From news editor Daniel Silliman: One of the things I like about obituaries, and the way we do them at Christianity Today, is that you get to see the arc of a person’s life and see how people change. 

One of the reasons I am an evangelical is because I do believe that people change—that God changes people. Not everyone has a dramatic conversion story, of course, but the Spirit moves, God calls, and the Good Shepherd goes after some very lost sheep. That’s amazing, whether it’s a small British boy whose father was dying, a Nazi in a lake after an air raid, or a Black kid in Michigan invited to a white church by the pastor’s daughter. 

I keep going back to this passage from Augustine that I read this year. He was preaching to people about to be baptized, and he said, “My dear brothers and sisters, this life is full of both painful and pleasant surprises. Every day people who seemed to be good fall away and perish. And again, ones who seemed to be bad are converted and live.”

That resonates with me. I’m grateful that at CT we get to tell those stories and bear witness to the ways people are changed and what they do in response to God’s work in their lives.