Anna Resurget

I am listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. It is an old record that I have which I have been able to lately listen to again thanks to Timberley’s Uncle Butch giving Sam an old portable phonograph. I guess that I never listened to any of my vinyl albums while Anna was alive. But I suspect she would have liked this album. The music is beautiful (if you like Russian Romantic era music–I have friends who don’t). Anna liked beautiful things. The music is big. It has a sense of adventure in it. But mostly she would have liked it because it was about Scheherazade. Anna knew the story of Scheherazade in the form of a book called Shadow Spinner. That book tells the story of Shahrazad, a young girl who creates new stories every morning. It is the story of a strong girl who becomes the heroine through her bravery and creativity. Anna probably never thought of herself as particularly brave, but she loved stories of heroines.

As I was listening to Rimsky-Korsakov, I thought I would peek into Anna’s room (our guest room where we keep many of Anna’s old things–Anna never lived in this house) and see if I could find the Shahrazad book. I couldn’t remember the title or what it looked like, so I was having to search through all of the titles on the shelf–and there are many. I finally saw Shadow Spinner written in a mildly Arabic-looking script and knew that I had it. I opened the well-worn pages. Anna was certainly not hard on books, but she read books many, many times. Hearing the story long ago of Shahrazad (Timberley and the kids used to read stories out loud) made me think of Anna. When I hear the music of Scheherazade now I am reminded of Anna.

Anna has been on our minds much lately. Today perhaps more so because of an unrelated milestone. We are celebrating Timberley’s 50th birthday today. As I searched Anna’s bookcase looking for that book, I had to look through many titles. Mixed into the shelf were some books that belong to Timberley about homeschooling and such. I saw the Children’s Herodotus (what is homeschool without reading Herodotus?). I began thinking of the long hours that Timberley spent on teaching the children. The books on this shelf represented an enormous investment that she made in the lives of our kids.

With our loss of Anna at such a young age, one might be tempted to say that Timberley had wasted those hours in school, preparing Anna for a future that never came to pass. Of course that is not true. I have heard of and know parents who have lost children at a point in life where the child is ready to move into adulthood and sprout their own wings. They are graduating from high school or college, or just getting married. The questions about what might have been, I’m sure, are devastating and would continue long in the parents’ minds. But that is not so much the case with Anna. Anna was meant to be a child. Not really that. It was almost as if she were already fully grown, or fully mature as a nine-year old. She was aware of the physical change that would begin to take place in her body as a teen-ager and she was terrified of it. She liked her physical age, but her mind had already far surpassed it. (Anna would be approaching her 15th birthday were she still with us. I cannot imagine her at that age. I have tried. I failed.)

So what did Timberley do in school with Anna? She prepared her to be a fully mature nine-year old girl. She built into her a godly character. She encouraged a love of reading and a love of God that created a thirst for God’s word and a passionate desire to be with the Lord. She now has her greatest desire.

So, Timberley, as you look back at your first fifty years and remember the things you have done and where you invested your life, I want you to remember the call that God placed on you to make disciples of your children. I want you to know that you prepared one of them very well, and she graduated at the top of her class. You have done well.

Two days before Anna died, she sent an email to her second grade teacher, Mrs. Buckner, back in Louisville. In the email she let Mrs. Buckner know about some of the things that were going on in her life in Indonesia. She told her about some new friends she had made. Then she asked for prayer that, because they couldn’t speak English, and she couldn’t speak Indonesian very well, she would receive help “to share God’s love in its various forms” when they played together.

I am at the Nigeria Bible Translation Trust in Jos, Nigeria helping to lead an Old Testament workshop. I was thinking about Anna’s email yesterday morning during our devotion time before breakfast. One of the Nigerian translators was sharing some thoughts from the book of Esther. He talked about Mordecai and how his act of bravery in saving the king from an assassination plot went largely unnoticed at the time. Later in the story, however, his act is remembered and leads to the downfall of Haman, who had been plotting to destroy the Jews. His point was that many of our acts will go unnoticed in history. But we continute to do our work, not to be heralded by men, but because God has called us to the work.

