From Conception to Natural Death
Monday, September 9, 2024
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.” – George Washington
Over the course of my long ministry career, I have worked with virtually every age and demographic possible. From 1983 to 1993, I served as a department head at a Christian retirement community in New Jersey where the 300 or so residents ranged from age 60 to 105. As a whole, the younger ones were extremely active and independent whereas the older ones were often bedridden.
During those same years, Deanna and I served as the junior high youth leaders at our home church for a while before I entered full-time prison ministry. From 1994 to 2011, my job as founder and executive director of The Saints Prison Ministry was to use sports as a means to share the gospel with prisoners across North America. Some of them were being held in minimum-security juvenile facilities and others were incarcerated in maximum-security U.S. penitentiaries.
In 2011, our family relocated to Vero Beach, Florida to launch Risk Takers for Christ. In my new role as founder and president of RTC, I have spent the past 13 years ministering to at-risk youth in their teens; homeless people in their 30s, 40s, 50’s, and 60s; and church members 55 & over.
However, my most important ministry has been to my wife of 39 years, our three children, and our six grandchildren... as well as to my mother and my in-laws. They currently span the ages between 2 and 95.
No matter what stage of life you find yourself in, there are always people for you to minister to… and people to minister to you. Sometimes, we are on the giving end of things and other times, we are on the receiving end. Paraphrasing John Donne, “No man, women, or child is in island.”
I guess that is one of the reasons why I am so staunchly pro-life “from conception to natural death.” We begin life’s journey totally incapable of caring for ourselves and we often end it that way, too. How we spend the intervening years makes all the difference in the world.
“And he [Job] said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.’” Job 1:21 (NKJV)
- Rev. Dale M. Glading, President
