Passing It On by Ellen Marie Okerstrom Walden

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PASSING IT ON

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ELLEN MARIE OKERSTROM WALDEN

HER LIFE AUGUST 24, 1904

SEPTEMBER 25, 1991

PASSING IT ON T HE CONTENTS:

A Suggestion Something Ellen wrote about herself These Things I Believe A Short Preface

THE CHAPTERS:

What are you leaving anyone? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I I learn some things about prayer ... .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . 2 (Built on a frightening childhood experience) A glimpse of Heaven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 (My younger sister's death, its message) The Great Physician . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 (My healing - unmistakably God's instant action)

I thought I was so smart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 (College days quandaries) I blush for some presumptions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 (Christian commitments come of age) Roots .. .. .. ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . .. ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 (Family and early life experiences - parents divorce) I learn by osmosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 (A wonderful summer spent with God's exemplary people) Believing the unbelievable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 (An incredible experience, strictly God's saving action) Sprouts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 (An important transition period of my life)

The Vision. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 (A startling vision of Christ in Church.

Also witnessed by another) God knows where the thing is. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 (A most unusual experience with a lost item in a desperate situation) A serendipity I questioned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 (God persists in making me take the second look at a reluctance to share, finding His good intended) Unfinished Manuscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 (A teenagers scrapbook of quotations intended to paraphrase the Bible's truth and to show the impact of God's word to all generations since his first speaking to His children) Right-about-face. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 (All things work together for good to them who love Godincluding loss of sight in one eye.)

A change in tense and tension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 (I suffer my first stroke) Resurrection made plain to me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 (An Easter Sunrise Service - a mountain top experience in every sense of the word) AND FINALLY

I promised copies of some of my favorite prayers - and now you have them.

A SUGGESTION: That you first read this .

My wife mentions many times in what she cal~er autobiography that she wanted "Passing It On" to be passed on. It will be.

I am having a few copies made for special people and for some of the organizations to which she belonged. I think Valentines Day is a proper time to start the printing.

You should know that in my opinion Chapter 16 was not completed by Ellen. A thorough search has been made but no printed page discovered that seems pertinent.

Ellen did not write Chapter 17. I do not have her talent but I know the importance that Lizard Butte had for both of us and I want to share it with you.

I have strung the words together.

February 14, 1992

A.K. Walden

604 S. 13th Street Coeur d'Alene, Idaho May 26, 1971

As I told you on the phone, being chosen by your Council's Board of Directors as candidate for such an honor is a very lovely "happening" I deeply appreciate. Whether anything more comes of it or not, I am touched to be considered by you all for whom I have so much respect. And, of course, if more could come of it, attending the November meeting would be a pleasure I wouldn't miss.

It's a little difficult to write about oneself but your letter stated you did need some definite information on some items. I am enclosing some news clippings that tell of some of my involvements in more detail than I want to give in a letter, which will no doubt be verbose enough.

While not currently associated with Camp Fire I have been in the past and had many happy experiences growing up here as a Camp Fire Girl myself.

The only

requirement that kept me from attaining Torchbearer rank was that of helping with a Bluebird group - something Coeur d'Alene did not have at that time. Which you can see was many years ago and how you have grown! In fact, our group then thought we were the first to be organized here but I learned since there was an earlier group that graduated, I think, about four years previously.

I became involved in Girl Scouting when we lived in Sandpoint - first as a camp counselor and Vice President of the Bonner County Council and then as a President and Executive Director (on volunteer basis) for seven years before it affiliated with the Inland Empire Girl Scout Council in Spokane.

During my fifteen years with Girl Scouts I have served in almost every capacity as a leader at every age level, as leader trainer, program consultant, public relations, camp director (established , day, primitive) as member of the Inland Empire Girl Scout Board for eight years, its chairman of the Nominating Committee, presently 2nd Vice President in charge of Field Services. Also on the National Selections Committee for three years to select the applicants from the eleven western states for international

opportunities.

Much work was required of me when I served on the Rendezvous Committee for the International Girl Scout Roundup held at Farragut. My two major assignments for this "downtown" of the encampment was to depict Northwest recreation and native gem rocks and supervise the training of the Girl Scouts working at the exhibits. Being the committee member closest to the site of the encampment, a great many other requests were made of me by the committee, particularly in working with troops to be assigned to areas and providing volunteer labor and materials. With financial assistance from our bank, donations of lumber and materials from many personal friends and the donated labor of the Lions Club, both my exhibits were provided shelter. The larger one for recreation was later moved to become part of the bank building serving the World and National Boy Scout Jamborees there.