About that time, I remembered Anna’s words. I remembered her desire to share God’s love with the Indonesians. She didn’t have the ability to use her words, so she simply prayed that God would give her other means. Her acts will go unheralded in history, but she was trying to do what God had called her to do.

Yesterday afternoon I met with two Nigerian translators and a translation consultant. They are working on a translation of the Old Testament in the Gokana language. I was able to join in on their work as they pored over their translation of these verses:

“And Yahweh spoke all these words to Moses,

‘I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Do not have any other gods before me.

Do make an idol or any image of a thing in the air above, or on the earth below, or in the water below the earth.'”

I am here doing this because I understand, in some sense, that God has called me here to do it. But as I sat in our meeting hall yesterday morning during devotion I began to silently weep, thinking about how much Anna would love to be a part of this translation meeting. The reason she would want to be here is that she knew her Lord Jesus. And she knew what it meant to be saved. And she knew that, even if we “shared God’s love in its various forms”, people are only saved through hearing the word proclaimed to them.

When I met with the Gokana translators the first time, I sat in a room with the consultant and one of the Nigerians. The other was late getting there. I asked the Nigerian man, “How many Gokana are there?” He thought for a moment and said, “I would say there are about 75,000 or 78,000 of us.” The consultant sitting next to him seemed surprised and said, “Oh really! I thought there were more like 150,000 Gokana.” They both shrugged and we went on with the conversation. A few minutes later, the other Gokana translator came in and sat down. I turned to him and posed the same question,”How many Gokana are there?” He furrowed his brow and tried to remember. After a moment he said, “According to the last census, there are,  I think, about 250,000 or 300,000.” The rest of us let out a laugh. 75,000? 150,000? 300,000? What is it?

But whether it is 75,000 or 300,000 Gokana, the same thing is true for them all. They are in need of a Savior. That Savior is Jesus Christ. If they call on his name for salvation, they will be saved. But they cannont call on a name if they do not believe in that name. And they cannot believe in a name if they have not heard the name. And they cannot hear the name unless someone proclaims the name. Faith comes through hearing the word of God. May God bless the work that these translators are doing.

It is hard to believe that five years have gone by since Anna left us and went to be with the Lord. In her memory I am posting three videos for you. They have all been here before, but many of you may be seeing them for the first time.

The first video is of Anna at three, when she learned her first tongue twister. At the time we were in Richmond, VA preparing to leave for Indonesia. Anna was three. It was a very cold January and Anna decided, for whatever reason, to go into hyperdrive in her aversion to certain irritating pieces of clothing. This included socks and shoes. That would not have been a problem had we already arrived in Indonesia, but we were still in a very freezing Virginia. In between the screaming and tears, however, we caught her here in a particularly pleasant mood.

The second video is from Salatiga, where we did out language study. Anna was a much calmer four years old. In this video she is reading a book to me at bedtime. Two things are funny watching the video now. First, while Anna missed the word “her” at one point, she had no problem with the phrase “beautiful arabesque.” Second, at the 1:18 point, you will hear Anna’s older brother, Sam, going into a very excited and high-pitched scream of “Scat, Cat!” I’m guessing that Sam had taken charge of the kitchen and was trying to keep our new cat outside.

The last video is from her memorial service. It is a montage of pictures set to two songs: Michael W. Smith’s “Anna” and Switchfoot’s “This is Home.” We used to listen to the cassette containing “Anna” in our car in Indonesia. Anna used to ask me to turn up the volume on “her” song.  Another song that we would listen to together, and that would cause her to lean up to me, was Phil Keaggy’s “Child (in Everyone’s Heart)”. Switchfoot became our favorite band while we were in Indonesia. We had most of their albums and for a long time, our car had a Switchfoot only music policy. Many of their songs would have been appropriate to remember Anna because it seems that Jon Foreman, the songwriter, has experienced significant loss of his own. “Amy’s Song” and “Yesterdays” deal specifically with losing a friend. Anna never heard the song “This is Home.” It was released in the days immediately after her death. But as soon as I heard it the first time, I knew that this was the right song to remember Anna with. Since then, Switchfoot has released two more albums and each one of them has its own “Anna” song. “Needle and Haystack Life” reminds me that Anna was unique, like finding a needle in a haystack, and that we need to hold on to such things while we can. And then “Souvenirs” on their most recent album speaks for itself.

