Our beloved Prof has gone home. Please keep his family in your prayers.
My first pastor after I became a Christian, Marlin Hardman, served at Barcroft Bible Church, one block from my house inArlington, Virginia. And Pastor Hardman led Prof's dad to Christ on a metro DC bus, as I recall. Prof was raised by his paternal grandmother because his parentssplit up when he was born. He told me years later that he had prayed for forty years for his beloved father to know Christ. And as his kids grew up, they prayed for him nightly, he said. Pastor Hardman ended up striking up a conversation with Prof's dad and sharing the gospel. I seem to recall that Pastor H did so because the stranger looked just like the famous Howard Hendricks!
When I was about fifteen, Prof came to that church from Dallas to do a marriage conference. I told my parents about it, and they attended and taped (cassette) every session.Replaying those recordings later, I could hear sniffling. My mom told me that was the sound of my father's weeping as he heard from Prof how husbands are to love their wives as Christloved the church. That weekend was the beginning of an enormous transformation in our family life. My older siblings (I am the fourth of five) have at times reflected that my younger sister and I grew up in a different family from the one they had. Our home became a more loving, nurturing environment.
One year for Christmas, my boyfriend at the time—Gary Glahn—gave me a six-cassette series, "Hendricks on Communication." It was not about communication between two people in love. It was about communicating for professional growth. It was Gary's way of telling me he believed in me, helping me—even at age nineteen—to develop as a speaker and a writer. And Prof was my model.
So when I came to DTS, the second course I took was from Prof. It was a Leadership class. I was one of seventy-five students that included only two women. One of the guys in that class asked me a question that he honestly did not intend as demeaning. He really wanted to understand, "Why would a woman need to knowabout leadership?" But when Prof heard about it, he was incensed, demanding: "Did you ask him what turnip truck he fell off of?"
After I joined the DTS faculty, I attended my first faculty retreat. I was one of only two women in attendance. Some of the men, probably wanting to avoid all appearance of evil, kept their distance. But Prof came right over and seemed glad I was there. He was not afraid to be seen with me. During free times, as I was working on a tight book deadline, I had my laptop open at a picnic table in the woods. When Prof passed on a path nearby, he called out,"Well! You can tell your husband you certainly can't be accused of flirting with all these men!" Ha!
For about ten years, we officed in the same building, and he always greeted me with a hug. He frequently emphasized how glad he was to have the women present, both when I was his student and later when I joined the faculty. A few years back, he did a video taping with Dr. Sue Edwards and me talking about women in ministry, and during that time Prof stressed the great influence of women in his own life, including that of renown Bible teacher Henrietta Mears—who also had a significant impact on Bill Bright and Billy Graham. Apparently when Prof was a college student at Wheaton, his classmates Lois and Mary LeBar encouraged him to pursue a career in Christian education. And the CE department chair at the time, Dr. Rebecca Price, saw his potential in the field. And his wife is fab. So he credited women with helping to direct the course of his career.
When Dr. Bill Cutrer and I coauthored our book on family planning, Prof (and Jeanne, no doubt) wrote the introduction. Prof endorsed every writer he could, using his cred to open doors for those who came behind him.
One of the things I most respected about Prof was that he never kept people at arm's length. Aging was hard on him, and he shared the struggle in a vulnerable way with a wide audience. In doing so, Prof not only modeled how to live, but how to live out one's days. This man who had been in eighty countries and served as chaplain to the Dallas Cowboys during the glorious Landry years (that included two Super Bowls) had to submit to a doctor who told him he could no longer travel. And he confided that the news came as a blow. He wrote articles about aging and insisted that in God's service there is no such thing as retirement. But he never sugar-coated the agony of what our decaying bodies must endure this side of heaven.
In an interview with my friend Kelly Stern for Kindred Spirit, Prof described aging as a “quiet, ill-defined blurthat steals up on one with little advance warning.” He said, “My body refusesto cooperate with my mind, as if it were a stranger. Mysterious little achesand odd moments of forgetfulness pop up. Birthdays become irrelevant. Thesurprise is that I no longer seem to be quite the ‘me’ I have always known.”
Until today.
Prof's body is now fully cooperating with his mind, which is no longer a stranger. The mysterious aches and moments of forgetfulness are gone. The reunion with his daughter, complete. And best of all, for the man who often said, "Heaven is a person: Jesus Christ," he finally, with both eyes now whole, can meet for the first time face-to-face the One whom, having not seen, he has loved.
Nothing is more common than unfulfilled potential.You are able to do many things. Be sure you find the onething you must do.The Bible was not given to make us smarter sinners, but tochange our lives.In the spiritual realm, the opposite of ignorance is notknowledge, it's obedience.A belief is something you will argue about. A conviction issomething you will die for. It is a sin to bore a child with the Word of God.You can impress people at a distance, but you can impactthem only up close.Biblically speaking, to hear and not to do is not to hear atall.You can control your choices but you can't control theoutcome of those choices.If you want to continue leading, you must continue changing.Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is. If we stop learning today, we stop teaching tomorrow. Leaders are readers, and readers are leaders. The measure of you as a leader is not what you do, but whatothers do because of what you do.
On Celebrity:
I do not think that celebrity is in any way Christian.Celebrity is something that is attached to you by people. A legacy is somethingthat God produces in your life. He uses you, but you’re not the center of theactivity.... When you are talking about a person who leaves a legacy, no onecan ever question the impact of it. He or she may not know the true impact. ButGod does. And it remains permanently. — Dallas Connection,Spring 2008
