Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Michael Angel Bastiaans grew up in Bali.  He was the fourth of six children, and when his family fell on hard times, he went door to door with his mother, helping her sell bed-sheets.  Like many from Bali, Bastiaans assumed he would go into the hospitality industry, but then he received a scholarship to study teaching.  It changed the course of his life.

     After graduating from teachers’ college, he was sent to teach for two years on a remote island in Indonesia named Siberut.  The wooden schoolhouse where he taught was built on stilts, and every day it shook with small earthquakes.  Power outages were commonplace and could last for days.  Sometimes food was in short supply.  But the hardships didn’t bother him.  He would crack jokes while fetching water and join in the singing during blackouts.  He taught his students how to play basketball even though they had no court.

     Known to his students as “Pak Mike” (Mr. Mike), he never had much money of his own.  But he was the kind of teacher, the kind of man, who would give his lunch to a student who had no breakfast; the kind of man who would help friends pay their way home during a family emergency.

     His dream was to change education in Indonesia.  He wanted to make a difference, and in his own way he did.  Not on the large scale of improving an entire educational system, but he made a difference in the lives of those he touched.  As his fiancé put it, “He taught me to smile brighter, to love more fiercely, to dare to be vulnerable, to forgive freely, and above all, to let down my guard and live more genuinely.”

     Michael Angel Bastiaans died on April 4 after falling ill in mid-March.  He was one of the more than 129,000 people world-wide who have died from the coronavirus.  He was just 31 years old.  His obituary (from which this piece is drawn) appeared in the New York Times as part of a series on those who have died in the pandemic.  The numbers are staggering and difficult to grasp.  Meet someone like Bastiaans, however, and the toll becomes more personal.  These aren’t just numbers.  These are parents and friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters like Michael Angel Bastiaans who are being taken from us.

     What’s the measure of a life well-lived?  That’s the question that Charles’ Dickens’ was addressing in his tale of Ebenezer Scrooge.  It is really the question that every great novelist wrestles with at some level.  A well-lived life is about more than longevity.  It is about more than being “successful.”  We know it when we see it though, and we know that Michael Angel Bastiaans' life, as brief as it was, was full, and rich and good.  Like Jesus, he only lived into his early thirties, but like Jesus, the years he did have were filled with generosity, compassion and love.

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” (1 Jn. 4:12)