Suffering

Just a quick thought for today:

When we were first converted, we spent much time with a family whose four kids were roughly our own age. I loved hanging around with both parents and children – observing and learning what this new Christian life really meant on a practical level. And they were wonderful teachers.

One day the mother, Marjorie, told me that they had had a fifth child, a little girl. On a Christmas morning, years before, they had bought their older children a wagon as a gift. The toddler stepped into it. It was yanked by one of the other girls, and the little one fell onto its edge, breaking her trachea.

Tragic. Her voice was still full of sorrow as she told me about Heather. But what burned into my mind were her final words:

“As we came home from the hospital, all I remember praying is, ‘Lord, help me not to ask why.’”

I don’t know why I was thinking about this again the other day, but it reminded me of how insufficient our horizontal answers to suffering are. We understand, vertically, why suffering exists – the predictable outcome of a sinful world inhabited by sinful people, under the judgment of a just God.

But individual outworkings of that?

Great mystery.

And not only are our answers inadequate, they are dangerous. We can begin to think our own answers are God’s, and then turn against him in rage because they are not good enough.

May I add, that I think many of the most harmful explanations of our suffering do not come from others, but from ourselves. We are our own worst ‘Job’s Counselors.’

“God ordains a man’s steps. How, then, can he understand his own way?” (Proverbs 20:24)

Indeed. We can’t.

BUT

Although we often do not understand God’s providence, we can always understand his character. He is good and just and always purposeful. He will never spill the tears of his own children unnecessarily.

That is what we are left with.

And the New Heavens and the New Earth.

It is enough.

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Fightings and Fears

While I was at my son, Tim’s, last week I read a book from my grandson’s bookshelf. It was not at all the kind of thing I usually read. It was the story of an American pilot shot down behind enemy lines in the Yugoslav War.

This young man was absolutely alone in hostile territory for several days, trying to stay invisible until he could contact American forces with his faulty radio. There were a few close calls when search parties or civilians came close to him in his various hiding places, but mostly his problems were technological.

Even so, this was a situation, of course, of high stress. When he finally managed to establish contact with the air force, he was told he would be rescued several hours later. His response was along the lines of “No, I need to get out right now.” And rescue crews honored that. They came almost immediately, at great risk to themselves.

He returned to the States to a hero’s welcome. He has never apologized for being terrified, nor should he. In spite of his terror, he was absolutely faithful to his calling and did exactly what he should have done.

I was interested in the grace the world showed to this young man in his weakness. Isn’t it ironic that we Christians can be so hard on ourselves in our challenges? We so easily despise ourselves in our imperfection, and our default position can be to feel God also holds us in contempt.

I was once talking with a friend about a part of life – I don’t even remember what, now – perhaps relationships – and was mourning the fact that my performance was sometimes just that. Without the desired ‘sincerity’.

She said, “ Nevertheless, you are doing what is right  –  because you love God and want to please him. That is a high form of service, and very beautiful.”

Like that young pilot, really, on a ‘sacred’ level.

Weren’t those lovely, life-giving words?

More Miscellanea

I have generally been a minimalist as a consumer of drugs and health care. When my kids were little, we generally had a bottle of aspirin and a box of bandaids in our medicine cabinet- just as my mother had before me. But all good things can be taken too far, can’t they? And I have done that these past few weeks.

I have been walking about (sort of) not feeling well, with a deep cough, just waiting for things to take their course. Well, they sure did a couple of nights ago. Whenever I lay down, I could not breathe well enough to remain prone – had to spend the night sitting up and trying to doze in that position.

Uh-oh, I thought. Things have gotten a little out of hand here. So I went to my family physician and found out I have pneumonia in my right lung. I am now full of steroid and antibiotics and feel much better already.

But, I am tired – very tired. So I thought I would just pass on a couple of things I have read lately.

