Well Done, Good and Faithful Servant: A Tribute to Scott Powell
On June 19, 2022, I awoke to the persistent ringing of my doorbell at around 6:15am. As soon as the man at the door showed me his badge and asked if he could come in, I knew something terrible had happened, and I knew it was related to my husband. Several thoughts raced through my head in the few seconds it took for John to sit down. Was Scott in a hospital in Africa? Was he suffering? Did I need to get on a plane to go be with him? The answer to all these thoughts was no. He was not in a hospital and he was not suffering. He was with the Lord, experiencing all the glory that we as Christians live for, that we long for, that we dream about.
Scott had been in Uganda for a week, training Samaritan’s Purse staff from around the world, passing on his knowledge so that more people would be able to carry out the work that he did, saving lives by providing drinkable water in the name of Christ during people’s darkest hours, usually following a major disaster.
While on a drive out to a project site one day, he was riding in the back of a bus when the driver hit a large pothole. Scott said it jarred his spine, and he immediately felt sick, confused, and had terrible back pain. He also began having memories of things he knew had never happened as well as difficulty with his short-term memory.
Over the next two days, he took Tylenol and Ibuprofen, which he said were helping with the backpain. He finished out the week of training in Uganda and started his trip to Yemen, where he was supposed to help out with some water issues there resulting from an intense and long-term drought.
After a layover in Ethiopia, he and a co-worker boarded the plane to Yemen. Scott was seated in the exit row, and the stewardess read the responsibilities he would need to carry out should they encounter an emergency. He agreed to those responsibilities, and then closed his eyes to take a nap. When it was time for the flight to take off, Scott was unresponsive. The autopsy would show that he died instantly of an aortic aneurysm, which doctors have told me almost certainly resulted from the bus accident a few days prior.
As a co-worker of Scott’s later shared, it was fitting that his last words were an expression of willingness to serve in an emergency. Scott lived his entire adult life serving others, primarily in emergencies, and he left this world ready and willing to do the same.
The co-worker who was traveling with Scott lived in Yemen, and she shared with me that his last words to her were, “Are you excited to go home?” Neither of them knew that it was Scott who was really going home, and that he only had a few more minutes in this temporary world. It’s a sobering thought, and one that causes me to continually evaluate how I live each day here.
As I write this, it has been exactly three months since Scott went home suddenly, unexpectedly, and peacefully. I know that many people would like to know how I’m doing, but I’d like to save that topic for another time. For now I’d like to share the words that I shared at Scott’s memorial service and encourage those who are interested to view the full service at the link below. It is my prayer that Scott’s life is remembered and celebrated, and, even more importantly, that the Lord is glorified, not only through the happy times, but also in our darkest hours. For he is worthy.
My Memorial Service Comments:
Over the past few weeks, some of the words I’ve heard used most frequently to describe Scott include brilliant, mentor, advocate, listener, leader, servant, funny, humble, and passionate. I’d like to take a few minutes to share a few stories that exemplify how I got to see some of these characteristics at work in Scott’s life during our nearly twenty-two years of marriage.
Scott was indeed brilliant. He double majored in mechanical engineering and mathematics at Duke University, finishing seventh in his graduating class while also doing RTOC and tutoring several other students through Duke’s rigorous math and engineering programs. Because of his academic achievements, he was part of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. As a member of this prestigious society, he would receive magazines in the mail that contained some of the most challenging math problems of our day, and while I was reading theology books, he would solve math problems – just for fun – that very few other people in the world are able to solve.
When Scott and I needed a break from vocational ministry in 2010, Scott decided to go to graduate school. He came to me on a Monday and told me he would be going to Denver on Thursday to take the GRE. He had just decided about ten seconds ago to go to grad school, and the test was in three days. I said, “You can’t just sign up and take that test in a few days. You have to study for it. Most people study for a year or more before taking that test!” He laughed and said, “It’s a standardized test. I’m not going to study for that.” I said, “Okay, it’s your call.” Well, three days later, Scott got a perfect score on the GRE math, and a near perfect score on the English, more than thirteen years since he had been in a classroom!
Scott was not only brilliant. As many of you have shared in the past few weeks, he was also a good listener, an advocate, and a great manager and mentor. But what you may not know is that these didn’t come easily to him. When we got married, he was quite a poor listener, and he would readily admit to that. But God says that people matter, that hearing their heart matters, that in order to love them well we have to listen and seek to understand where they’re coming from. So Scott worked on becoming a better listener. We took an eighteen-month marriage discipleship course in which we practiced active listening for months on end, and then he made the decision to continue listening well until it became a habit.