I’m not sure about the truth of the saying, “Time heals all wounds.” Yes, in some ways. But some wounds leave behind scars that never go away, even with the best plastic surgery. Some wounds heal for a while, but the new skin is such that the wound keeps getting reopened from time to time. But while we may wish things were different, we must continue with what we have. Memories are sweet. They are painful as well. But these things only serve to remind us of the fellowship in the sufferings we share with Christ. Sin entered the world through Adam, and with it came death. But death was not the final statement to be made. With the curse of sin, God also pronounced his victory over death. So in time, God sent his son in form of man to die the death we deserved. God showed his great love for us in that he did this while we were still sinners. The righteous died for the unrighteous. His resurrection from the dead proved God’s final victory over death, and was a foreshadowing of the resurrection that we will all one day experience. But resurrection does not come without a prior death. So God’s victory over death on our behalf, does not eliminate the battle. It merely guarantees victory in that battle.

Anna knew these things. She loved Jesus more than life itself. She spoke often of her desire to be with her Lord. In the midst of the sad memories, it is a great comfort to know that Anna has, in part, what she wants. The part that is still incomplete we await along with her. We can still stand alongside Anna and cry out to the Lord, “How long, O Lord!” We await his return and final resurrection from the dead, when the dead in Christ will arise first and then we will be caught up together with her and the Lord. What a day that will be!

I don’t know if I have posted this photo before. The photo for the masthead of the blog was cropped from this one. I thought you might like to see the whole frame. Anna loved animals of all sorts, even the annoying ones. We lived with a great number of snails in Indonesia. They were of several types, and usually quite large. I have some photos that I can’t show of Anna and Sam when they were trying to break the Guiness record (really!) for the number of snails attached to a person’s face at one time. They read that the record (I believe) was only eight. They thought that was ridiculous, so they ran to the pond in the backyard and fished out a dozen or more of our “pond snails.” These are like our American snails, but with shells perhaps a little larger than a golf ball and a body that stretched to four or five inches. Each one in turn would lay down while we placed the snails on their faces. The trick was to make them stick while the person stood up. They needed to stick to the face to count for the record. We were able to fit nine of those monsters onto Anna’s face, but two of them would not cooperate and stick when she stood up. Very frustrating!

Anyway, here she is with a smaller, and more attractive green snail. As you can see, she loved that snail.

Enjoying a snack at Pak Bejo’s Soto Stand

Fourteen years ago today, we welcomed Anna into our family. Timberley went into labor on Palm Sunday and Anna was born on Monday morning. This morning we were sharing stories about Anna and decided that it is difficult to think of her as 14 years old. I guess she will always be 9 to us. I was thinking about her yesterday, thinking about how much our family has changed since we lost her. One change is that Sam has gotten quite a bit bigger. In fact, at 6’3″ he is almost as tall as I am at 6’2″, but not quite! (Some people do say that he is a bit taller than I am, but I think that’s just to make him feel good.) Anyway, I figure that Anna would be one of those that would think Sam was taller than I am, and I wondered what she would say when she realized her brother had eclipsed her dad. I know that she would run over to Sam, grab his arm, and in her excited voice say, “Oh Sam! My big, strong, brother.” And then turning to me, she would come along side me, put her arm around me, and put her head into my side. She would then quietly say, “It’s okay, Daddy, we still like you, too.”We are having very complicated feelings today. We are celebrating Good Friday and the crucifixion of Jesus. Even calling it Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ death, is always complicated. But that complication, and the goodness of the day, is what is at the heart of the Christian gospel. But I think also, that because we are celebrating Jesus’ death today, it is far too easy for today to feel less like March 29 and more like May 7.But while today is the crucifixion and the grave, we know that Sunday is coming, and with it an empty tomb! We know that our Lord has risen, and because of that we know that Anna, too, will rise at the coming of her Lord. Anna Resurget!

Indonesia has many good qualities. City parks are not on that list.

