Among the names of prominent Christians who died in 2025, such as John MacArthur and James Dobson, there is a name less remembered, though most fondly remembered by me. I used to lovingly call Arthur Blessitt a spiritual space cadet. Arthur was quite unorthodox and anything but a conventional Christian, which may be why I admired him so. 

Upon vowing to God that he would carry a 12-foot-tall cross across America as a witness for Christ, Blessitt rose from his hospital deathbed and proceeded to do so. In fact, he went on to carry that cross around the world, reportedly walking through almost every sovereign nation on earth. When he wasn't walking and carrying his cross, he was riding his chopper, with its huge sissy bar with neon letters that lit up to spell Jesus.

Blessitt walked through Scripture like he did countries, one step at a time. He said he never went on to the next verse of the Bible until he was living out the one he was currently reading. Arthur Blessitt, like Dwight L. Moody, believed every Bible should be bound in shoe leather. To Blessitt the Bible wasn't just to be learned, but lived.

I'll never forget Blessitt's startling answer to an interviewer's question of what he liked to do when he wasn't carrying his cross across the countries of our world. According Arthur, he liked to go into dirty book stores and put Gospel tracks into  pornographic magazines. He would then stand back and watch the reactions of the store's customers when the powerful Word of God jumped out at them from pornographic literature. According to Arthur, he got a big kick out of watching porn-readers get a kick in the pants by his planted Gospel tracks.

Yes, I fondly remember Arthur Blessitt. While he was, as I lovingly dubbed him, a spiritual space cadet, no one could doubt his love of our Lord. I'm hard pressed today to recall anyone in my lifetime who better epitomized the taking up of one's cross as a testimony to Christ in this Christ-rejecting world. I suspect Arthur is still walking, but not across countries with his cross, but across the Heavenly City on streets of gold. It certainly warms my heart to think of it, as well as makes me long even more for Heaven myself, since I can add a personal stroll on streets of gold with Arthur to my Heavenly bucket list.