Reflections

Birmingham, Alabama, Christmas 1968

Boxing Day. The Day After Christmas when, in British tradition, one boxes up gifts to take to the poor (is this where we get “re-gifting”?). As good a day as any for reflection on the year past.

2011 has been a very good year for me. Exhausting, but good. My year was shaped by disasters. The very events that brought destruction and pain to so many others have been exactly the same events that provided fresh purpose and meaning for me. It seems that the greater the problems around me, the more opportunities I have to be a blessing and to be blessed.

The North Carolina tornadoes of mid-April left a trail of destruction and death such as our part of the country has rarely seen. The map of the storm tracks looked like some giant beast had ripped the land with massive claws, gouging out parallel lines of terror. All across the eastern half of the state, homes, businesses and entire communities were laid waste by the whimsical power of the swirling winds.

Then in late August, Hurricane Irene cut across eastern North Carolina, and gusting winds after hours of soaking rains made it a very bad day for trees and for any houses or garages or fences or wires under them. Large areas were described – accurately – as “looking like a war zone.” Electricity was out for days, or even weeks, across hundreds of square miles, and blue tarps spread like a fungal plague across smitten roofs.

There have also been other, less dramatic, disasters. Yesterday – Christmas – our church spent much of the day preparing and serving lunch and singing Christmas carols at the local soup kitchen. Fellow servants were there to distribute socks, towels and Bibles and to help with distributing the food. Dozens of men and women – young and old, black and white – came to eat. As I looked at the faces, many of them wrinkled like baskets of old laundry, I was aware that each one had experienced its own individual disaster.

In the afternoon yesterday, Patsy and I met with friends for what has become another of our family’s Christmas traditions: singing carols around the hospital. Starting in the emergency room and ICU, we then went to the top floor and sang our way down. I wore my Santa’s cap, and Patsy wore felt reindeer antlers to try to bring a little cheer to our audience. On every floor – except, perhaps, the maternity wing – we knew that each room held its own variation on the theme of personal disaster.

Christmas is about God’s response to the ultimate disaster of our separation from Him. As I reflect on the disasters and responses of the past year, I am reminded yet again of the huge privilege I have that when others suffer destruction and loss, I am allowed to be one of God’s personal representatives of His disaster response.

Henry VIII or The Notebook



Portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger
(1497-1543) made c. 1536
Madrid, the Thyseen-Bornemisza Collection


If we choose the easy way, not only are we choosing sin and the inevitable separation from God, but we make ourselves unblessable and we forego the opportunity for God to work His good through the situation. (Matthew Gilliland)


Henry VIII of England was, in his core beliefs, a good Catholic even after his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. Interestingly, Henry’s Catholic principles were not allowed to get in the way of satisfying his personal whims, and, for all his kingly achievements, Henry is remembered primarily for disposing of inconvenient wives and for splitting the Church of England off from the Catholic Church when the Pope would not allow him to use divorce to “legitimize” his adultery.


Last Tuesday, September 13, Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of The 700 Club, shocked viewers by saying, in effect, that it would be OK for the spouse of an Alzheimer’s patient to use Henry’s trick of hiding adultery behind the scrim of divorce, because the Alzheimer's patient's forgetfulness is like a death. Reactions from both religious and secular sources was instantaneous, and almost universally negative.


As one friend, who is caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband, said to me, “How could I leave him just when he needs me most?”


I am certainly grateful that God does not abandon us when we forget who He is!


Granted, Pat’s comments were “off the cuff” at the end of a 700 Club program, and he did say that this was a difficult situation, etc., but still … he said that divorce would be preferable to adultery, as though one can justify one wickedness over another just because one’s situation is difficult!


The fact that righteousness is difficult can never be used as a legitimization for sin! And as one who helped care for a loved one through several years of Alzheimer’s decline, I am offended by the very idea!


I know human beings have shown a remarkable proclivity toward selfishness ever since Adam and Eve had their unauthorized snack, but it was probably not until the 1960s that we started to make our self-centeredness into policy. We proudly announced our depravity with phrases like, “If it feels good, do it.” We – particularly in American society – then went looking for any variation we could find on “self-fulfillment,” “self-realization” or “self-actualization.”


Now, a public religious leader, once-respected for his Biblical conservatism, has spoken out in denial of clear Biblical teaching regarding marriage and commitment in general and has affirmed selfishness as an acceptable basis for moral decision-making.