Enclosed is a picture that tells of the girls

participation with it. It's the only one I have of them and would like it back.

Other clippings tell of my involvement with the World Boy Scout Jamboree and again at their National Jamboree, which was a very enriching experience. Also some of my work with the American Cancer Society, for which as a volunteer I have served as Kootenai County Chairman since 1962, as State Board member since 1963, State Public Education Chairman for three years and this year State Crusade Chairman with Mrs. Ernest Hemingway as State Honorary Chairman.

At the youth level, much of our ACS public education work is with smoking and health programs in the schools, providing films, speakers, library kits of materials, arranging previews and explanations of available resources for teachers, as well as often helping individual students with special assignments on the subject or science projects.

I promoted the Mother-Daughter Program state wide for graduating high school senior girls and their mothers, which is the showing of two films with a doctor present to answer questions about breast and uterine cancer, the two major cancer sites that cause the most deaths in women and which are most easily detected at an early stage when most curable. Not all counties in our state have yet instituted this annual event in their high schools but more each year are following the lead of our county.

As state public education chairmen for the ACS I have conducted many workshops for county chairmen and county public education chairmen at state and district levels.

I was twice asked to serve on the Governor's Comprehensive Health Committee, which I was unable to do with an already overloaded schedule.

However, I did attend a

Regional seminar on Smoking and Health at Renton, Wash. , as one of Idaho's five representatives. Two others were from the State Dept. of Health, the others teaching health classes at U . of Ida. and College of Idaho. A major priority decided by the Idaho group for getting the health hazards of smoking into regular teaching curriculum of health studies in schools has been stymied for lack of funds for teachers training and other obstacles and so the burden remains on the volunteers and haphazard scheduling. Many of our films for schools and colleges are also on careers in the field of medicine and research.

I like to think I may have contributed something to youth when I taught Sunday School.

During my high school years I had a group in the Junior Dept. of the

Presbyterian Church for three years and later in life taught for about seven years.

Remembering my own questioning days during college and the need for a strong steady faith at that time, I have been particularly interested in the high school age group.

Whether teaching or not, I have opportunities often to talk personally with young people, many of whom I have had in my Sunday School classes or in Girl Scout troops.

I have good rapport with several who seem to have little chance of weathering demoralizing home environments. Four of these are from two welfare homes in which the parent is the delinquent - mothers divorced and so wayward themselves they set the opposite of good examples for their children. How to help such children with their attitudes, help furnish clothing, camp experience and healthy group participation and at the same time try to instill some sense of personal responsibility and accountability is sometimes a troubling question and weight on one's mind. But it is in this area of personally directed concern that may make the most difference in their lives.

Under your Honors/Awards won item - hmmm? Twice honored as the Women of the Year - several years ago here by the Beta Sigma Phi selections and about fifteen

years ago by the Sandpoint Civic Club. Received the highest Thanks Badge allowed by National Girl Scouts and a different type but similarly expressed appreciation from National Boy Scouts that is reserved for what they consider "special". During college elected into Eurodelphian Society, (four chosen from among fifty some aspirants) a nationary honorary for creative writing students - mine in the field of poetry. Also in college the editor of the national magazine of my sorority (Alpha chi Omega) requested English majors or creative writing students in all its chapters to submit articles, six of which would be selected for publication in a special issue. Mine on religion was one of those selected.

I have had a serious novel in the making for many years, which I have given up hopes of comple~ng until we retire. Will have to find a hide-away to do it. Have written some children's stories which received much encouragement from the American Girl magazine although they were unable to use my story inasmuch as they had covered the same subject (how to be a good houseguest) just a few months previously. Mine was in verse with cartoons while they had used actual photographs of situations. Have had in the making a series on a number of other subjects for growing girls - good grooming, dating, hostessing, etc.

Under personal background, I don't know what is either pertinent or interesting.