When we first moved to Semarang where I was teaching at the seminary, we went looking for a park where we could have a picnic. I located a small lake on a city map, and it looked like the lake had a small park surrounding it. It was not quite what we anitcipated. But we did have a good time that day. There were pedal-boats that you could rent and tool around the pond–I should not continue calling it anything else–and there was a small patch of grass, rare in Indonesia, where we could sit down for a bit.

We took this picture of Anna, and I remember thinking at the time that this one was different. It was the first one of Anna that had a certain feature to the pose–one that would come back often in the future. She did not look at the camera, but just looked off somewhere else. It was the first of what might be called her “detached” look.

That look captures, for me, Peter’s attitude toward this world that he expresses in his first letter. The detachment that Anna began to show in her photos revealed the heart of a person who knows they are in a place they don’t belong. Peter addresses believers as those who are “exiles” and who are “sojourners” in a foreign land. We are not to conform ourselves to this world, because it is not our home. Neither are we to give sway to our own human passions. Rather, Peter says that since we have been born again, we should love one another with a pure heart. In fact, he seems to intertwine the ideas of being purified, being obedient, and loving one another. He confuses the order of them so that it is difficult to say first you are purified; then you are obedient; finally you love. In 1 Peter 1:22 he wraps these three together into an inseparable triad. Our purificiation, obedience, and love must all coexist, or they will all fall. A purification that comes from God, and obedience to truth, and a true love for our fellow Christian, are concepts that are foreign to this world.

As Anna grew older, it became evident that she realized here alien status in this place. She longed to be with Christ. She knew that my protection as her earthly father was far inferior to the protection she received from her heavenly father. She knew that the care she received from her human mother was inferior to the provision given to her from above. And the companionship that she shared with her human brother was far less that the companionship she would share with her true brother, Jesus. So I just wanted to show you a photo of her with the beginnings of that faraway look that would come to typify her is so many ways. Lord, help me to have the same disdain for the things of this world, and to desire you with the same passion.

It seems that events lately have been bringing back many memories of Anna. Saying that I run the risk of giving the impression that at other times the memories are not there. That is not the case. But it seems that in certain seasons, at certain events, meeting certain people, that the memories become a bit more intense. More tangible. So it has been the last few months.

This past summer Samuel and I made a trip with his scout troop to New Mexico to backpack in the Philmont Scout Ranch. It was an incredible 12 days. It was about the most difficulty thing I have done physically.

Todd and Sam at 12441 feet. The top of Baldy Mountain.

While we were there, we had long days of hiking. Early on, the nine boys in our group talked incessantly. As we all got more tired, and more tired of each other, the talking slowed down and then stopped. Those were the days of hiking with my thoughts. The place was so beautiful. Ponderosa pines. Aspen forests. Wide meadows opening up beneath mountain peaks. My kept asking, “What would Anna think of all this?” The answers were at once evocative and comical. I knew that Anna would love the beauty of the place. She would love the care that the Scouts have taken in preserving a clean and prisitne environment. But I also knew that Anna was not cut out for the kind of grind we had to go through each day to endure it. Instead, she would be content to wait for us at home, and upon seeing Sam get off of the airplane all grimy and stinky, say with a huge smile, “Oh Saaam!” She loved her brother.

Sam with Papa Freddy.

Another scouting milestone we had at the end of the summer was Sam earning his Life Scout rank. His next stop is Eagle. The court of honor that evening was particularly special as all of Sam’s grandparents were present. Timberley’s mother, father and step-mother came down from Richmond, and my Dad and his new wife, Ollie, came out from California.         A few weeks later, Sam and I had a chance to attend a wedding of a friend of ours from Indonesia, who is now at Southeastern. She was married here on campus and many old friends from Indonesia came to the wedding. It was a great reunion for us, but one which brought back many memories as well, as those who knew Anna best were brought back into our lives. Sam and I had a great time there, maybe especially Sam since he had a chance to cut the rug a bit.

