These are my comments from Mark’s Memorial Service:

Mark and I met in college in the late 80s, we were members of an elite club –passionate surfers going to college in Chicago at Wheaton. Later we became roommates, went on surf trips and various adventures together, both married women named “Sarah,” both moved to Laguna after marriage, and both are raising our families on Brooks Street.

Mark and Sarah plugged me and my family right into the community in a very deep way. Much of who I am today is a very direct result of my friendship with Mark, the best parts of me have a lot to do with the parts of Mark included his wife, Sarah.

His very best friend took the place of Joe and me almost 10 years ago when he married Sarah Ochs. They became Mark & Sarah, a unit. Someone recently said that no man will love Sarah as well as Mark did. I’ll take it a little further and say that few men love their wives and treat them with the respect that Mark did. It may sound like this is candy-coating my friend, but he really did love Sarah as close as any man I know could come to the way Christ loves the church.

Mark was an anomaly. He was a paradox. I’m pretty sure that he had to be the first Lit major to become a Navy SEAL. He loved adventure but wasn’t bombastic about it. He just did things, big things, and the doing was reward enough.

At a men’s breakfast last week, we shared what we knew and remembered about Mark. We used the Inklings at Oxford, CS Lewis, Tolkien, TS Eliot, their friendship and sharpening of each other as an example. At one point, a member of the group died and Lewis said something to the effect that, “While he’d miss Charles personally, what he’d miss the most was how Charles made him a better person.” Brad Coleman’s question was how did Mark impact us to help make us better people? I think it’s a good question for a gathering like this one today.

Honesty, loyalty, humility and love would seem to be qualities that best characterize Mark to me. He wasn’t loud and he hated being in the spotlight. He probably wouldn’t like all of us sitting here talking about him, but he’s just going to have to get over that.

Mark didn’t try to be cool. He hated facades and veneers. Mark’s first impression was about avoiding first impressions entirely. He loped when he walked, like a big golden retriever or Mr. Snuffalufagas, he never wore jeans, his uniform was khakis (long or short), t-shirt of a well-worn variety, flannel shirt and “flippity floppities” as he called them – flip flops. He was always shaggy-haired and the harriest man I know – diametrically opposed to body razors. The worst criticism he could give you was, “Wow, that’s cool, Dave.” It meant that you seemed to be trying to be something you weren’t. Something that I’ve needed a lot of help with in life, and something that Mark was better than a brother at helping me manage.

If you read the blog, http://www.markmetherell.com, you’ll find a wild array of stories about Mark from decades ago to some that are very recent. The common threads that I see in most of them are two things: 1. Some form of vomiting going on; and 2.) Mark making an indelible remark to someone when they needed to hear it, and usually part of the impact was the efficiency and economy of delivery.

It seems funny that such a quiet guy could leave such a hole in my life, and I am sure a crater in Sarah’s, but it is a hole that creates tremendous substance from the vacuum it creates. And in a horrible way, I think that the economy of that void will help make me a much more honest person in much the same way that Mark did.

Mark lived his life for others. He was a soldier and he worked very closely with local people in countries where he operated in ways that were unique. In Afghanistan, he actually lived with the tribal people he was serving and training. He was invited to an Afghanistani wedding, something that never is allowed for foreigners. He was one of them, he loved them as people, because he believed that we are all children of God. When he died, Mark had essentially put himself in the lead vehicle in a convoy going into a dangerous area with Iraqis he had trained. He realized that if he was going to be an effective leader and if the Iraqis he loved and trained were going to be able to stand on their own without him, then he had to lead by example so they could do the same. Like Stonewall Jackson, Mark lived the way he expected his team to live. He did not lead from the rear. Mark realized that to be the tip of the spear, you have to ride point, and if you expect others to do that then you have to be willing to do it yourself.

But I don’t want to talk about Mark in the past tense. I am a firm and resolute believer in the very real body of believers, the communion of the saints living and dead.

When my own older brother died from Leukemia14 years ago, I remember asking God to show me that he was safe and whole and happy again – I knew he was a believer and that he was living a complete life in the presence of the Father in Heaven, but I needed to see it. God granted me a vision of my brother smiling deeply and joyfully and wholly again. His look told me that he was living entirely in the joy of the sovereignty of God.

My older brother and I started surfing on the Great Lakes together. Mark helped fill part of that hole as a brother, like my younger brother Joel does. It’s a bond the creates a tribe among surfers. You see it here in Laguna with the Laguna Bros, the Hakamoms and other rogue gangs. Every time that I would go surfing, it seemed that I was having a baptism of water and the spirit, it was a place that I could always go to feel closer to my brother and to my God.

One of Mark’s favorite verses is Genesis 1:2, I pulled from it last Sunday and then found it again in one of Mark’s short stories from college “And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Mark is more alive now, more real now, more true now and more whole now than he ever was on Earth. The difficulty is that we have this veil between us that separates us for a time. For me, getting in the water – getting our gills wet, as Mark and I used to say – helps bring me into communion with the body of believers beyond the veil. It is where I find the spirit of God most often and all the saints, living and dead. I find great comfort in being a small part of that body; it keeps me close to my brothers, some who are alive and some who we are separated from, for a time.