Interestingly, among the voices raised in reaction to Robertson’s statement, the only ones I have heard rendering even slight approval for the Henry VIII solution have been from aging “liberals.” Among the reasons so few from the younger generation have approved may be that they grew up watching the movie, The Notebook.

In The Notebook, James Garner plays the part of an elderly man who daily visits his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife and reads to her from a notebook about their earlier lives together. The lady, played by Gena Rowlands, sometimes manages to retrieve herself from the mists of memory for a few blissful moments, only to lose herself again in the horror and fear of the Alzheimer’s.

When I watch this movie, I do so with, on the one hand, a mixture of awe and admiration for the James Garner character, and, on the other, the pain of familiarity with Alzheimer’s. I recognize only too well that loss of personality portrayed by Gena Rowlands, because I watched at close hand as my Mother fell slowly into that same abyss of disconnectedness. I also watch with peace, knowing that no matter how painful and frustrating those final years with Mother were, I would not trade them for anything.

It is a sad day when we can learn more about “goodness” and “covenant commitment” – about “for better, for worse … in sickness and in health” – from James Garner than we can from Pat Robertson.

Jesus said that there is a wide, easy way that leads to destruction, and there is a challenging, narrow way that leads to life. God’s people have no excuse for taking the easy way.
 
 

Trafficking With The Enemy

1/1/11 already! A new year, with new adventures and opportunities, even as we recall and reevaluate the old year.

What a year 2010 was! As I look back over the last twelve months, I can scarcely believe that so much has happened. Yet, as I look back, certain memories rise above the rest.

The Iroko Box.
Mother is buried in
A piece of Africa

When Mother died two days after Christmas 2009, much of life began to revolve around finalizing her affairs and arranging for her memorial service. In American society, we are generally sheltered from such arrangements of death. Usually, a funeral home takes care of all that, and the process is carefully sanitized.

Not so for us, and for a variety of reasons, most of the arrangements fell to me. Getting a death certificate and publishing obituaries [you would be surprised how difficult society can make those tasks!] – coordinating with the crematorium and the cemetery and the monument carver, and contacting a church and minister and musicians, all in another state – and making the box for the ashes.

Making the box was a special privilege. I had anticipated for years that I would have to do it, and I had a beautiful piece of wood ready. I had chosen a pecan plank, because Mother never met a pecan she did not like. But when it came time to make the box, that board just wasn’t right. A friend gave me a plank of West African iroko wood, and another friend planed it smooth for me. Then I set to making a box. Patsy helped with the final design (my first design looked too much like a bird house).

Making that iroko box was a particularly emotional stage in a very emotional process. As I worked the wood, I had a lot of time to think about Mother, and what a remarkable woman she had been, and how so much of me was shaped by her. She was not without her faults, but on balance, she was – in the words of her eulogy – “no ordinary woman.” As I worked on that box, I thought a lot about how un-ordinary she had been. And I cried a lot.

It has given me great satisfaction to know that my Mother’s ashes are buried in that iroko box I made – buried in a small piece of the Africa she loved so. And she was buried under a footstone that reads (borrowing from 2 Corinthians 9:8): “Always enough to share.”

Mother’s death and the subsequent arrangements prevented me from helping in the response to the Haitian earthquake, so as soon as the memorial service was over I began checking on whether my skills might be needed in some other disaster response. I ended up being asked to go to South Sudan to help with an HIV/AIDS prevention project for Baptist Global Response. I flew out of Raleigh/Durham airport on Easter Sunday, April 4, and spent most of that month in Sudan. In Africa, one can safely expect that little will go as planned. That was the case with most aspects of my anticipated project. Nevertheless, God was apparently working out His own plans, and I had the wonderful satisfaction of knowing that I was in exactly the right place at the right time to be in the middle of what the Lord had for me.

Sudan is not a particularly comfortable or fun place to visit. It is not for tourists. Creature comforts are in short supply and there are far too many people running around with AK-47s. And it is hot. Really, really hot – like 115°-120° every day, and no ice or AC. April is near the end of the dry season there, and so everything was not only hot, but very dry. The good side of that was that there were fewer insects (especially mosquitoes), and I could sleep outside under the stars almost every night. (Night by night, I watched most of a moon cycle pass over my head.) Breakfast each day was instant oatmeal and instant coffee, both mixed with tepid water. Supper was mostly beans-and-rice supplemented with special minerals provided by the included gravel. Lunch, if it happened, was probably a pack of cheap cookies washed down with more warm water.