Born in Sweden, came to this country when I was a year old, grew up in Coeur d'Alene, as a first grader at the old Bryan School had little interest in a freckle-faced imp who would one day be my husband. Both of us worked our way through two years at the University when the depression hit, his father died and our marriage had to be delayed until he had seen his family through a three year struggle. Ace started his banking career here and the seventeen years we were away from Coeur d'Alene was always with the same bank, finally returning in 1957 to manage the bank where he had started. He is now the Area Vice President - also Treasurer of the Idaho State Bankers Association. We were unable to have children of our own but have always had an interest in the welfare of young people. My husband is an ardent booster of both high school and our Junior College athletics - I am also but not as actively supporting as he is. A few years ago a

group of men connected with North Idaho Junior College called on me to persuade me to run for membership on their Board of Directors, which I declined rather than run against someone I admired very much.

As county chairman of the ACS I have been able to organize a strong unit, which has succeeded in tripling our crusade goal, moving our county from 35th place of Idaho's 44 counties to a close contender for first place, second only to Ada County, which is almost four times our size. In all other areas of our year around work, education, service to cancer patients, special events, etc, we are unquestionably #1 county. Our cancer bowling leagues of 140 women, the city-wide Bowl Down Cancer tournament, the 20 bridge clubs playing once a month to raise more money to fight cancer, our six weeks golf league, have assured us an extra $3,000.00 annually for our Crusade total . This year will be considerably more with the cookbook just out, which I first intended as a county project but upon request of the State Division extended its participation and sale / at bookmaking - as my personal thanks for considering me a nominee for this lovely honor.

I've been so long-winded, I'm ashamed but, if there is any other information you want, call me.

Sincerely, Ellen

insert after "and sale" st~te wide . I ' d like for you to have a copy of this my first ~ttempt

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THESE THINGS I BELIEVE It has been said that a man's creed is a monument set up to show where he

stopped thinking. I believe it may also be a monument to indicate when a man started thinking in his search for a personal philosophy of life.

There comes a time when a man should pause, take stock, make an inventory.

He should evaluate where he stands from the impact of the wide range of things he has read, heard, discussed, and thought about during the years of his life, he should summarize, and simplify what has meaning and value to him personally.

This is what I have composed for my own satisfaction, and I share the results with you. Of course, I often fall short of living up to this affirmation of faith but when I fail, I strive to come back to it, take may stand on it, and try once more.

First of all, I believe in myself. I do not believe that I am a chemical accident.

I believe that I am made in the spiritual image and likeness of God. I believe in the original goodness of man. When you loan much money to many different individuals for many years, you have to have a very deep faith in your fellow man. Faith is not only daring to believe, it is also daring to act. When I believe in myself as a son of God, I attribute to all men the same quality. This goes for men of every class, creed , and color.

The proof that I believe this way will be measured by the way I act toward others.

Most of our difficulty in getting along with each other can be traced to lack of faith. Husbands and wives lose faith in each other, and homes break up. Children lose faith in parents, and parents in children, and tragedy results. Labor and management lose faith in each other, and we have strikes. Black and white people lose faith in each other, and we have riots. Leaders of governments lose faith in each other, and we have wars.

Faith is the only bridge human beings have between each other. Only as we strengthen, reinforce and maintain the bridge of faith can we move over the dangerous pitfalls of prejudice, misunderstanding, and fear, and reach our common objectives.

Several years ago a Rotary International President took as his motto, "Build Bridges of Friendship in Rotary." This certainly is an admirable and worthy goal, but I believe bridges of faith in you fellow man will heal more ills.

Faith calls for risks. "It is only by risking our persons that we really live at all," said William James, "and often our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that can make the result come true."

Faith means to trust. I like Ernest Hemingway's test: "The only way to learn whether a man is trustworthy is to trust him." The alternative to trust is doubt and suspicion, which may often seem justified. But where do we draw the line? "You may be deceived if you trust too much," said Frank Crane, "but you will live in torment, if you do not trust enough."

As for me, I choose to take the leap of faith---to trust too much rather than to trust too little, to live for something bigger than ourselves, for some cause that will lift our world to the loftier level so urgently needed today.

I believe we are called to hang in, hold on, to live in those risky and scary areas where our weaknesses are obvious, but where we can offer a hand that matters and sustains. I am reminded of a story told by Will Campbell, a well-known southern baptist preacher. Will had been chided on his religious acrobatics. No one had ever called Will an acrobat before, and it rather irritated, and also intrigued him. Soon afterwards, he attended !/circus; he watched those acrobats up there and recalled his friends comments, and he thought about it. After the show, Will looked up this one young man he had seen on the high wire and struck up a conversation with him. The man talked about the thrill but also the awful fright with all the danger and risk. "Why do you stay up there then?"

