Anna Resurget

I began re-reading a book that I have not looked at in years: Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.  I have realized that over the past seven months I have stopped practicing many (more like most, and possibly all) of my spiritual disciplines.  I thought going through his book again might help me to find some direction in that regard.  As I read his chapter on meditation, in which he emphasizes among other things the meditation on scripture, I was drawn to his use of Psalm 42.  I thought perhaps that Psalm might prove fruitful to begin anew my discipline of meditation on scripture.  I was in for a treat.

Each verse of Psalm 42 struck me deeply and cut to the core of so much of what I am experiencing at this point in my life that I was left with the impression that this psalm must have been written just for this situation in my life.  I will not go through the entire psalm verse by verse, although that might prove fruitful later.  I do, however, want to direct you to one verse that is repeated in the psalm and also appears in Psalm 43 following.

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?  Hope in god; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5)

I was reminded of a sermon I had listened to a while back by John Piper.  I am sorry that I do not know the sermon or have a link to it, but at one point he discussed the importance of talking to ourselves.  He said it this way (I am paraphrasng from my memory), “The problem many people have is that we listen to ourselves when we ought to be speaking to ourselves.”  The act of listening, according to Piper, is passive and we do not control what is being said. But speaking is active and we choose what is said.  When we listen to ourselves we often hear messages of depression, fear, doubt, or other negative messages.  The solution, he said, is to take the upper hand and to speak to your soul.  By speaking truth to the soul, we strengthen our faith and are better prepared to fight depression or other negative emotional states.

We see this very thing at work here in Psalm 42-43.  The psalmist says to himself (his soul), “Why are you cast down . . . and why are you in turmoil within me?”  Instead of listening to the voices asking about our worth, we take the fight to the enemy soil.  “Why are you this way?  Why are you feeling so low?  What’s wrong?”  The psalmist continues by encouraging himself (his soul) with the admonition, “Hope in God.”  But why should his soul hope in God?  What basis is there for thinking things will get any better?  The answer immediately follows, “For I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”  The psalmist is able to say to his soul that the future will get brighter because he will again praise his God.  Because of this hope in the future restoration with the Lord, the psalmist takes hope, and he tells himself to take hope.

But what is the basis of this hope?  Is it based on the resolve of the psalmist to get his act together and begin singing God’s praises again?  Is it based on the determination that the psalmist sees in himself to do the right thing?  I think the answer lies in the tone of the whole psalm.  In Psalm 42 the psalmist is crying out to the Lord because it seems he has been abandoned by God and at the mercy of his enemies.  He has been overwhelmed by waves.  Voices of doubt come to him asking, “Where is your God?”  But it seems that the psalmist never gives in to those questions.  Throughout the psalm, despite the various and serious problems he faces, the psalmist never doubts that behind all of his turmoil and problems lies the Lord.  Even when he asks the question in verse 9–“Why have you forgotten me?”–he prefaces the question with “I say to God, my rock.”  I believe that the reason the psalmist can say to his soul with boldness, “I shall again praise him,” is because of God’s grace in granting faith to this believer.

Last Sunday the pastor at Biltmore Baptist Church spoke to the children of the congregation.  On the occasion of lighting the hope candle for that Sunday of Advent, he asked the children if any of them knew what hope was.  One of the boys, perhaps a fourth or fifth grader, raised his hand and said, “Hope is depending on something that hasn’t happened yet.”  The pastor said, “That is a very good answer.  In fact I think it is better than I was going to preach today.”

In times of trouble we have to know the truth.  We have to depend on that truth.  And then, with the psalmist, we need to speak that truth to ourselves and stop listening to ourselves.

We returned Sunday night from visiting Timberley’s family in Richmond, VA.  We stayed until Sunday so we could visit the congregation at Biltmore Baptist Church where Timberley’s mother is a member.  We wanted to stay because about a month ago they dedicated a memorial garden for Anna and we wanted to see it and thank the congregation.  The garden consists of a park bench and a young dogwood tree.

When we gave thanks to the congregation we noted that the garden was particularly meaningful for us because it was exactly the kind of place that Anna would love.  I told them that I hoped the bench would be used by many children of the church as a place to sit and read.  They could read their Bibles there, or, as with Anna, whatever other books she brought along to church with her.  It is a beautiful spot.