The first is from an article in ‘Message’ magazine, a quarterly publication of a Baptist mission organization. The home-missionary interviewed is Michael Landoll. Here is a most interesting paragraph:

“Having ministered in Germany for the past twenty-seven years, Michael attests to the sad truth that many postmodernists’ lives are ‘simply an emotional, moral mess’. Michael remembers counseling the grieving family of a dying architect, whose final wish was to spend the last day of his life gazing upon an expensive Mercedes sports car he purchased but never got the chance to drive.”

The next couple of sentences I found in a book on African missions published in the late 1960’s. The author is speaking of Nigeria. He says:

“A degree is almost worshiped, and even failing a degree examination carries prestige. I saw a sign on a shop: ‘Proprietor Samuel Oko, B.A. (Failed)”…Just tickled my funny bone!

Finally, for some reason I thought of the following little story recently. It is about George Washington Carver, a former slave who became an agricultural research scientist at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He was one of my childhood heroes.

As I remember it – I read this many, many years ago – he was meditating in the fields one night. He thought,

    “Lord, why did you make the universe?” And the obvious biblical answer to his soul was, “Little man, that is too big for you.”

    So he thought some more: “Lord, why did you make mankind?” And again the answer, “Little man, that is also too big for you.”

Finally, he said, “Well, Lord, why did you make the peanut?” And the answer was more-or-less, “Now let’s get to work.”

And he did. And became a great blessing to southern farmers.

So, on this note, I drag my tired, pneumonia-y body back to bed!

All That Stuff

In Canada we have a counterpart to NPR called the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. One day many years ago I was driving home after visiting my kids’ school. I turned on CBC and heard a great comedic monologue called “All That Stuff.” The fellow narrating it was talking about our propensity to collect. He said our homes are really just ‘big boxes’ that we put our ‘stuff’ into. It was hilarious and I have never forgotten it.

I was thinking about ‘stuff’ again the other day – I think because friends of ours, about our age, are selling their large, riverfront home. With great regret? Sorrow? No, with great joy. They can’t wait to get rid of it. Isn’t that life? Or rather, Christian life.

What we collect in early life – and that is the age to collect and nest-build, nothing wrong with it – we love to divest ourselves of in later life. ‘Stuff’ just loses its allure. As simple as that. It stops being interesting. Not completely, but very substantially.

What, oh what, do materialists do with this very natural facet of aging? Christians can lay down their attachment to objects knowing they are transitory anyway. The eternal becomes naturally more and more real, more compelling, and fills the vacuum with excitement at the approaching eternal inheritance.

But if you have lived for stuff, by intention or by default? What a death that death of desire, or at least the satisfaction of desire, must be. It is fascinating to me that men think they can get away with ungodliness. The God of heaven and earth truly catches them in their own traps.

The fragility of the material was brought home to me with great force when my mother died almost twenty years ago. She and Dad had fairly recently downsized from a home to an apartment. I had helped her sort through her things in preparation for this. And I was amazed as Mom determined she could not bring all her carefully collected mementos of European trips with her. Not even a single tourist brochure. All went into the garbage.

Then she died within two or three years of that move. My sisters and I went into her apartment and in a few hours had sorted, packed and cleared her things away. The apartment was cleaned and there was no physical trace of her ever having lived there. Or ever having lived at all, for that matter.

I remember the words of John Knox as he went out from an audience with Mary, Queen of Scots. Grieved by the worldliness of her court, “Knox addressed himself to the queen’s ladies. ‘O fair ladies,’ said he, in a vein of raillery which the queen’s frown had not been able to extinguish, ‘how pleasing were this life of yours, if it should ever abide, and then, in the end, we might pass to heaven with all this gay gear! But fie upon that knave Death that will come whether we will or no.’” (Wylie: The History of Protestantism)

Death is an amazing phenomenon.

But more amazing, of course, is Life Himself. The Pearl of Great Price. Our eternal treasure.

Re-Visiting Old Territory

WordPress has done something today it has never done before. In my ‘preview’ it is highlighting and linking to certain words and terms. Have no idea how to get rid of that, whether or not it will be there when I publish! Sorry!