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Asked Will. "Well, you see," He said, "My wife is up there and she's crazy; my sister is up there and she's simply irresponsible; and my father, he's up there, and he's getting on in years and his reflexes aren't what they used to be. So I go up there day after day so that when that moment comes, I'll be there to reach out a hand and grab hold." Will Campbell turned to walk away, then stopped. "But why," Will asked, "do they stay up there?" The young man looked uneasy and said, "Well, you see, mister, I kinda have this drinking problem .. .. . " I would like to close with an excerpt from Paul Harvey's Comments entitled "THEY MISLED US" - the quotations: -

Spaceship earth came with a book of instructions; let's see what it says. It says we should not be slothful in business. In fact, It says he who does not work--let him not eat.

It says women should wear modest apparel.

It says don't steal anything---ANYTHING! It says don't get drunk---period. It says you sleep only with your own wife.

It says you don't do what you1."want" you do what you "ought", for those whose

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consciences are anesthetized it specifies which is which. In other words, if that rule book were not divinely inspired, it would still be the best blueprint for an orderly existence.

If it did not promise life hereafter, it would still contain the best formula for a good life

here.

Ellen

PREFACE

I thank God that in this attempt to look closer and think harder on the meaning of God's saving action in my life there has grown this deeper understanding of His nature and purpose for us all who respond to his love, and newer, more absolute reliance on the might and availability of His Holy Spirit alive and working within us - the extent of which to me is as miraculous as the particular instances I had in mind at the beginning to share with others.

Over the years the sharing of these unforgettable experiences often crossed my mind as something I must someday do.

But, at those earlier junctures of time, my

thought was centered principally on the supernatural uniqueness of the happenings themselves and not on the appeal such sharing would have for readers - the blessed and amazing events in themselves getting top attention even more than the grace and power of the Giver.

However, this telling has in it the remembrance and assurance of the earnestness of my prayers at the outset for absolute honesty about the facts as they happened, plus the need for sharper understanding of the meanings behind the related happenings and, most of all, that the only true motivation for the telling be for the explicit purpose of helping others to reflect more seriously and gratefully on the awesome everlasting fact and glory of God, our Creator. The Lord, knowing us better than we know ourselves, has His own way and timing in answering our prayers of need - Thank God! Once begun my eagerness to tell it all I thought I could do in a few months. It has been being written on paper, in mind and experience now almost five years with intermittent periods of protesting the intrusions of involvements and "other things" wanting attention. But God's timing and estimations of "intrusions" may be another testing of our reliance on i/is judgment and purpose for us.

The title "Passing It On", chosen at the beginning, seemed so right then since I felt so ready to share and pass on these wonderful unusual experiences as so many more examples and evidence of God's great goodness.

But more accurately and more

appropriately it has become "Taking It In". The childish one wanting to run and tell the incredible happenings in the past is more wisely and humbly realizing the greater importance of what is happening now as she walks daily more closely and dependently hand in hand with her Lord.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT ARE YOU LEAVING ANYONE?

"What are you leaving your children?" That was the question our pastor Ed Hart asked our Presbyterian congregation in his Father's Day sermon. While my husband and I have no children of our own, we care very much about and feel a responsibility to all young people, who constitute the most important element of hope for a better world . So the

question remained to nag my conscience the rest of the day.

By evening the thought "what are you leaving anyone?" was shaking my slothful

procrastination to bits and crystallizing a resolve to finally put in motion the witnessing I have known for so long is mine to do. Before it is too late. My life has had so many incredible instances when the Lord took direct charge of seemingly impossible situations.

Not to pass them on would be my life's worst waste and shameful ingratitude. Always for my future's agenda there had been a periodic vaguely assessed plan to get down on paper the events of my life that spoke so clearly of God's almighty power - action of His that some non-believers would be reluctant to give credence, confining their limited human understanding to provide some logical sensible explanation for such phenomena, putting them in the realm of the occult anything other than naming them "Honest to God" God given miracles.

Skeptical of the Unknown they miss the knowing, however

mysterious, that makes the difference in living and existing.

Stirred as I was by Ed Hart's question that Sunday, I was eager to begin immediately recording all the yearnings wanting utterance and set about to clear the days of much distracting business. But then, with pen in hand and sandwiching time between a busy schedule I became stymied first off with a sudden feeling of inadequacy to handle such an assignment with any justice - an assignment to me sacred. I found that more than eager resolute decision to start recording these first hand revelations of God's reality would be required of me before I could ever get such witnessing off the ground.

