Remembering a friend...

"If you want to be great, you must treat those under you as your superiors." Those were the words of Daniel Cordova, a friend who recently passed away in Mexico. He shared those words with me once when he was talking about leadership, and I must confess those words had a lasting impact upon me. Mostly they had an impact because I could see that his life matched his words. He was a great leader and a great man. He was one of the most humble people I have ever known, but the impact his life had on the people around him in the city of Leon, Guanajuato was amazing.

Working for the Church of the Nazarene, Daniel told his brother several years ago that he was going to go to Leon to build up their church. He told his brother, who is the District Superintendant for his district (in other words, he oversees the work of the Nazarene churches in that part of Mexico), that all he needed was enough money to pay his expenses for the first few months. Then he would have the church going strongly enough that it could take care of itself. "You're crazy," his brother told him, and he put a few pesos on the table saying, "That's all you'll get." It wasn't that he didn't respect his brother, but his plan was bordering on the humanly impossible. He thought he could take a dying church and turn it quickly into a large, self-sustaining church with the power to transform the community around it. How could this be done? However, Daniel went to Leon, and the church quickly grew from a few people to over 400. It began to reach out into the community and to transform the world around it. This quiet, humble man reached out to the community in a loving way and trained up leaders who could work with him and do an amazing work. And his brother? Well, his brother Jorge also became a great friend of mine, and he loved to tell the story of the great work that Daniel was doing in Leon. He loved his brother and was proud of him. He was glad that Daniel was crazy for his God and unwilling to take no for an answer when he knew what he needed to do.

A couple of years ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and a long and difficult battle began. Through it all, however, he maintained a quiet strength that we knew could only come from his strong faith in God. Not long after I saw him last September he had received the news that the cancer was gone, but unfortunately the news was wrong. I received the news just half an hour ago that he has passed away. I had been considering making a special trip to Mexico this summer in order to visit him and speak at his church. It's hard to believe that he is no longer there. He will be missed by many.

Will his work in Leon continue? I believe it will. Why? Because he didn't raise up followers of Daniel Cordova. He raised up followers of Jesus Christ, and he empowered them to reach out and to do the work that needed to be done. In the Bible, the apostle Paul said: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves" (Phillipians 2:3). That's how Daniel Cordova lived his life. He will be missed, but his legacy will live on.