Last year I listed some people who died in 2006 with my comments. Here is my 2007 list. This is not necessarily a list of important people or world-changing people—just interesting people. Some are now in heaven. Some went into a Christ-less eternity. Here they are:
Evel Knievel – 69 – Hard-living bone-breaking daredevil who renounced the devil, and boldly talked about how Jesus changed his life in his later years.
Luciano Pavarotti – 71 – Tenor. Cancer.
Liz Claiborne – 78 – Clothes. Cancer.
Marcel Marceau – 84 – Mime. Old.
Boris Yeltsin – 76 – Former Russian president who helped dismantle the Soviet Union. Heart failure.
Dan Fogelberg – 56 – Singer/songwriter icon of ‘70s soft-rock era. Prostate cancer. Danny F lived in my 8-track in my Camaro in high school.
Anna Nicole Smith – 39 – Celebrity. Drug overdose. Dead or alive—why is she always in the news? I just don’t get it.
D. James Kennedy – 76 – Pastor, author, broadcaster, and founder of Evangelism Explosion (EE). I got saved in ’76 when someone “EE’d” me. I had never heard a presentation of the gospel that made sense, until then.
Jerry Falwell – 73 – Mega-church pastor. Founder of Liberty University. Founder of Moral Majority political lobby with 6.5 million members. One of those love him or hate him kind of guys.
Tammy Faye (Bakker) Messner – 65 – On-demand tears, big hair, and mile-long eyelashes. Icon of ’70s and ’80s religious TV shows.
Kurt Waldheim – 88 – Former United Nations secretary-general accused of Nazi war crimes. The UN must have the world’s greatest PR machine to still have an ounce of credibility after all the scandals involving their top leaders.
Seung-Hui Cho – 23 – Tormented student who murdered 32 students and faculty on the Virginia Tech campus. Stuff like this makes me want to be a campus missionary.
Paul Tibbets – 92 – Piloted the B-29 bomber that dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The plane, Enola Gay, was named after Tibbet’s mother. Who would name a bomber after their mother? Not sure my Mom would be flattered.
Robert Cade – 80 – Univ of Florida researcher who invented Gatorade in ’65 to help the Florida Gator athletes replace electrolytes lost through sweat. What if he had worked at Oregon or Oregon State? Not sure Beaverade or Duckade would have been as marketable as Gatorade.
Benny Parsons – 65 – Taxi driver who became one of NASCAR’s 50 greatest drivers, winning 21 races. I’ve seen at least 1000 Filipino taxi drivers could do the same, if given the chance.
One thing is for sure—sooner or later, we will all die.
One question: will we be ready?
Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment. – Hebrews 9:27