There was first of all a great deal of self-delegation of my ability to even speak of such things. My mind revolved considerably about Moses, who became to me a flesh and blood human being lifted out of history, out of Sunday school story telling and 1

Biblical sermonizing, to become brother to me, identifying compassionately with my own feeble protestations of ability. When the Lord let Moses know beside the burning bush that he should go to Pharaoh and demand the release of his people, Moses felt overwhelmed and said, "But, Lord, I don't know how - I can't - I stutter - I have no eloquence - I can't persuade - someone else could do it - not me", But in the quiet of the hills and deep in his own inner stillness he felt God's presence assuring him, "Trust me, Moses, I will be with you - you will know what to do and say." Moses finally put himself trustingly in God's hands and acted out his faith. We know the rest of the story.

I too needed to learn to finally place my own poorly regarded abilities at God's

disposal, knowing God only required a willing trusting obedient availability. Any ability I might have is a gift of God and that He will sharpen with His power as we go along.

However divergent our situations, capabilities, and other such incidentals, I learned as Moses did that trust in the faithfulness of God must be real and vigilant obedience is my part of the covenant between us. The warmth of His light flooding my being exposed me to myself with shame for the impertinent self-centered fear of falling flat on my selfconscious face.

But I had rude reminders of other manuscripts begun in spurts of energetic high hopes still lying around unfinished, unsatisfactory, questioning my ability to now deal with a much deeper matter dear and sacred to me - so long a part of me yearning for adequate expression. I know I needed to look longer, think harder, with absolute honesty at the absolute purity of my motive in wanting to witness for the Lord alone in all He has done in my life - for His Glory alone, ridding myself of any lurking wish to couple that purpose with any thought of also proving myself to those friends and relatives who. had once believed in my eager literary efforts but had long since lost confidence in my follow through with such dreams.

My own self-confidence had known its humiliations, its

fluctuating exuberance and nervous self-doubts - enough to raise questions and confuse an impelling divine urgency with a persistent intimidating taunt, "who do you think you are?"

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Thank you, Holy Spirit of God, for not giving up on me - forgive my scant estimations of Your power at work in me. I have been so long in completely trusting in Your open arms, the goodness and wisdom of You as a personally caring God - in spite of all the experiences that should have taught me better. Thank you, Lord, for Your patience with me. Amen I don't know how God could have made the reality of Himself more evident than in these frequent times of unique providential care. I acknowledged them as His own marvelous action but, for the most part, I have hugged these experiences to myself privately, unwilling to risk the chance that anyone would possibly question their actuality - to me not a reflection on my own veracity, which is of little personal concern, but a rejection of God Himself. And there was the restraint in remembering Christ's caution about the indiscriminate broadcasting of God's name - the casting of pearls before unfeeling un-understanding creatures.

Before I was out of my teens I was becoming increasingly suspicious that these strange unique instances were not common to others I knew and the big question piquing my mind "why me?" wanted answers. Perhaps others in fact did have them but did they too have instinctive reasons for maintaining a silence about them. Were they a little afraid no one would believe them - afraid of being pointed out and talked about as someone a little strange? All my life I've had an aversion for conspicuous dress or behavior with a private pity or contempt for those who knock themselves out to appear different. With such inordinate compulsion for some showy way of getting attention, such emphasis on the outer image I can't help wondering what inner qualities of character and belief are hidden and in much greater need of effort. While they strut, "Their underwear's draggin".

My own fears and glaring shortcomings were apparent enough and would loom up to block the expectations that even those good and loyal ones, who knew me best and hopefully still cared about me, could understand how and why such extra-ordinary things could keep happening to me when they were beyond my own common-sense

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understanding as well. Why wouldn't they perhaps wonder if I could be stretching things - a little hallucinating. I did try to relate some of the incidents on rare occasions, never very well, when I felt fairly sure of companionable understanding - sometimes resulting in a glorious kinship of mutual awareness and wonderment. But I became more wary of promiscuous opening-up after some badly-time and feeble attempts to disclose either the simple details of the experiences or attempt the meanings hidden within them.