Fortunately, the real adventures of life relegate this sort of less-than-comfortable circumstance to total irrelevance. The circumstances would not even merit mention except for the way they provided the setting in which I experienced the true significance of my time in Sudan.

The greatest privilege and delight of my trip to South Sudan was in the remarkable people I met and with whom I worked. There were the young-but-remarkably-mature-for-their-years Dinka pastors who helped us and prayed with us and taught us, and who quickly became our friends. There was the American mission doctor with his tiny hospital who, with his dedicated African staff, is making far more of an impact for people of a whole region than he ever could in his native South Carolina. There was the missionary couple who have given 17 years of heroic service, mostly under incredibly difficult conditions, to share the love of God with the Sudanese. And there were the bright, young, short-term missionaries – college students or recent graduates – with whom I spent most of my time. All of these had been contributing their parts to what God is doing in that area of Africa. What a blessing to be allowed to participate a little with them!

All of these fine people were involved in God’s invasion that is bringing His Light into that very dark portion of “darkest Africa.” They had been making meaningful inroads into the Kingdom of Darkness, and their true success in the spiritual realm would soon be attested by the counter-attack they faced.

The New Testament is clear that we are in a War – The War – and our enemies are real, but they are never human. They are not “flesh and blood” but are the spiritual powers of the Kingdom of Darkness [Ephesians 6:12].

The cosmic war in which we are engaged is very real and has physical manifestations, but its essence is unseen. More importantly, as Christians, our combat must usually take forms that are completely unnatural and counter-intuitive. But because of the Cross of Jesus Christ, we fight from victory, not for it. Yet we must fight. We fight to extend the blessings of victory to those who are still enslaved in Darkness.

The Old Spearmaster.
The people are never the enemy.


In our warfare, one of the great challenges is constantly to remember that we fight for the very people whom we see representing – in the natural – the interests of the Kingdom of Darkness. So it is that the King of Light can command us to demonstrate our preexisting victory by loving, even feeding and blessing, those representatives of Darkness. [Cf. Luke 6:27-28, Romans 12:20]. There is much more to spiritual warfare than this, but without this, all our prayers have little meaning.

As events progressed in South Sudan last April, the Kingdom of Darkness was represented locally by a group of occult practitioners known collectively as the Spearmasters. The local Spearmasters had collectively placed a powerful curse against the young missionaries. About the time we learned of this spiritual counter-attack, it happened that I went on a day-trip with Jermaine and Andrew to a nearby town. (“Nearby” in American terms; a long, hot walk in the African bush.) As we started for home in the Land Cruiser, we passed one of those Spearmasters (plus woman and small child) by the road, and we offered the trio a ride in the vehicle. The old Spearmaster presented an imposing figure with his giraffe-tail fly-whisk and his bundle of ceremonial spears.

Riding cramped in the back of our Land Cruiser was surely better than a long, dusty walk, but it was still hot and dry. We made several stops during our drive, and on one of those stops, I remained at the vehicle with our guests while Jermaine and Andrew visited local church folk. As we sat there, unable to converse, I grew thirsty and reached for a water bottle.

As I reached for the water, however, I faced a quandary. My Mother had always taught me never to eat or drink in the presence of others without being prepared to share whatever I had. I had plenty of water, but … I had no cup by which to share it. At times like that, I often find that my choices are really very simple. I pulled out my own drinking flask, opened it and handed it to the man and his family. Then, I dug out a couple of ever-present granola bars and shared those, too. As I did, I knew it was the right thing to do, but I was not even aware that my simple actions had such cosmic implications for The War.

Love can cast out fear! We really can overcome evil with good!

The old Spearmaster knew, of course, that we represented “the enemy” to his way of life, even as we understood that he represented our enemy. But thanks to the fact that Jesus Christ has placed His love in us, we were free to share. It is amazing how much of real importance can be accomplished with a little water and a granola bar.

Our “trafficking with the enemy” did not stop The War, and there were serious subsequent battles, but we faced them having already demonstrated before the watching angels that we were already more than conquerors through Him who loved us! [Romans 8:37. That is the verse on my Father’s footstone.]

As I look back over 2010, from the many vignettes that rise in my memory, these come to the top: honoring my Mother, who taught me to share, and honoring my God, Who prepares a table before me and allows me to share it in the very presence of my enemies.