I received a link to a news story about a Canadian pastor who lost his daughter.  On his blog he talks about his ministry, but now things tend to focus a lot on his daughter.  You can view it here.  From what I have read, our stories seem very similar.  Please take a look when you get a chance and pass it on to others if there is a need.

To help those who wonder why Anna finished her first official year of Latin in the third grade, but learned much from watching and listening to Samuel for two years prior, and why Samuel is enrolled at Highlands Latin School, this is in from Victor Davis Hanson:

Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos). After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education.

HT:  Between Two Worlds

No, this is not a long philosphical  discussion on the will of God.  Hopefully that will come with time.

I just wanted to share a funny quote from a book that Timberley is reading, Why God?, by Burton Cooper.  It is one of the better grief books that Timberley has read and is helping her at this particular stage.

Here’s the quote:

When asked, “What was God doing before creating the world?”  Luther responded that God was preparing hell for those who would ask that question.

Tune in, or log in, or whatever, over the next few days.  I have a three-part post coming up that describes the events surrounding our move to Kentucky in 1997 and Anna’s birth.  I hope you enjoy the story.

Below is my journal entry from June 6.  We had recently returned to Indonesia from our three-week time in America.  While in the states we had three memorial services for Anna–in Richmond, VA; Louisville, KY; and San Mateo, CA.  At the end we were exhausted and ready to go back “home”.  We thought at the time that we were through the hard part and could get on with making something out of the wreckage that was our family.  We were wrong.  Very wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Samuel recently brought home a school assignment with an odd question.  His class is reading Anne of Green Gables, a book and series that Anna loved and read several times.  His assignment included a question about the meaning of a phrase included in the first chapter:

With this Mrs. Rachel stepped out of the lane into the backyard of Green
Gables. Very green and neat and precise was that yard, set about on one
side with great patriarchal willows and the other with prim Lombardies.
Not a stray stick nor stone was to be seen, for Mrs. Rachel would have
seen it if there had been. Privately she was of the opinion that Marilla
Cuthbert swept that yard over as often as she swept her house. One could
have eaten a meal off the ground without overbrimming the proverbial
peck of dirt.

We had to find the meaning of the final phrase “the proverbial peck of dirt.”  After a bit of looking we found out that the peck of dirt is the amount of dirt one is said to eat in a lifetime.  It is the dirt that remains on food or is ingested in other ways.  Its use as a proverb relates to the lifespan of a person.  Once the peck of dirt has been eaten, a person’s life is said to be full and complete.  A person who dies prematurely could be said to have died before he ate his peck of dirt.

As with everything else, my thoughts return to Anna.  Did Anna eat her proverbial peck of dirt?  Or did she die too soon?  I had satisfied myself that Anna had led a complete life.  My mother said the day after Anna died that Anna did more in her nine years than most adults do in their entire lives.  But also, spiritually, Anna lived a full life.  She knew she was a sinner.  She knew the Lord who died to save her from her sin.  She read through the Bible.  She shared her faith with others.  She loved people deeply.

And then I remembered back to an odd memory.  When Anna was a toddler we could not stop her from eating dirt.  One particular memory stands out.  We were at the beach and we saw Anna near the water on all fours with her little rear end sticking up in the air.  Her face on the ground.  She sat up and turned around and we saw wet sand covering her face.  Her teeth and mouth were full of the sticky goo.  And she gave us a big smile before going down to dig up some more.  I laughed to myself as I remembered that day and thought to myself, “Yes, Anna did eat her peck of dirt.”

Below is my journal entry from May 20.  We were in California before the memorial service there.  Although we had been in America for a few weeks at the time, you will see the effects of jet lag on me.  At the time I, thirteen days after Anna died, I was still trying to process what her loss meant to our family.  I was beginning to see how the loss of a person is different for every family.  Every person is unique.  Every relationship is unique.  Every loss is unique.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our decision to leave America for Indonesia was made with prayer and consideration.  Of course our children were a big factor in that decision, but ultimately we did what we perceived God calling us to.

The response from others was varied.  Those who knew us well were generally supportve although also sorry to see us go.  Sometimes the responses were bewildering if well-intentionied.  I recall one older woman asking us, after she heard we would be going to Indonesia, “Will you be taking your children with you?”