I remember a conversation with three intimate friends after a bridge game when divine healing became a topic and I was moved to tell my own miraculous no-questionabout-it healing and one of those friends I dearly loved, without ever intending that her remark would distress me, or be even aware of its effect on me, asked, "well, but don't you think you would have gotten well anyway?" She never knew her off-hand question flashed a sad and sober caution to thereafter be more careful in exposing what I knew in my very bones was truly God's action to anyone else's possible discounting. I did not take the shock and hurt of her statement to mean she didn't believe I believed it happened just that way - it was only her unbelief in the power of God's hand in the situation.

Later I was to understand some of the inner conflicts she was undergoing and at the time unable to resolve - a wistful yearning for truth too good to be true and a working faith while under the dominating opinions of the husband she loved, who was openly and destructively antagonistic to any belief in any Supreme Being. Eventually her mind snapped. Medical treatment prescribed for her could not alleviate the troublings of mind and spirit and in time she took her own life. At every mention of her name I feel the weeping inside continue for her that she was never able to experience the assurance and peace of God that passes all understanding, past whatever the circumstances of life are.

Part of the weeping is for my own faint heart in retreating from her question, failing to recognize that it might have been an invitation to speak more definitely to her need of a fortifying faith.

In my tongue-tied days of growing up God's name was not easily bandied about.

It was the reserve of theologians. Or fanatics who often did the Lord more harm than 4

good, stuck on and with their own vain lop-sided but intensified versions of what God has in mind. Perhaps television programs and talk shows with ordinary people outside the ministry exposing their inmost thoughts about spiritual matters have had a salutary effect on us - at least making us think more deeply about our own belief and pray more earnestly for the Holy Spirit's guidance to what is truth and unabashedly affirming the truth given us.

In my contact with young people today I find them certainly much less inhibited than my own generation was at their age to talk about their convictions and their struggles with doubts - some very admirably in earnest with enlightenment far ahead of what most of us had at their stage of development. Of course, this generation also has its extreme opposites who grab the notoriety spotlight for their perversions that end in their own soul's sickening suicides. There are others well intentioned but still too immature in their assurance, speaking with glib almost palsy-walsy familiarity with God's name rather that evincing any humbling reverent awareness of His Holy Presence or understanding of His redemptive purpose in the Cross of Christ. They are not yet prepared to offer substantial spiritual insights to a hopeful seeker of God's reality. !>ut who am I to say - God knows the good of their intentions and can gloss their mistakes. I can identify and blush for my own early brashness with the little smatterings of godly wisdom I thought I had and then uncomfortably wonder how relative my assumed growth in understanding at this point in my progress may be with all that still is going over my head. It could be enough to dampen any urge to ever speak up. But then I remember Moses again - my confidence is not in myself. In all things give God the Glory - even for the/regretted stupid values and mistakes of the past - by them we learn better. God is going to make a real Christian out of me yet. Not perfect or better than anyone else - just better than I was. All those years I was groping in the dark I didn't recognize the dark was in me. Our mistakes serve their purpose - the shame of them teaching us what not to be - they have in them the definite sins the Lord and each of us must reckon with if we want the reality of His presence - it is thus we eventually come to know our strength is in the Lord, not

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ourselves except as we allow ourselves to be His instruments.

I was no better, no worse, than my peers but the urge to be pleasing in God's sight is persistently haunting. I wanted to be good but was afraid of ever appearing sanctimonious. I wasn't sure of the meaning of sanctification but I certainly wanted nothing of sanctimony - enough to make me deliberately put up nasty smokescreens sometimes of phony indecent sophistication to hide any of the soul's genuine aspirations.

But I can't look up at the sky in the early evening for the first star to emerge visibly without recalling the times as a child I used to make on that first little twinkling.

Sometimes it had been while walking or playing with my chums, giggling and boisterously full of ourselves, when one of us would call attention to a star beginning to glimmer in the heavens and we would stop in our tracks to rattle off, "star light, star bright, first star I've seen tonight, I wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight." And no one was teased to reveal those deep wishes. Mine was always the same - to always be good. With _god I could say the word "good" straight out without squirming and, with the wish, would come a quick flash of isolated privacy for feeling the closeness of God for a moment. A secret between us that I am only now willing to admit to anyone.

I have seen on television some stirring telecasts of God's word sincerely and urgently presented to huge gatherings - rare ones among the many mediocrities, often outright embarrassing performances suddenly crowding the airwaves with heavenly themes that turn us off. But I remember one shown with open areas as far as the screen could cover picking up a solidly packed mass of faces listening intently, drinking in the words, recognizing their truth, no vacant preoccupied looks in the eyes as close-ups flashed through the crowd. I was thrilled to realize how universally and inclusively and also how individually God speaks to us all over the world. And however tremendous the size of such a gathering, it is just a tiny representative portion of God's whole global family of believers.