The other day I had an interesting experience. I was babysitting two of my little granddaughters. The natives were getting restless so I decided to take them outside for awhile. We were wandering around and they were doing their tiny girl things, when a wave of crashing depression swept over me. You know those feelings that make you feel absolutely desolate? And immediately hopeless?

I probably have twenty (forty, sixty) years left to live. And those years are going to be like this. Panic. Can’t stand it. Can’t do it. Blackness.

It hit hard.

Now, I used to live with much more of this. But I have been a Christian for over forty years and, though I have periods of being depressed, they are not generally of this magnitude anymore. So I reminded myself of that and decided I wouldn’t panic. Rather, I must dissect my life and just figure out what in the world was happening.

And, honestly, when I did, it wasn’t difficult to come to conclusions. I have had some very difficult situations to deal with recently. And, as always, there are the ordinary pressures of life: relationships, the sorrows of others, fatigue, our communal challenges of politics and economics. All of a sudden…BOOM!…It detonates.

Nothing fancy. Nothing unusual. Life in a sinful world.

But it reminded me of what an enemy time can be, of what it is like to be severely depressed. We know that, to God, a thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years. In depression, every minute is like a thousand years. Something heavy to get through. An enemy. Life becomes terrifying; the future a horror, as it is composed of these interminable minutes.

As an unconverted teenager, I found Shakespeare’s Macbeth the most powerful reading I had ever done:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time….
………………………………………………………..
It’s (that is life) a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I could identify with that. I lived that once. And, Tuesday, for just a couple of hours, I was like a sexual abuse victim having a flashback. I felt like I would die, almost, from the pressure of desolation and the perceived meaninglessness of life.

But there is a God in Heaven. And I am his. His mind is my mind. His strength is my strength. I have truth to turn to in any and all situations. And this Truth lives right inside me. He restores my soul.

For me, this was just a quick trip into the depths of the Slough of Despond. But it was like visiting Hell for a few hours. If that is where you are (and often the stays are longer) my heart is with you.

A Different Kind of “Ode to our Cottage”

Until 2005 we owned a cottage on a lovely, clear lake south of Ottawa. For my children’s children, it was a fifth generation cottage. It was built by John’s great-uncle who, childless, handed it down to John’s father, and so on. Uncle George was Vice-Chairman of Ontario Hydro, and family history says our cottage – “Chaffey’s” – was built of rejected telephone poles – thus, a log cabin. About the same time, he was Chairman of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway Commission. As he oversaw the gathering of Canadian antiques for a developing tourist site called Upper Canada Village, he collected alongside for himself. Much of his collection ended up in our cottage. So, as you can see, the emotional roots go deep.

But that is our physical “Chaffey’s”. The social was every bit as precious to us. On one side of us was a rambling old summer home also (still) owned by a fifth generation family. Their fourth generation – that is, the generation of my children – merged perfectly with ours. And then another family  – again with age-appropriate children – began to rent a cottage up the road each summer.

Let me tell you about this group of children. The family beside us came from the NYC-Philadelphia area. They were Jewish by background and loosely Quaker by persuasion. The others, also from Philadelphia, were committed Roman Catholics. Both were mostly pacifists, Clinton supporters and fervently ‘pro’ the liberal agenda of the 80’s…Then there were my kids…And, oh, the conversations they had! Out under the stars late at night. In snatches, while playing “Capture the Flag”. Anywhere and everywhere.

They were all most idealistic and intellectually curious children. They had the same questions (though the answers were very different). And that bound them closely together. We not only survived, socially, but became like family.

Now let me fast-forward to just two years ago. Sharon, the matriarch of the Catholic family, has come to visit me while I am staying with my daughter in Brooklyn. We are sitting in a cafe eating lunch and talking about any number of things both past and present. She says to me, “Barbara, do you remember when one of your children said to one of mine,’You have a dark, wicked heart.’ ” I am taken aback for a minute, but I reply, “No, I don’t. But the Protestant answer to that, Sharon, would be ‘Don’t take it personally’ “

She looks at me and we laugh and laugh. It was a true answer (On one level. On the other, of course we have to take sin very personally, indeed!)  And we share the same sense of humor.

