WAKE FOREST, N.C. (BP)??Ed Young, reflecting on the recent deaths of two of the 20th century’s most adored women, described Diana, Princess of Wales, as a “time teller” and Mother Teresa as a “clock builder.”
Young, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church, Houston, and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, compared and contrasted the lives of the two “humanitarians” as part of his Sept. 17 chapel message at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, N.C.
“I submit to you that the clock builder is more important than the time teller,” said Young, a 1962 Southeastern alumnus. “It’s the clock builder and not always the time teller that really makes an everlasting difference.”
Describing Diana as a “time teller,” Young said regretfully: “She is a reflection of so much of the world today.”
Diana died Aug. 31 from injuries sustained in an automobile accident in Paris shortly after midnight. Diana’s multi?millionaire boyfriend, Dodi al?Fayed, and the driver of the black Mercedes sedan they were traveling in also were killed. Investigators have since said the driver of the Mercedes, who reportedly was trying to elude the pursuit of photographers, was driving drunk.
Amazed by the outpouring of emotion by millions of people across the world after Diana’s death, Young described Diana as a “woman of our time … a woman of our generation who had literally everything, everything, everything this world has to offer.”
She had “the biggest, most expensive wedding the earth has ever seen and probably ever will see, but there was an emptiness there.”
Referring to published reports of Diana’s attempts of suicide, battles with an eating disorder, admissions to adultery, her subsequent divorce from Prince Charles and the causes through which she reached out to the poor and the sick, Young said Diana spent much of her life searching for true purpose and meaning which can only be found in Christ.
“I’m sure when she married the number one bachelor in the world, she must have said, ‘Now, my emptiness will be filled.’ But it wasn’t,” Young declared. “And then she said, ‘You know I’ve had a child or two, now these children will fill that emptiness.’ But it wasn’t (filled). I’m sure fame and power and money and affluence and position, this will fill that emptiness, but it didn’t.
“And finally,” Young continued, “she must have thought ‘an affair, surely an affair, will fill my emptiness,’ but it didn’t. And then shesaid, ‘I’ve got to get out of royalty. I’ve got to move out, do my own thing, live my own life. I’m tired of the tradition. I’m tired of the pressure. I’m tired of my husband. I’m tired of the whole routine. I’m tired of the shallowness, my emptiness. I want to be fulfilled.’ And so she got a divorce and she went out on her own. Still, she felt empty.”
Mother Teresa, on the other hand, was a “clock builder,” Young said.
“Mother Teresa, out of her fullness and the meaning she found in her life, gave everything she had to the sick and the poor,” Young said.
“In spite of her aberrant theology, let’s put that to one side, Mother Teresa said she was filled up with Jesus,” Young said. “And a little 4?foot 10?(inch) Albanian woman made her way slowly by boat to India, had only the clothes on her back, a pad and a pencil and a bar of soap, (and) ministered to the poorest of the poor, those who were dying for decade after decade after decade, unknown by the world for 50?plus years.”
The 87?year?old Nobel Peace Prize winner died of heart failure Sept. 5. In 1950, Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic, founded the Missionaries of Charity to minister to orphans and lepers in the slums of Calcutta, India.
Exhorting Christians to be clock builders, Young said, “If you decide to be a clock builder and not a time teller, God will honor your faithfulness, your consistency, your daily quiet time, your walk with the Lord, your sharing your faith, your preparation, your ministry, your love to the least and the last and the lost in a supernatural way.”