Finally, I just returned from a trip to Vietnam. I taught a class there for a Bible school at Grace Baptist Church in Saigon. It was my first time to Vietnam. The similarities between Vietnam and Indonesia were obvious and many. As the week went on, I began seeing the differences as well. But the whole week was a reminder of where we have been, and what we left behind there when we left. It was a wonderful time and I am hoping to return and bring the whole family.The only major mishap was taking a day-long bus tour on the day I was going to leave. My flight left at midnight, so I took a tour that went to the Mekong River delta and visited several local factories that make honey, coconut candy, etc. What I did not know was that the tour also included romps through the jungle getting from site to site and several trips up and down the river, one of which was by row boat. The row boat couldn’t quite get to the dock, however, so we had to wade through the river to get to the boat. Unfortunately, I was dressed in my travel clothes with my good shoes (I had no others, actually). So off came the shoes and socks, and I rolled up my pants, and into the river! I was feeling very Indonesian. Did I mention that it is rainy season in Vietnam? It was a wet day.

Todd and his class in Saigon.

All in all, things are going well here. Joy mixed with sadness seems to be the human condition until the Lord returns. Maranatha.

Anna and Foxy

Timberley asked me last night if we were doing anything today to remember Anna’s passing. I had been asking the same question and came up empty. It didn’t seem right to go out to dinner. We have developed the tradition, if you will, of placing a picture in the newspaper on her birthday. I would rather do that on March 29 than on May 7. So what to do? We don’t have a gravesite to visit, although we do still have her ashes. It would seem odd perhaps to put flowers by her remains. (A former professor of mine was asked by a Buddhist man at a cemetery, “Who do you think is going to smell the flowers?”)

I think the best way to remember Anna’s passing is to share the goodness of the grace of the God that Anna worshiped.

I have written before about the grace that God showed in many aspects of Anna’s death. All of these things are, of course, backward-looking. It is only in the remembering of a series of bad events that one can see the single thread of goodness woven throughout. I don’t know whether Joseph, having been sold into slavery by his brothers and unfairly jailed in Egypt, was cognizant that God was doing all those things in the process of working out a plan for the benefit of Joseph’s family. But in his later reflection, he was able to say as much to his brothers.

One aspect of the grace of God that I see in the timing of the events surrounding Anna’s death is that Easter always precedes the anniversary of her death. That means that every year as we prepare for the remembrance of another year without her, God gives us our annual reminder that Jesus has ushered in a new perspective on reality for those who believe. We know that because Jesus was raised on the third day and then taken to sit at the right-hand of the Father, we too will be raised from the dead and be seated at the right-hand of the Father. In fact, Paul speaks of these events with such certainty that he speaks of them as already having been accomplished. “We have been co-raised with Christ and have been co-seated with him at the right-hand of the Father.”

Because of this new perspective given us by the resurrection of Christ, we cannot think of Anna’s passing in  quite the same way. Every thought of missing Anna is accompanied by the comfort, not only for Anna but for us as well, that death is not the end of the story. The new chapter has been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, but is yet to be revealed to us. We will live again. Sickness, disease, lethal blows, accidents of nature, even the evil acts of other men are not signals of the end, but are rather enemies that Jesus battled when he died on the cross, and to which God dealt the final blow when he raised Jesus from the dead. That is the victory that awaits Anna when Jesus returns. It is the same victory that will be ours, for those who believe, for those who are called according to God’s good purpose.

One of Anna’s final letters she wrote was to her second-grade teacher in Louisville, Mrs. Buckner. In that letter, Anna expressed her desire that God would help her to share the gospel with her new Indonesian friends. Anna did not speak Indonesian very well, so she asked that God would help her to “show God’s love in its various forms.” By this show of love, Anna hoped that these young friends would come to know her Lord. Anna would want the same for you who might be reading this today. She would want you to know that God loves you, but that your sin has caused a breach in that relationship that no human effort can fix. There is nothing that we can do on our own to stand before the Lord as a righteous person. But God loved us so much that he sent his son, Jesus, to die in our place, the just for the unjust, so that if we believe in him and confess that he is Lord, we will be saved. Anna would want you to know that you, too, can have eternal life.

[This photo was taken at my parents house in Half Moon Bay right before we left for Indonesia in 2003. Notice Anna’s book. Typical.]

