From Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What:

The way John writes about Jesus makes you feel like the sum of our faith is a kind of constant dialogue with Jesus about whether or not we love Him. I grew up believing a Christian didn’t have to love God or anybody else; he just had to believe some things and be willing to take a stand for the things he believed. John seemed to embrace the relational dynamic of our faith. And he did so in an honest tone, not putting a spin on anything . . . He ended his book by telling the reader he was going to die . . .

This is beautiful and meaningful because John wrote his essay a long time after Christ had left so he was very old, probably nearly ninety years old, and this was back when communities loved old people . . . This was back when you didn’t have to be all young and sexy just to be a person. And it makes you wonder if John sat and wrote that he was going to die knowing within a few days, a few weeks, a month of gentle good-byes, he was going to go home and leave all his friends, and he didn’t want any of them to be surprised or scared.

When you read the book you start realizing that people who were very close to John read this essay and got to the end and started crying because John was telling them we was going to leave, and then I’ll bet at his funeral everybody was standing around thinking about how John knew he was going to die and told them in his book. And I’ll bet they sat around that night at somebody’s house, and somebody who had a very good reading voice lit a candle, and the all lay on the floor and sat on pillows. The children sat quietly and the man with the voice read through the book, from beginning to end, and they thought together about Jesus as the man read John’s book, and when it came to the end where John says he is going to die, the person who was reading got choked up and started to cry. Somebody else, maybe John’s wife or one of his daughters, had to go over and read the end of it, and when she was finished they sat around for a long time and some of the people probably stayed the night so the house wouldn’t feel empty. It makes you want to live in a community like that when you think about the way things were when Jesus had touched people.