My dad passed away Wednesday, December 12, 2018.

His name was Tae-Yung "Ted" Lee and he was 76 years old. He was a husband, father, grandfather, businessman, entrepreneur, and a deeply devoted Christian.

When I received the text message from my mother saying that my dad had collapsed, I was with a friend reading and praying at our local church nearby. The ambulance had taken him to the hospital and tried to revive him for 40 minutes but to no avail. We knew he was gone. My dad had been struggling with chest pains for a number of years really so it was not a surprise that this day had arrived, but even so, it was very sudden and very unexpected in other ways. One moment he was with us, the next moment he was in Heaven with the Lord.

(My dad would often be carrying around one of many such notebooks, every page filled with a stream of thoughts and ideas both in English and Korean covering a wide-ranging array of interests—everything from Bible meditations to architectural designs, emerging technologies, sustainable living, politics, and education.)

The passage that my friend and I were reading that very morning was from Jeremiah 13. I remember being struck by how careful Jeremiah treated the “word of the Lord.” The Lord said do this, so he did that. The word of the Lord came again and said arise and go, so he went and did just as the Lord commanded. Then the word of the Lord came again, and so on and so forth. At every turn, Jeremiah immediately and unequivocally obeyed God's word. The sin that the Lord identified in that passage can be found in verse 10 .. it was a “refusal to hear my words.” That was so instructive. The fact that my father died the very moment I was reading and meditating on that passage will forever put a “bookmark” in my mind around that chapter and the importance of reading and obeying God's Word.

As I thought about it in the days following, that is the one thing that my father instilled in his children perhaps more than anything else in his life. For all of his faults, he was a man that loved God's Word. That much was clear. He was constantly reading it, talking about it, making notes in it, and improving the translation of it into the Korean language. To me, in this regard, he exemplified the blessed man in Psalm 1 who's delight was in the law of the Lord, “and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”

I thank God for my dad. I thank God for this chief delight that, in some small way, he passed on to me. I pray I will not so quickly forget.

I miss him already.

The funeral service was held on Saturday, December 22, 2018 at 2pm EST at Faith FPC in Greenville, SC and was attended by many of his friends and family.