Meach and Jake. For many years those two names would bring a smile to my face. I attended a military academy and had a number of different roommates. Meach and Jake were two of them. These were not their real names, but nicknames. Formal proper names didn’t fare well in that environment, and they surely wouldn’t have for these two guys.

Meach was from the Mississippi bayous. He was a talented artist and often drew cartoons of us. Once, he did one of me based upon a famous sculpture, The Thinker. It was obviously me, but in the cartoon he made my already large ears enormous. In fact, they were elephant-like. His drawings were politically incorrect, but you couldn’t help but laugh, even when you were the subject.

One summer, I visited Meach’s parents in the bayous. He took me water skiing on a rickety old fishing boat with a motor that wasn’t built for water skiing. Every time I fell into the water, he reminded me that there were a bunch of alligators swimming around.

Through the years, I didn’t have much contact with Meach, as so often happens with college friends. I knew that he became an Air Force pilot who flew in a number of our nation’s wars.

Jake was from Boston. He loved disco music. On the weekends he’d dress up like John Travolta in the movie Saturday Night Fever. He could sing the lyrics to all the Bee Gees’ songs perfectly. One night we went to a local pizza hang-out for military cadets. He bet the owner that he could make a butter knife fall from the ceiling into the opening of a small salt shaker. To the applause of the whole restaurant, he accomplished the feat, winning free pizza and drinks for all the cadets at his table, including me.

Jake was also a prankster. He would often pretend to be a high-ranking military officer and phone other cadets on the wing, threatening them with various kinds of punishment. Other times he’d act like an anonymous cadet, call up high-ranking officers, and chew them out. Sure, it was sophomoric and immature. But I guarantee that if you had been there as a 20-year-old guy, you would have been rolling on the floor right along with me.

Jake and I kept in touch through the years. He also served in the Air Force, and our paths crossed every now and then. I even gave him some books from GES, and he became a believer. He was a great friend who was very good about calling me once a month or so. We did this until he retired from the military and life, I assumed, became too hectic to keep calling a college roommate he never saw anymore.

Last week, I heard through the military grapevine that Meach had died “unexpectedly, from natural causes.” Meach and I are no spring chickens, but it still was shocking. We are not all that old. In my mind, I still see him as a young 20-year-old water skiing and looking out for imaginary gators. I see him in the cockpit of a plane.

I wasn’t sure whether Jake was aware or not, and I knew he would want to know about our old roommate. So I called him to tell him, but the number had been changed. When I looked up his info online, I found out the real reason he had stopped calling. His obituary popped up. He had died in a “tragic auto accident” three years earlier, while driving through Arizona.

I know that many of you can relate, and that you’ve had similar experiences with friends of your own. Names that once brought so many smiles to my face are now associated in my mind with two graves.

Meach and Jake are a reminder of what David experienced in his own life. He wrote: “As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (Ps 103:15-16). I feel certain that David thought of the Meaches and Jakes in his own life when he wrote those words.

These words of David express a reality we all know. If the Lord does not come back first, people will one day read the same thing about each one of us that I read about my old roommates.

But, because of Christ, this thought should not bring us sadness. Christ conquered death for us. All who have believed in Him for eternal life will live with Him forever.

In that eternity, I am sure we won’t be singing songs by the Bee Gees, lying over the phone to scare other people, or fearing gators. But I like to think there will be a lot of humor. There will be cartoons, feats that will amaze us, and water skiing–perhaps in rickety old boats. Whatever the details, because of Christ there will be an eternity of smiles, laughter, and great memories.