Anna was born this day 13 years ago. That is, she was born into this world then. It was a wonderful day for us. Timberley has a kind of tradition with the kids that on their birthdays she would recount the events during the day leading up to their birth. Sam was born in the evening and so her labor and delivery was all on that same day. For Anna, everything began the night before. Timberley started the early stages of labor at church the day before. Or, at least she knew things were starting to move. We did a lot of walking that evening. We walked at the park by the Ohio River. We had a forgettable meal at some Louisville chain restaurant. We walked around Seneca Park until about 10 PM. I decided we might be in for a long night, so we went on home to get to bed.

I laid in bed much of the night wondering when Timberley would say it was time to go to the hospital. She, on the other hand, laid awake reading her pregnancy and baby magazines. She found one story that she thought was particularly interesting that she wanted to read to me. It was about a woman that waited so long before going to the hospital that she finally delivered the baby at home in the bathtub! All the while, I am laying next to her through her increasingly painful contractions, saying, “Okay, time to go.” She just laughed and told me to stop worrying. I told her to stop reading me those stories.

Anna’s birth did not go as smoothly as Sam’s. He had some problems, too, such as there not being a delivery available at the hospital, so Timberley was forced to sit in the waiting room until about an hour before she delivered him. That, and there wasn’t a full nursing staff apparently, so I had to do double duty watching my wife and helping the doctor turn machines on and off and holding things, etc. In Anna’s case, we had a nice big room, plenty of nurses, just no doctor. He apparently did not like getting up early in the morning and didn’t show up until after Anna was born. All I could think of when he finally came in, with hardly an apology, was “Do you still get paid for all this?”

The most memorable part of Anna’s birth, I suppose, was the nursing student who came from school to observe some procedures. She sat at the side of the room with her pad and pencil, taking notes. Very studious and professional. Poor girl.

Timberley doesn’t do drugs. She doesn’t really mind pain. She’s pretty tough. The nursing staff, it seems, wasn’t really used to that. We found out later that out in the hallway they had given her the nickname “Prairie Woman”. We took that as a positive thing. But the whole event was pretty traumatic, loud, tense. With no doctor there, the nurses had to decide whether to continue with the delivery without him. At the last minute a resident making rounds came in and took over. And then Anna was born.

After things settled down a bit, the nursing student came over to Timberley and me. She was a puddle of tears. All she could say was, “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Thank you.” Then she turned and walked away.

Anna’s birth was beautiful. And Anna grew to be truly one of the most beautiful children I could imagine. It is rare, but once in a while we meet someone with a little girl who is such a combination of pleasantness, wit, and physical beauty, that we tell the parents, “She might be as cute as Anna.” But it is rare. And we always say “might”.

While today is Anna’s birthday, I never come to this day with real satisfaction, because I know that for Anna now, today is not very significant. Her real birthday came later, in 2004, when she accepted Jesus as Lord and became one of his children. And a day perhaps more significant came May 7, 2008 when God called her home. But the most significant day is yet to come. Anna is awaiting, as we are, the day of the return of her Lord Jesus, who will raise the living and the dead to new life. Paul tells us that those who are dead will rise first and meet him in the air. So we have this promise. We have this hope. And we wait.

Maranatha.

Anna resurget.

Timberley read Uncle Tom’s Cabin a while back and found a passage that made us weep. She reminded me of it today in an email. The character’s name is Eva, but Timberley changed the name in her quote to read about Anna.

Has there ever been a child like Anna?  Yes, there have been; but their names are always on grave-stones, and their sweet smiles, their heavenly eyes, their singular words and ways, are among the buried treasures of yearning hearts.  In how many families do you hear the legend that all the goodness and graces of the living are nothing to the peculiar charms of one who is not.  It is as if heaven had an especial band of angels, whose office it was to sojourn for a season here, and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they might bear it upwards with them in their homeward flight.  When you see that deep, spiritual light in the eye,–when the little soul reveals itself in words sweeter and wiser than the ordinary words of children,–hope not to retain that child; for the seal of heaven is on it, and the light of immortality looks out from its eyes.