Dr. Plaster is the senior pastor of the Worthington GBC, but to thousands of people, he's been more.
You see, Dave was a long-time professor and dean at Grace College & Theological Seminary, from which I personally received my Bachelors degree. He also took numerous trips to Africa, where he spent months at a time teaching locals how to speak English (and where he contracted malaria three separate times).
Dr. Plaster (or "the Oppressor Professor" as we called him on account of his brutal multiple choice exams) was my mentor while in college.
When I got back to Grace after a year at Akron, I was an atheist with a chip on his shoulder. I'd regularly get into discussions with people in hopes of proving what lunacy Christianity was, because I'd never heard ANYONE be able to handle themselves logically while professing any sort of Christian view.
Enter Dave, a short, stocky Welshman with an amazing heart and an amazing mind. Dave and I started meeting once a week on Wednesday nights in my dorm room. I would bounce questions and honest reservations I had with Christianity off of him, a professor in the Religious Studies department. He handled them with an amazing balance of wit, honesty, and understanding. I didn't get any of the "caca del toro" answers from him that I used to get from many pastors and Sunday school teachers. I got answers from a man who had not learned what to think, but a man who had truly learned HOW to think.
And over the years, that was what he instilled in me. As we would meet, he would never force my thinking in any direction, but if there was ever a weakness in my thought process, he'd bring it up, and force me to either defend it or rethink it.
Dr. Plaster was probably as big an influence as anybody in my development as a thinker and as a person.
Over the last month, however, he has been hospitalized for numbness and loss of function in his legs, face, and brain. The doctors are saying it is an infection that may have been the result of some damage that his malaria medicine has caused.
This morning, the doctors labeled him terminal. He is at the Cleveland Clinic, and I am hoping to visit him on Saturday if he makes it that long.
This man has meant more to me than any other man in my life, save my father and grandfather. I am a mess right now, and I hate this.
So, if you pray, please do for his family at least. They've all gathered from all over the world (as far as France, where his son is a missionary), and it's really not looking good.
My biggest reservation to going is that I'm going to have to see what this infection has done to his brain, which once housed such an inspiring and insightful mind. I don't know that I can bear seeing him reduced to such a state.
I know he would be content with being called home to be with his Creator and greatest passion, but I'm not so sure the world is ready to lose such a great man yet.
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