When Scott was in his twenties, he realized that he had a proclivity toward micromanaging others. He usually knew the best and most efficient way to do just about everything, and he wanted others to do all things with excellence as well. Sometimes this resulted in others feeling controlled, but that was never his intent; he wanted people to thrive. So he very intentionally learned to mentor and to manage people without micromanaging them. When he was promoted to a managing role, he committed to bringing on excellent team members and then trusting them to do what they do best, while providing whatever support, mentorship, and advocacy they may need. That’s a big part of why he loved working for Samaritan’s Purse. You all serve with excellence, and you make it easy for people to trust you.
Scott not only worked hard at leading well and loving well; he was also willing to do any amount of physical labor to get a job done. No job was beneath him, no matter how dirty, no matter how difficult, no matter how disgusting. However, Scott also thought that paying money to go to a gym to do physical labor was just about the dumbest thing he had ever heard of. Nonetheless, he paid for me to go to CrossFit five days a week. Whenever I would come home and announce that I had set a new personal record in some lifting movement, Scott wouldn’t look up, he wouldn’t smile, he would just say, in his terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger accent, “I pick things up, I put them down.” I wanted to be annoyed, but it was just too funny.
Anyone who knew Scott for any length of time also knew that he was a humble servant. He didn’t make a big deal of his acts of service. He would just do what needed to be done without complaint or fanfare. On the last day I spent with Scott on this earth, I was so excited that some baby birds had been born in our bird house on our back porch a week or so earlier. Even though I had to pack to leave for Florida that day, I spent an hour watching the babies chirp and stick their heads out as their momma bird flew away to gather food and then brought it back and fed the babies. But then I noticed that there were wasps swarming around nearby, and I realized the wasp nest was right next to the bird’s nest. When I went upstairs, I mentioned to Scott that I was worried about the birds because there was a live wasp nest nearby. Scott didn’t say anything, but he stopped what he was doing and disappeared for about ten minutes. When he returned, I asked him where he went. He said, “I took down the wasp nest. They’re all gone. The birds are safe now.”
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Scott was passionate to help others for the glory of the Lord. When we got engaged, the plan was for him to make a lot of money and for me to do full-time ministry. But then, he went on an EMI trip – Engineering Ministries International – and, as he used to tell people, it destroyed his life plan. He decided to leave the military, and then he proceeded to turn down several opportunities to make six figures as a mechanical engineer and take an entry-level job as a civil engineer making $35k a year in order to retrain himself as a water specialist so that he could get potable water to the poorest people in the world in the name of Jesus. “For richer or poorer” quickly took on a whole new meaning. But I was excited to see him so excited, so passionate, and so committed to living for God’s glory.
I smile every time I think about the fact that Scott left this world doing what he loved most. Scott's favorite thing in the whole world was using his practical skills to demonstrate the love of Christ to people in very tangible ways: rescuing them from their darkest hours following a natural or manmade disaster, getting them drinkable water, equipping them with sustainable practices in Jesus' name in order to improve their lives long term and provide ample opportunities for them to hear the Good News, and training others to do the same work he did. His second favorite thing in the world was taking naps.
On the day that Scott was called home to Heaven, he had just finished a great week of training and was on his way to the next project when he peacefully closed his eyes to take a nap and woke up in the presence of Jesus.
Scott never wanted to linger in this fallen world. He struggled with depression, he wasn't comfortable in social settings, and he found navigating this world really frustrating at times despite – or maybe because of – his exceptional intellect. He wanted to put in his time to serve the King with excellence and then get home to be with Jesus, where he knew all the pain and struggles and disease and death and awkwardness and heartache and depression and anxieties of this fallen world would be wiped away forever.
His philosophy of ministry, though he didn’t come up with the words himself, was “the quality of our work is the platform for our witness,” words he first heard from Ken Isaacs almost two decades ago, which immediately drew him to want to partner with Samaritan’s Purse. Scott wanted to do every project, every task, every interaction, with utmost excellence so that people would see Jesus in him and in his work and ultimately turn to the one who motivated and empowered everything he did.
All of Scott's dreams have now been realized. He lived the way he wanted in this broken world, and then he moved on the way he wanted...peacefully, efficiently, and having completed a life worthy of the calling he had received. He has said for the past several years that he had lived more life by age 40 than most people live in all their days on this earth, and that if God were to take him home now he would have no regrets. He gave his all, and now he has entered the reward of his labor.
One of our favorite quotes, which Scott shared at his dad’s funeral two years ago, was from missionary and martyr Jim Elliott, who said, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." Scott was constantly giving all that he could not keep, pouring himself out for others, knowing that no matter what he lost – whether money, limb, or life – he would not lose eternal life with Christ, and that was really all that mattered. Scott chose the narrow path, and he chose it day by day, despite the challenges that sought to stop him. He longed to be free: free from suffering, free from ignorance, and most of all, free from sin. And today he is free indeed.
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