Archived from http://doinglikewise.blogspot.com/
I simply must turn to this blog more often as a way to share what is crossing my life at this stage in the journey. So here I take the time to remember my dear and beloved friend Tim Hansel.
I begin at the end, on January 16, 2010 a group of people who had been impacted by Tim to varying degrees gathered in Carlsbad, California to say goodbye to their friend, colleague and in many cases mentor, Tim Hansel. Tim finally succumbed to the 35 yr assault on his body from the pain and aftermath of his well chronicled injury from a mountain climbing accident in 1974. Tim left us to be with his Heavenly Father on December 13, 2009.
You can find much of his life easily through Google or the many books he has authored on Amazon. What you may not easily find is the giant heart of a man who loved his Lord with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. Oh, it’s there if you look but those of us who knew Tim intimately have witnessed the gift of Grace in the form of a man so humbled by injury and pain and yet so huge in his joy and his faith, that words and images fail to give the true depth of heart that was Tim.
So for the next few days or weeks or however long it takes me I want to share my Tim Hansel story with you. I think of Tim as larger than life because he made me see life as larger than I had ever imagined. In my day by day goings on I will miss Tim, I will miss his laughter, his incredible gift of knowing exactly what to say and do to life me up. I will miss his love and his respect, Tim helped me to respect myself on a higher level than I had known before. But I will not miss Tim’s affect on my life. It is implanted in my awareness. It will be with me until I join him in his final dance.
I first heard of Tim Hansel from a friend who told me I needed to read a book that Tim had written. Tim’s book “Holy Sweat” was profound in my experience because it spoke of the reality I was then facing and continue to experience through the ministry of my passion; Go and Do Likewise. As I read the book, I kept saying, that’s me, at each step in the process to become the gift you were created to be, I said; that’s me. I am sure I must have nodded my head in agreement a hundred times each day as I read it. I knew the truth of what he wrote and the ease someone as myself finds in failing to stay the course. So . . . with the encouragement . . . no the nagging of my friend, I simply called Tim at his home in Seattle, where he was living to take care of his mother, and from that call the adventure began between Tim Hansel and Bud Potter. It started as life with Tim was, in uncertainty, laughter and chaos, which we called the BONK story. . .or ‘the crash that started it all’
To be continued . . .
PART 1: My friend and a man I love, Tim Hansel