What Max Andrews Taught Me: A Funeral Homily
Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. — James 1:2-4
Max loved this passage. Actually, he told me it was one of his favorite passages.
He told me that before the accident in 2001, which left him paralyzed.
And it stayed one of his favorites after one of the most devastating physical trials anyone could imagine. His love for this passage had everything to do with his lived experience—and his dislike for the fluffy, feel-good version of faith that sometimes gets packaged in our culture. Max’s faith in God through trials was hard-earned. He knew the Christian life was not some smooth ride lined with lollipops and gumdrops.
He knew life in this fallen world was complicated. But when he and I would talk about this passage, what lit that gleam in his eye—what really got him fired up—was this deep conviction that God could take hard things, broken things, even wheelchair-shaped things, and use them to build endurance and grow our faith in Christ.
Max believed God was always at work—restoring, reshaping, redeeming. He saw how both the beautiful moments and the brutal ones, when surrendered to the Holy Spirit, became tools in God's hands. And not just before the pain. Not just after. But right in the middle of it—when the dirt of life is under our fingernails and when God's work is hardest to see.
What Max taught me—and what I think he would want you to hear today, at this celebration of his life—is this:
God’s goal is to make us mature and complete, not to keep us from all pain—including the sting of his passing.
Because this—Max’s passing—is one of the trials in your life to which he would have applied this passage for you.
Grief is in the room.
We feel it in our hearts, our bodies, and the heaviness of today.
Losing Max hurts. It is personal. It is real.
And no words right now can make that pain go away.
But even here—even in this—Max would want us to know God is working,present, and shaping something in us through the weight of this sorrow.
Max would tell us today:
Grief and growth are not enemies.
They’re teammates.
He would want us to grieve.
To miss him.
To tell stories.
To laugh.
To cry.
And he would really find meaning in our laughing and crying at the same time—because that best represents the real life he found in this passage.
And if you want to honor him—really honor him—do this.
Let your faith grow.
Let your endurance stretch.
Let God use the grief to make something stronger in you.
Place your trust in Jesus Christ.
Because Max is now fully restored.
No pain.
No wheelchair.
No tracheotomy.
And there’s the promise that for those who follow Jesus, we will be restored too.
And we’ll see him again.
Until then, keep growing.
That’s what he’d want.
And honestly, it’s what we need.
Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. — James 1:2-4
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