“No,” I thought, “they are about six and four.  They will be just fine on their own.”  But out loud I smiled and said, “Oh yes, we will take them.”

The  general consensus among family, I think, was that the children were going to suffer.  They would be deprived of all that is familiar and be thrust into a strange world.  We tried to dispel those ideas as best we could, but with our limited knowledge of the country were unable to really quell their fears.  And besides, for the most part they were right.  It was just that Timberley and I were not convinced that “all that is familiar”–when talking about American youth culture–was such a bad thing to be deprived of.

Of course there were larger issues than just the children’s education and social well-being.  The world at the time was in the midst of being overturned by Islamic terrorism.  This was after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but before the US invaded Iraq.  The people of the United Staes were angry, frustrated, zealous, but at the same time confused because of a real lack of knowledge about this mysterious enemy.

One evening as we were packing some things at our house to prepare to leave, my father expressed his own misgivings.  “Todd, I understand about wanting to move overseas, but I don’t understand why you have to go someplace where they hate Americans.”

My father is not a bigot, but of anyone I know, he has good reason to harbor resentment towards Asians.  When he was just ten years old he received the news that his father had been killed by a Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.  My grandfather, along with over a thousand others on board the battleship Arizona, died that morning on December 7, 1941.  My father has never talked much about that time.  He doesn’t talk much about his response at hearing the news.  I guess now that I have seen my own eleven-year-old son deal with the loss of his sister, I can better understand why my father does not talk much about it.

The surprise for me came when my father went to Japan.  He was nearing the end of a long career working for American Airlines.  The company had recently opened up a route to Tokyo and they needed a ground mechanic to work in Tokyo to coordinate with the Japanese workers there.  My father volunteered and for more than six months he lived in Tokyo with my mother taking several trips over to see him.  Later on, as he reflected on different assignments he had taken, he told me that his time in Japan was among his favorites.  I remember asking him if being with the Japanese was difficult in light of the history with his father.  He seemed honestly surprised by the question.  I don’t think he had ever considered it.  He really loved Japan and the Japanese people.

When my father asked me why we had to go someplace where they hate Americans I answered that we had to go where we felt God leading us.  But I knew that with my father things were far from settled.

About six months later we were in Indonesia doing language study in the town of Salatiga in Central Java.  We had some neighbors next door who had been very helpful to us.  They had a son named Adi who was a student at the local university.  One morning the two of us went out jogging.  It made me feel good to run with Adi because, although I rarely exercise, I could still run faster than him.  I think the fact that he smokes far too much than is healthy for him does not help.

But on this particular morning as we were walking and jogging along our street Adi asked me, “Mr. Todd, why do Americans hate us so much?”

I laughed at his question, which confused Adi and caused a bit of a cultural embarrassment for him, but then I said, “Adi, before I left for Indoneisa my father asked me why I had to come to a place where they hate Americans.”

Adi looked crestfallen and confused.  “But we don’t hate you, Mr. Todd.  We like you.”

“And we like you, too.  It’s just that most Americans dont’ know very much about Indonesia, just like many Indonesians never get to meet an American.  Each one thinks the other hates him, but really we just don’t know each other.”

But as we were packing up our house, going to meetings and orientation, and getting over a dozen inoculations to fight illnesses I had never head of, our families were worried about us going.  It did not help things that we had tickets to fly on March 23, 2003.  On March 22 the US invaded Iraq and drew even more hatred from the Islamic world, including Indonesia.

The news of the invasion of Iraq on the day of our departure brought phone calls from worried family members across the country.  We tried to be as reassuring as we could be wth our limited knowledge.  We finally made a phone call to our contact in Jakarta who was going to be receiving us there.  He assured us that things were fine and to come on.

“There is rioting in the main part of the city,” he said, “but as of this time the main roads leading from the airport are still clear.  As long as we can get you out of the airport then you will be fine.”

Those were not the most reassuring words at the time.  Later after we arrived in Jakarta we had lunch with the man’s wife.  She said, “I told him not to let you come.  It’s not a good time right now.  He just looked at me and said, ‘There’s never a good time to come to Indonesia.'”