A Day To Remember

An Author’s Introduction by Fred Passmore

I did not first write A Day To Remember as a story. In 2002, I wrote it as a sketch for churches to perform.

That is how most of my work begins. A church, a youth group, or a ministry team needs something they can put on their feet: two actors, a desk, a few props, and a handful of minutes. The original sketch was written that way. The performers speak the lines. A soundtrack plays underneath the action at the points marked in the script. The whole piece runs about eight to ten minutes. It was meant to be done live, in a sanctuary or fellowship hall, in front of people who had not been told what they were about to see. From the emails I have gotten over the years informing me of the results of performances, it has had a powerful impact and always drew gasps at the end as the location is revealed.

I still believe that is the best way to meet it. If your church or team wants to perform the sketch, the script is the original form, and I would rather you keep the ending to yourselves until the lights come up. A sketch like this only works if the room discovers it the same way the characters do. Announce the setting in the bulletin or the introduction, and you have already given away what the last line is meant to do.

This new version is for a different kind of meeting. Some people will never see it staged. They will read it on a screen, or print it, or send it to someone who needs a word. So I have taken the same scene, the same conversation, and the same last line, and written them as a short story. The stage directions have become description. The dialogue is still the talk between two men in an office on what looks, at first, like an ordinary morning. Nothing essential has been added to change the meaning. I only wanted the page to carry what the stage used to carry.

The scene is simple. Mike is the believer. He has just lost his position because he would not set his convictions aside for an advertising campaign. Jeff is the man who took his place. Jeff does not believe, does not want to believe, and cannot understand why Mike is not angry. One man is boxing up a photograph of his family and walking out under a security escort. The other man has the desk, the title, the raise, and plans for the evening. If you stopped the story there, you would say Jeff won and Mike lost.

That is the point at which most of us judge a day. We look at the obvious result. Who got the promotion. Who got sent home. Who looks strong. Who looks finished. Scripture does not let us stop there. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” That promise does not mean every afternoon feels like a victory. It means the Lord is not finished when the meeting adjourns. Mike can leave that office without the job and still not be out of the will of God. Jeff can sit down in the chair that used to belong to another man and still be poorer than he knows.

I have watched that pattern all my life in ministry. The world keeps score by what can be counted before supper. Heaven keeps score by what will still matter when the books are opened. Any elevation of an unbeliever over a believer is temporary at best. It will not profit him for long. The Lord will justify His children, and He will show the end of those who refuse to listen. That is not cruelty. It is mercy speaking while there is still time to hear it.

That is why Mike does not spend his last minutes in that room defending his pride. He spends them on Jeff. He tells him the truth as plainly as he knows how: you do not know what a day may bring. You do not even have a guarantee of finishing this one. “Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” The sketch was never mainly about a job. It was about a soul standing in a bright office, certain that nothing but good times were coming, while the man he had just replaced tried one more time to point him to Christ.

If there is a harder lesson in the piece, it is this: you cannot tell the whole truth about a life from the outside of a single morning. Faith looks foolish when the crate is being packed. Unbelief looks successful when the phone call is going well. The Lord sees the other end of the day. He sees the other end of the life. Our part is not to rearrange the scoreboard. Our part is to trust Him, to keep a clean conscience, and to speak while the door is still open.

I am offering the story form now so the same warning and the same hope can travel farther than a Sunday night program. Read it through before you decide what it is about. If you share it, please do not explain the close in the caption or the preview. Let the last line do the work it was written to do. And if the Lord uses it to make someone consider where they stand before the day runs out, then the sketch and the story will have done the only thing I ever asked of them.

May the reader, like the man leaving that office, be able to say that even the hard thing is not outside God’s will—and may the one who thinks he is winning still have time to hear that now is the day of salvation.

Click here to download and read a PDF file of the story.

Fred Passmore
Sheep Laughs Publications  •  Sheep Laughs Studios
ChristianPlaysAndSkits.com
Original sketch copyright 2002  •  Story adaptation and this introduction, 2026