Family usually does.

And Then Comes Life

We all know that children don’t understand the nature of reality very well. They have few tools and so very little experience. That is why, as parents, we have to interpret life to them, day by day and step by step.

But, honestly, I wonder how much more younger adults “get” life. I love younger people and spend much time with them. But I would say the single biggest communication gap comes in the area of suffering and disappointment. I don’t think you even begin to understand these things until you are at least middle-aged, and “enlightenment” continues on from that point. Please read on because I know this sounds depressing, but ultimately, not so-quite the opposite.

Young people know that “life is not perfect”. Older people know that life almost kills you with disappointment and grief. I would go so far as to say it is God’s settled purpose to do that very thing. Truly. You will see. But, as always, the bad news comes before the good. When we have been overwhelmed and destroyed by life, it becomes obvious there are only two choices. You can either rise up in the power of the Holy Spirit and live “in Him” or you become bitter. Two alternatives.

The first is so biblical, isn’t it? Odd that the necessity of it should surprise us so much. I guess it is because, early on, we think that we will voluntarily embrace life in the Spirit: “It is not I that live, but Christ who lives in me.” We don’t. Mostly, it is forced on us by adversity and suffering.

But it can become a way of life, in the interest of sheer survival. To raise the white flag and let God have his way. To “let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.” Dearest aspirations. Identity. And so on. I haven’t been called to let go of all of that, yet. But I have been called to lay down enough to know what happens next. The big hole is filled with Christ, Christ and Christ again. Death in the Bible is always the gateway to life. No, not life – Life Himself.

Why I Didn’t Become a Jehovah’s Witness

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Who in the world is that? It is Saturday morning and I am at home with the little children I care for. As far as I know, we are not expecting anyone.

It is 1970 and I have just quit university – another sixties fatality. I am now a house parent with Children’s Aid, in Ottawa. I help care for four children -two boys and two girls -who have been taken from their families for one reason or another. They have been devastated by their circumstances and desperately need this surrogate parenting.

No. Don’t bother, Nancy. I will get it. And I open the door….Oh, it is LIllian and Frank, the Jehovah’s Witnesses who asked whether they could return and do some Bible study with me…

Hi. Come in. OK, kids. You will have to be quiet while I talk with Lillian and Frank. FInd something to do for awhile. And, mostly, they do, though they come and go while we are talking about Jehovah and the 144,000, good works and non-existence…

It is kind of interesting. From my childhood, I have bits and pieces of Bible stories, many little biblical songs stored away, and mostly good memories of my Anglican church background. But I have long-since lost any active interest in it. I have not attended church since I was confirmed at the age of twelve. I received a Beatles record as a confirmation gift from my parents, and that was that. I have not read the Bible, talked of faith, been to any church since then. My systematic knowledge of biblical truth is zero. I have no idea that God is alive, that Christ is God, that Jesus died as a payment for sin, that we are sinners in the first place…In other words, I am a perfect Jehovah’s Witness prospect.

So I listen and I think. The kids come and go. And we talk and talk…Eventually, it is time for them to leave….Bye! Thanks!

Then I ponder. How do I process all this? Is what they say true or is it not true? Is their god real or not real? I don’t know how to begin to evaluate any of this. I simply don’t have the tools. But then I begin to do some bottom-line thinking. That, I can do. IF God is truly there, IF he exists at all, surely he is a God who loves – didn’t my little Sunday School songs teach me that?  And surely he would be compassionate and caring toward these little children I live with. Yet, Frank and Lillian didn’t even ask their names. They paid no attention to them whatsoever. IF there is a God, they simply can’t be representing him.

And that is why I didn’t become a Jehovah’s Witness.