Anna Resurget

I have not posted for a while.  I was out of town for the weekend, far from any internet, and then my parents came for a wonderful, but all-too-short visit.

Where was I on the weekend?  Sam and I had a scout trip to Red River Gorge for two nights of camping and backpacking.  Sounds great, no?  Except that the weather report called for freezing temperatures all weekend and snow showers all day Saturday.  The ominous part for me was when I checked the forecast and below the posted low temperature for the day, which was 22, was a brief addendum, “Will feel like it is 12.”  I have never quite figured out why, if it feels like it is 12, we don’t just say, “It is 12 degrees out.”  Our first morning we got up about 6:30.  I slept very little the night before.  What sleep I did get was really my mind slipping in and out of consciousness from the cold.  It was snowing.  I was standing on a barren hillside with my hands in my pockets, surrounded by six other tents.  I could not escape asking myself over and over, “Where are my car keys?

But after some hot oatmeal and coffee my spirits picked up.  It did not seem so cold after we started moving around.  And we ended up having a great time in the cold.

These photos show Sam with his scout patrol (the Scorpions) before leaving for home Sunday morning, Samuel setting up his tent, and Samuel with his tentmate, Charlie Starmer.

What would Anna have thought of all this?  This one is easy.  Before she died Anna whined and complained about not wanting to go to summer camp in Indonesia, Camp Miki.  “Death Camp” she called it.  In the middle of our weekend I pulled Sam aside and said,”Sam, THIS is death camp.  Anna would have hated it here.”  We both had a good laugh.

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 »