• Charleston, SC*
• Topsail, NC*
• Gore, VA*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Louisville, KY
• Rochelle, VA
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.

• Ararat, VA*
• Chattanooga, TN*
• Coinjock, NC*
• Gore, VA*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Rochelle, VA
• Washington, DC*
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.

• Baton Rouge, LA*
• Currituck, NC*
• Bumpass, VA*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Washington, DC*
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.

• Zeeland, MI*
• Fayetteville, PA*
• Currituck, NC*
• Ararat, VA*
• Bumpass, VA*
• Lexington, KY*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Chattanooga, TN*
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.

It was long enough ago to still be in the era of the NCAA football tie – when the outcome of a game could still be something other than a win or a loss.  The year was 1993, and the place was Birmingham, Alabamaâ€s Legion Field.  It was the third Saturday in October, which could mean nothing else than a matchup between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Alabama Crimson Tide.  But the 17-17 final score isnâ€t the story here. 

It was my freshman year at Tennessee, and I had never been to an in-person Tennessee/Alabama game.  I donâ€t remember who exactly planned the trip, but someone worked it out so that Chris Toomey and Matt Morley met Colby Willen and me in Knoxville, and we all road-tripped to Birmingham for the game.  I had secured room and board for the group, courtesy of my grandparents who lived in Birmingham, so the only cost was the price of sleeping on a sidewalk all night in line for tickets, plus gas money ($1.11/gallon avg. in 1993!). 

The four of us had spent our high school years together at Indian Springs Baptist Church, and we knew each other well.  Colby and Matt were a couple years†older, and Chris and I had been in the same class in school since first grade.  Since ABC Sports was broadcasting the game, and our seats were on the front row of the end zone, we made a sign that said Awrange Beats Crimson in a bid to get on TV.  My grandmother cooked us “pluffs” for breakfast the morning before the game and had cinnamon rolls waiting for us afterward. If I had to make that trip over again, I wouldnâ€t change a thing. 

Almost 30 years later, both of my grandparents are now with the Lord.  And a week ago, Chris Toomey joined them when he died in his St. Louis home from cardiovascular failure.  Admittedly, this last point is a bit jarring to introduce into this story.  But how could it be anything but jarring?

In the past week, Iâ€ve read countless recollections and memories of Chris from both people I know and people I donâ€t.  But all of them unfailingly paint a picture of the man I had known for all those years.  Due to geography and our stations in life, we hadnâ€t talked in quite a few years, but I have no doubt that when we did next weâ€d be able to pick up right where we left off – the test of an enduring friend.

Much has been said, and as I watched the stream of his memorial service, it was clear that not much had changed.  He was a dear friend to everyone.  He sang in my wedding, but in whose wedding didnâ€t Chris sing?  In addition to people, he loved fun. Pranks, gags, and general goofiness were endless. I canâ€t add much more, except to reiterate the impact Chris had on those around him.  He was far from perfect, but I know few who better exemplified Christ.

His most lasting impact upon me is undoubtedly in his ability to welcome everyone.  If my memory serves correct, I met him midway through first grade, when he moved to the area.  It was mid-year, and he was a kid even newer in a class where I was a new kid.  The new kid made me feel welcome.

The author of the book of Hebrews said, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” (Hebrews 13:2, ESV)  Thereâ€s no telling how many angels were entertained by Chris, because he showed hospitality to so many people.  Accomplished as was in nearly every field, he always found a way to make the outsider feel welcome.  As bad as I am today at that virtue, I learned what I have of it from Chris Toomey, in whom the Spirit moved to see even the so-called nobodies as worthy people who were made in the image of God.  Iâ€m forever thankful to Chris for living that virtue so many times right in front of me.

Back to that football game that nobody won.  One thing that did happen was my first appearance on national television.  Tennessee was driving toward our end zone.  We had the ball, and then we failed on 3^rd down.  The cameras turned to the Tennessee student section, and if you didnâ€t blink (I can’t even find it on this replay), youâ€d see four young men on the front row of the end zone with the very top of a sign that they had draped over the edge.  Three of those young men were looking dejected, frustrated, and angry.  After all, their team had just failed on downs.  But one of them – the red-headed one – saw the camera and was cheering on the Volunteers like we had just scored a touchdown. I hazed Chris about this every time I saw him thereafter.

Nobody won that game.  But Chris Toomey had already won our hearts long before.  May he rest in the peace of his savior.

• Baton Rouge, LA*
• Boone, NC*
• Centreville, VA
• Chattanooga, TN*
• Ft. Myers, FL*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Leesburg, VA*
• Mathews, VA*
• Nashville, TN*
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.

Tom Fillinger was a man marked by urgency. He could have easily been mistaken for a curmudgeon. But if curmudgeons are marked by criticism and inaction, Tom Fillinger was no curmudgeon. Cantankerous for certain, but no curmudgeon.

I first met Tom by reputation. Tales of him from his family were ample, and his influence was made clear in the respect his family had for him. I came to know Tom in the course of his work in helping church leaders to gain a biblical vision of shepherding the flock of God. A retired pastor not content to rest on his laurels, he reached out to me in 2014 to serve on the board of IgniteUs, a ministry he founded to help rekindle leadership in America’s churches.

I remember the first phone call I had with him. His gravely voice was fueled with both frustration and passion at what he saw as a cancerous deficit of leadership in American churches. Tom’s frustration led him not to benign grumbling, but to pointed action. For Tom, hand-wringing was an abuse of the time God has given us. Get moving or get out of the way. In the China shop of American church leadership, Tom Fillinger was a Pamplona bull.

