Dear friend,
I am going to tell you something strange, and I ask that you stay with me through it.
This morning, before the sun was fully up, I sat down and wrote my own eulogy.
I am not sick. As far as I know I am not dying any sooner than any of us are. But I am an old man, and old men think about endings whether we want to or not. I have stood at enough gravesides reading words written by someone else about someone who can no longer speak for themselves. And this morning I found myself wondering what I would want said, if I could no longer say it.
So I wrote it. And I want to share it with you, because I think it says more honestly what I believe than almost anything else I have written.
Here is what it says.
Here lies a man who was given more time than he deserved and tried, imperfectly, to use it well.
He was not a remarkable man by the world's measure. He held no high office. He built no monument. He will not be remembered by historians.
But he read this Book every single morning for fifty years, and he believed every word of it more on the day he died than the day he started.
He sat with the dying and was not afraid of them. He believed, until his last breath, that God had not abandoned the people he loved, even when the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise.
He spoke to people he never met and somehow, in ways he never fully understood, they became as real to him as anyone he knew in person. He prayed for them by name even when he did not know their names. He carried their letters in his heart longer than he ever told them.
He believed his country was not finished, even when it looked finished. He believed the people who loved Scripture and loved their families and got up every day to do hard, unseen work were not foolish or forgotten, no matter what anyone told them.
He was wrong about some things. He was probably wrong about more than he ever realized. But he was never wrong about this: that the God who made the sparrow did not forget the people who trusted Him.
He is gone now. But the words he left behind are not.
I do not know if that is exactly how it will read one day. I do not know who would even write it, or whether anyone would bother.
But I wanted you to see it. Because I think most of us go through life assuming we will get around to saying the important things eventually. Eventually we will tell our children we are proud of them. Eventually we will forgive the person who hurt us. Eventually we will stop being afraid and start being honest.
Paul understood this. Near the end of his own life, writing from a prison cell, knowing his time was almost finished, he wrote this in 2 Timothy chapter 4, verse 7. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
He did not write I am about to fight the good fight. He wrote it in the past tense, as something already done, while he was still alive to write it. He did not wait for someone else to say it about him after he was gone. He said it himself, while it still mattered, while he could still mean it with his whole chest.
I want to live the rest of my life like that. Saying the true things now, while I can still say them, rather than hoping someone else gets them right after I am gone.
That is part of why I wrote They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Not because I needed one more project. Because I did not want to leave this world having stayed quiet about something I believe Scripture makes plain. I would rather say it now, clearly, in my own words, while I am still here to stand behind it. If you have not read it yet, I think today is a good day to start. You can find it by clicking the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I am not telling you any of this to alarm you. I am genuinely well. But I think writing your own eulogy, even once, is one of the most clarifying things a person can do. It tells you, in plain language, what actually matters to you when you strip away everything else.
So before I close, I want to ask you something. Not as a content creator asking for engagement. As an old man genuinely curious.
If you wrote yours today, what would it say?
You do not have to answer me. But I hope you will at least ask yourself.
God bless you, friend. I am glad I am still here to write to you.
With you in prayer,
Father Thomas
Today, I want you to do one thing.
Find ten quiet minutes. Write three or four sentences of your own eulogy, honestly, the way you would actually want to be remembered. Not your job title. Not your achievements. What you believed, who you loved, what you would not stay silent about. Keep it somewhere. Read it again in a year and see if it is still true.