What I feel inside is a sharp contrast to the beauty I see around me.
It's 10:58 a.m. on a gorgeous Colorado summer morning. I'm sitting on a bench in Old Town Fort Collins, surrounded by the lively bustle of people walking by.
Yet I sit here feeling heavy. I've been carrying the weight of different kinds of grief over the past two weeks, but this one's a little different. It's the heaviness of regret — of lost opportunity.
In exactly two hours, we'll gather for Larry Baker's memorial service at Timberline Church. Two hours from now, I'll be seated in the 'Living Room' — that's what we affectionately call our main auditorium — for a formal closure to the looming reality that Larry is gone.
But right now, I'm in a place that was familiar to him. Larry was known for walking the streets of Old Town, often referred to as his "beat." I'm sitting here thinking of him, realizing I'll never bump into him again on these streets.
The pain of his loss feels so acute.
The last time I spoke with Larry, he was standing on the landing of the stairs overlooking the mall area of Timberline Church. He wasn't a stranger to that spot. I often thought of him like Hawkeye in his first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — the Thor movie. Like Hawkeye, Larry was a quiet but significant presence. Easy to overlook if you didn't know him. But if you did, you were a fan.
"You know, I almost died?" That's what he told me in our last conversation. We'd been trying to set a time to have him on the Let Love Live podcast. His story carries such weight, a chapter woven deep into Timberline's history. Pastor Darren Fred commented to me that, "You can't tell Larry's story without bringing up Timberline Church, and you can't tell Timberline's story without bringing up Larry." He was right. Larry was woven into the fabric of this place. Not flashy. Not loud. But essential.
Pastor Mackenzie Matthews and I had been eager to finally sit down and record with him. We had to cancel our first attempt, and then took an extended break while he recovered from a serious illness.
That day on the stairs, he told me just how close he'd come to death. We were so relieved that he hadn't. I recall commenting on how youthful he looked and how much energy he had. He smiled and reminded me he was turning 80 soon.
I had the opportunity to lock in a solo interview while Mackenzie was on maternity leave, but I hesitated. She had made a thoughtful observation from Larry's book, It's a God Thing, and wanted to ask him about it. It was such a good question — the kind that needed to be asked. But I felt it was more appropriate and important for Mackenzie to ask it. So I decided to wait.
I waited too long.
And now I'm here sitting on a bench on the corner of College Ave. and Mountain Ave., pondering, contemplating, and ruminating on many thoughts. Amid this swirl of emotions, two realizations have emerged-
1) Grief and gratitude can coexist
Grief is a funny thing, partly because we assign so many expectations to it. The way it should look. The way it should be processed. The way it should be shared. But the more I learn about grief, the more I realize it rarely fits into the boxes we try to create for it.
Pastor Donny Abbott recently shared in a staff chapel about the idea of holding both grief and gratitude. He read a quote from a blog by Lisa Russell that's been echoing in me ever since:
"We often think we can either be grieved or we can be grateful. The relationship between grief and gratitude is closer than we think. We can hold the grief and also hold the gratitude, but sometimes it takes naming the grief to uncover the gratitude."
Donny followed the quote with his own reflection:
"I found this to be so insightful because we almost always have something in our lives that we are grieving — either big or small. But at the same time, we have things in our lives we can be grateful for."
This past week, that idea became more than just theory. It became my reality. The news of Larry's disappearance and the eventual announcement of his passing unfolded during our week of Vacation Bible School. While stories of God moving in the lives of families poured in, we were also processing the ache of losing someone so dear.
Grief and gratitude lived side by side in me that week. I celebrated the laughter of kids, the stories of transformation, and the beauty of shared faith, all while carrying the quiet weight of Larry's absence.
And maybe that's the invitation: not to resolve the tension, but to hold it. To let sorrow and joy sit at the same table. Sometimes, the most sacred thing we can do is feel deeply and trust that God is present in the middle.
2) Grief is interconnected
While processing what I was feeling about Larry, I had an epiphany: every loss I experience will always lead me back to the loss of my father.
Grief isn't isolated. It's more like an intricate web — each thread connected, each loss touching another. When I grieve one person, I find myself brushing up against all the others I've grieved before. And I think that's part of what makes it feel so heavy. It's not just this loss, it's the echo of every loss before it.
I've realized that if I ever speak about grief from a platform, I won't just be speaking to people about my grief. I'll be speaking into theirs. Because grief is something every person in the room knows, whether they've named it out loud or not. Talking about one kind of grief naturally touches on the shape of someone else's.
That's the connection. Because we love, we grieve. It's the cost of deep love, and it's part of what makes us human. Grief connects us, not just to those we've lost, but to each other. And maybe that's the sacred thread running through all of it: we are all knit together by love, and love will always leave a mark.
I'm still sitting here on this bench, feeling the weight of it all. But I'm also feeling something else now. Grief may linger, but so does love. And maybe that's enough for today. Larry may no longer walk these streets, but his story continues in every life he touched. We never got to record his story for the podcast, but in truth, his story lives on in all of us, including mine.