When our own church was suddenly immersed in a leadership crisis, I got to see Tom at work firsthand. He first helped us see that our crisis wasn’t as sudden as we thought, and helped us put the pieces back together in a way that, though difficult, formed a more solid grounding. For a group of elders who were reeling from the trauma of a scandal while still trying to lead a church, Tom’s confident centeredness was a gift from God. He led us though a process that made us better, stronger, and more anchored in the word of God.

Tom’s urgency bled into his prolific correspondence. Oh how I will miss his emails! He sent many ministry updates and prayer requests for things like preaching the gospel at a funeral for someone he didn’t even know — and whose family had no one else to conduct the service. Often he would blind copy me (and who knows how many others?) on correspondence that would be prodding some wayward church leader, urging them to fall back upon the Scriptures.

His final prayer letter — in January — was aptly titled, “Looking Ahead.” After all, that’s where Tom was always pointing us. The last time I preached at our church, little did I know that Tom was watching the stream from his home in Alabama. He sent me a short email that simply said, “Jared, Listened to your message – Well Done.”

Now Tom gets to hear those words for himself as he worships his savior face to face. Well done.

• Baton Rouge, LA*
• Chattanooga, TN*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Prince Frederick, MD
• Wintergreen, VA*
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.

Communist party and other U.S.S.R government officials attempted to suppress the level of devastation wrought by the explosion during the immediate aftermath. Consequently, plant workers and citizens of the nearby town of Pripyat (populated largely of plant staff and their families) continued about their daily routines, and many unknowingly exposed themselves to massive amounts of harmful radiation.  The following efforts to contain the disaster, the so-called battle of Chernobyl, have been well documented in works like the 1996 documentary The Battle of Chernobyl; Adam Higginbothamâ€s gripping 2019 book, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster; and on the popular level, HBOâ€s excellent (if not reductionistic) miniseries, Chernobyl.

I visited the southern Belarusian city of Gomel in July of 1996, 10 years after the Chernobyl explosion.  Gomel is just over 100km from Chernobyl, and as I was preparing to go there, one travel guide I consulted at the time said that a weekâ€s stay in Gomel was “equal to a chest x-ray.”  I donâ€t know if that was true, but it was enough for me to breathe easy in the knowledge that I was only staying three days. 

What about the half-million people who lived there?  While the city did receive radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, reactions to it by the people were mixed.  Every summer, many of the children of the city were sent off to places like Western Europe and the United States in efforts organized by groups like Children of Chernobyl International.  The thought was – and still is – to let children spend time in areas away from radiation to breathe fresh air for a while.

As the residential evacuation of the areas surrounding Chernobyl was underway, 86,000 heads of cattle were also moved out.  Zhores A. Medvedev wrote in The Legacy of Chernobyl that, “Some of them contained so much radioactivity (particularly iodine-131) that it was easier to slaughter them than to wait for a decline in radioactivity.”  The presence of iodine in the cattle prompted a blanket ban on the sale of dairy products in Kiev, Gomel, Chernigov, and several other regions.  This ban was in effect for one year but only covered market sale of the goods.  It had no effect on rural areas and families with farms who got their milk from their own cows.  As Medvedev put it, “Despite active centralized help, the contaminated areas were left to heal their wounds with the help of local means.  Many officials probably thought that time and Mother Nature would improve the situation in the long term.  Waiting for better times may not be the optimal solution, but it is certainly the easiest and cheapest.”

The locals I met in Gomel told me that they typically had avoided local produce, but were beginning to consume them after a decade, given the more affordable cost. With little money, and already living in a contaminated city, why not just buy the local food rather than the expensive imported food?  Many expected to develop thyroid cancer in the next few years anyway.  Fatigue, and by some measure necessity, caused them to give up – even when the half-lives of the radionuclides in the surrounding soils told a different story.

The disaster that happened 34 years ago in Ukraine can be instructive for us today under a much different, but in many ways quite similar disaster.  COVID-19 is, like the radiation emanating from reactor number four, a silent and invisible pathogen.  Most of us in the masses know little about it, and the lack of scientific consensus confuses everyone. 

The numbers are all over the place with COVID-19.  For Chernobyl, the official death count remains 31, but few believe itâ€s really that low given the high numbers of people who were exposed during containment.  The Chernobyl disaster was the picture of a communist cover-up.  The juryâ€s still out on exactly what the communist Chinese government did or didnâ€t do in initial reporting on COVID-19, but itâ€s beginning to look familiar.

Nobody has dealt with a pandemic of this scale before, just like nobody had dealt with a nuclear disaster of Chernobylâ€s scale.  Long ago, the biblical “Preacher” wrote, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, ESV).  And whatever commonalities our two disasters have, the most striking is that we humans are left simply to respond.  They remind us all too well that we are not in control. 

But thatâ€s not such a bad thing.  These disasters also remind us just how capable we humans are at screwing things up.  They remind us that man cannot live on face masks alone, and certainly not by every word that comes from the mouth of an “expert.”  No, the man who told us, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,â€â€ knows a thing or two about disasters.  May we find him in this one.

Photo Credit: Peter Lam CH on Unsplash

• Ararat, VA*
• Asheville, NC
• Cashtown, PA*
• East Earl, PA*
• Holland, MI*
• Kingsport, TN*
• Minneapolis, MN*
• Owensboro, KY*
• Pigeon Forge, TN*
• Spartanburg, SC
• Washington, DC*
• Woodbridge, VA*

cf. 2005/1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.

*Asterisk denotes multiple nights in each city.