I tried not to notice his labored breathing or his yellowed and swollen skin.

“Hi Dan,” I choked back tears. “How are you feeling?”

He opened his dark, sunken eyes, turned his head and tried to smile.

 “Tired,” he whispered.  “Good to see you.”
 

It had been nearly five years since Dan and I were last together. My job change and move across country ended our weekly chats.  When he and I spoke on the phone during the past Christmas, no one could have known it would be his last earthly celebration of Christ’s birth.

As I watched him struggling to breathe, my mind drifted to the time when he shared with me the story of his conversion.  Because he had been raised as an agnostic, educated in the most prestigious schools, and trained as a clinical psychologist, he could have easily dismissed the emptiness gnawing at his heart as irrational foolishness. The idea that sin could be the root of his emptiness was as foreign to his humanistic world view as east is from the west.

But when the Holy Spirit revealed to him the truth about sin, forgiveness and salvation, Dan suddenly knew he had to make a choice: obey God’s voice through the Scriptures or hide behind human philosophies.

He chose God, and from that moment determined to devote his life to the cornerstone of God’s truth: Jesus the Messiah.

In 1996, as I stood by his bedside, although his body weakened by cancer, his faith remained powerful. As he had done for the last two decades of his life, he asked everyone who would listen, “Do you know my Jesus? Do you know my savior?”

During one of the last days we spent together in his hospital room, I asked him, “Dan, how does it feel to know you are dying?”

I learned long ago that a hospital room is where everything we hold dear to ourselves washes out: money, popularity, passions, careers -- like charred timbers after a house fire, a death-bed places so many things in clear perspective.
 

My question was deeply personal for me. I needed to know the thoughts of this man of God, my spiritual mentor. Perhaps his answer might help me cope during that future time when I lie in some hospital bed, staring into eternity.

He raised his hand to the bedrail and touched mine. “From life . . .  to life,” he smiled. “I leave this one to enter the next with Jesus. I fought the good fight. I finished my course. I kept the faith.”

I placed my other hand atop his and let his words seep into my spirit. As was always true in our relationship, the thoughts I shared with him never approached the wisdom he shared with me.

We buried Dan a few days later. A chilled November wind whipped across the southwest Missouri cemetery.  Rust-orange leaves carpeted the frozen dirt at our feet. And as the final words of eulogy drifted from the graveside, Dan’s last words to me filtered once again into my memory, “fight the good fight, finish the course, keep the faith.”

Dr. Daniel V. Taub illustrated for me how the Holy Spirit can use a child of God, even from a deathbed, to minister grace to anyone with ears to hear. Serving his Savior until his last breath, my friend’s simple eloquence reminded me that our labors for Christ are never in vain.

Never in vain.