Chuck Colson passed away on April 21 at the age of 80. He was, as William Bennett recently said, “a man in full”. This is my own small appreciation of his life.
It was the early 1970s and the poster on the left was taped to the wall of my room at college. (Parenthetically, in searching for this image, I saw an original poster for sale on EBay for almost $1,000!) As a freshman I had become eligible for the draft and drawn a very low lottery number (around 30). It was said that anyone with a number less than 50 would be inducted and likely end up in Vietnam (in 1971 there were still over 150,000 troops stationed there). Sure enough, I was called for a pre-induction physical but because I have very flat feet and couldn’t hear high frequency sounds, I was declared 1-H and told that I might be called for another physical in a year. Shortly thereafter, the draft was terminated. Like most of my peers, I was vehemently opposed to the war and to many of President Nixon’s domestic policies. When the Watergate scandal broke in 1972 much of my anger was somehow focused on Chuck Colson, whom I perceived to be the most ruthless of Nixon’s “henchmen” – a characterization shared by many and which he later admitted was fairly accurate (Chuck is pictured above in the second row, second from the right).
I wasn’t alone in greeting the news of his spiritual conversion the next year with great skepticism. From my perspective, it only got worse when he pleaded guilty to the relatively minor charge of obstruction of justice. Nevertheless, I still remember being oddly struck by something he said that day – it was like a hairline crack in the eggshell of my life that would eventually split open. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can share those words with you today: [pleading guilty was] “a price I had to pay to complete the shedding of my old life and to be free to live the new.” Imagine that…going to jail in order to be free, in order to gain a “new” life…and what a life it would be!
Although I never met him, Chuck Colson was one of my mentors because he had a profound influence on my life through his post-conversion speaking and writing. Time and space don’t permit me to expound here, but one thing in particular stands out from all the others. Through the example of his life, Chuck showed me there really is such a thing as redemption and that no one is beyond God’s reach. I also came to realize that God didn’t say to Chuck: “Now that you’ve been redeemed, I want you to become someone else”.
As with the apostle Paul, God wanted and needed a man with Chuck’s particular qualities to do His work (1 Tim. 1:12-17). His life reminded me that I was also created by God to be a certain kind of person and that He wants me to live that life to its fullest – not try to be someone else. Chuck was a hard-nosed Marine, he was a hard-nosed attorney, he was Nixon’s “attack dog”, and he ended up being hard-nosed guy for God. To be sure, some of his sharp points were filed down over time – but Chuck never stopped being who God made him to be. He was all-in, all the way and while none of us will ever know for sure on this side of eternity - I can see him as someone whom God recently welcomed into heaven with the words “Well done, my good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:31). As for me, I’m still aspiring.
