Religion: A Wonderful Experience

“I think you would want me to be perfectly frank with you,” said the doctor to the Rev. Benjamin Harrison Duncan, editor of the weekly Arkansas Baptist. That day, nearly a year ago, 66-year-old Baptist Duncan learned that he had leukemia (cancer of the white blood corpuscles) and perhaps had only a few months to live. In an editorial last week, Duncan told his readers how it feels for a minister to live under a death sentence.

“Death isn’t a stranger to me, a Baptist minister for 46 years,” he wrote. “I have prayed with scores of people in their last hours. I have turned from the deathbed to comfort hundreds of others . . . Death isn’t a pleasant assignment . . . The question was hurled at me: Will my life in these few weeks bean example of what I have preached? Does death look different, now that it has come so near to me, than it looked when I was counseling with others? … Is the counsel I gave to others adequate for myself now that I face the possibility of an early death? Am I willing to rest my case upon the assurances I gave to others through the years?

“After a thorough heart-searching I found that I could add nothing new for my own counsel. The same assurances of God’s word which had met the needs of others is sufficient for me … I can say with the Apostle Paul (II Timothy 1: 12), ‘I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.’ It has been a wonderful experience through which I have gone.”