As his funeral is today, I thought I would share with you all the memorial I wrote for my friend who left us far too early. It’s too long to fit in one post so the remainder will be continued in the first comment. This will be read at the funeral by his brother.
Memorial for my Friend, Reinhardt
It is with shock, grief and ultimately gratefulness that I sit here typing, thinking about one of my best friends in the world, Colin Kirby, finally coming to grips with the fact that he has moved on from us, taking a restful seat next to Jesus while we toil on in this weird, harsh place without him for a little while more.
A week ago, I was still excited that one day in the hopefully near future I was going to be back in America, living next to one of the best, most genuine friends I'd ever made. That my kids and his son would play together with the dogs and the chickens and the goats, learn to hunt and shoot guns and build houses and explore the truth about the Lord together, and that I'd finally, finally be near other people in real life who truly valued the good things Christ put us here to experience and appreciate.
I only met Colin once face-to-face, in the winter of 2024 at his place in Corinth, with his beautiful wife Emily and his lovely son, Thomas. But over the last seven years we spent countless hours talking on our podcast and the phone as well as probably hundreds of hours in the same places on the internet, so I've gotten to know him and become closer to him than the vast majority of people. He was significantly younger than I am, but there are few people I've learned more from over the course of my life. He possessed the erudition, scholarship and wisdom of someone who'd lived multiple lives. Whether the topic was Biblical explication, old world history, the nature of our realm, political realities, the finer points and hardships of self-sufficient rural life, or the deep lore of JRR Tolkien, I always walked away from every conversation feeling enriched, encouraged and better off for having spoken with him.
There were many times both of us discussed the trials and difficulties of our everyday personal lives and how to best navigate them in a world that's become increasingly difficult to see or steer through. Both of us were facing down some scary financial and future decisions. Those conversations always ended in a call to prayer from Colin and I would leave feeling, even if the issues had not been resolved and we still didn't know what the future held in store for us, that it was going to be okay.
There are people who go through life just doing what they are expected to do, getting by with the bare minimum, never examining the world around us, never thinking about how one person's actions affect the entire environment around him, and that environment in a butterfly effect rippling through and echoing across the entire physical and spiritual world. Colin was not one of these ordinary men.
In the time since the announcement of his passing, I have been inundated with an outpouring of messages from people telling me how Colin Kirby positively affected their lives. There have been so many I have had trouble replying to them all. It's a sad thing about the nature of this world and our lives that we often wait until it is too late to let the people we love who've affected us the most know how much of a positive impact they've had upon our lives.