My own tears of gratitude have spilled over with those shown overwhelmed. I

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have felt so drawn to them and what they might tell of their own personal encounter with God alive in them, how they felt and what they could make of it.

Which of the

admixture of emotions and reasonings would grow to be most profound in their individual cases. But the most natural and overriding I think must be first of all genuine returned love and gratitude for such love, an awesome wonder at the depth of such love shown to us at the Cross, and overwhelming contrition for all we do that is contrary to what we should be in the light of such love. He has no pets - His compassion is for all - He loves and seeks us personally, individually in His own various ways. The wonder to me was how and why His goodness to me was particularly emphasized in so many miraculous happenings. Even one such in one ordinary individual's life like mine would be a most extraordinary blessing.

So my question to myself over and over was always "how come - why me?" In the panic situations there are no questions of His willingness and power to do for me.

When the chips are down instinctive trust is just naturally there and gratitude for the saving.

But the wonder remained - why should I happen to be one so blessed with

instinctive faith, have the lucky awareness of my status as a child of God and be the recipient of such mercy and loving care

"//!Jep there are so many who seem obviously out

of God's orbit. He doesn't want anyone/of His orbit and it doesn't fit His character to have some whimsical way choosing which of His creatures would be His people - some "eenie meenie, miney , mo - I'll take you and you and you."

I often directed the question squarely to the Lord. Finally one day when I was really listening I felt His direction to go back over my life and remember when and how I had first given myself to Him wholeheartedly. Which I did and my recollection went straight as an arrow on target immediately to an evening in my childhood.

I saw myself again as a little girl in about the fourth grade, playing pump-pumppull-away with other neighborhood children in a big empty lot. It was a warm summer evening and at the corner of the lot music was coming from a religious revival tent meeting. Some of us were curious. We were also dirty, hot, bare-footed, and felt like

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intruders but we slipped in through the tent flaps and sat quietly on the very back benches.

Any feeling of self-consciousness soon vanished as I listened to the preacher speaking earnestly, plainly and graphically about Christ's death on the Cross for our sakes. I hung on His words and when he finished he asked that any who wanted to commit their lives to Christ to come forward. It would not have mattered if no one else went forward - I didn't wait to see but was immediately on my bare feet, making my way down the grassy aisle to the front, oblivious to all else but that I wanted Christ to know how sorry I was, to know I loved Him and wanted to belong to Him. There I know began my love because He first loved me - there began my pilgrimage to the truth that was to make all the difference in my life.

To set me free - never an extravagant

statement as I learn more and more what freedom from what means.

The next day my mother and a neighborhood lady were talking in our front yard and Mother called me over from playing to ask me if I had been to the revival tent the evening before.

I eagerly admitted it.

I don't know why I hadn't already told her

except, while I loved my mother, we didn't have a chatty relationship - we had our separate ways. Mother and the neighbor exchanged glances as if weighing words for what to say to this child. Finally the neighbor said, "Well, I think you are pretty little to know what you were doing" and something else about it as a serious matter I couldn't understand. I didn't answer or feel any resentment - she said it kindly enough. But I was surprised. Until that moment I had been assuming that grown-ups, simply because they were grown-ups, knew everything. It was almost comical kind of astonishment to suddenly realize they can be mistaken - to see them as fallible human beings. A totally unexpected step in the direction of growing up myself. Like it says - you learn something new everyday.

That recollection was God's first answer to my first question "why me, Lord?" reminding me that we had made a covenant that night.

And gratitude and relief

overwhelm me when I realize that His is a love that did not let me go in spite of the

8

horrible ups and downs of my own part of that covenant - my willful rebellious thoughts and wrong actions, the following restlessness and disquieting separation from God, a contrite heart too often ashamed to be repeatedly admitting the same old offenses. What patience God has! I know so well Paul's lament that we do those things we should not do and leave undone those we should do. But God's judgments and chastisements are sure and lovingly meant for our own good. He does warn that we reap what we sow and He does not deprive

\Jc..

Âľp of such lessons.

His patience with me I am sure is in remembering the grubby little girl who went to Him so eagerly and wholeheartedly way back then. She learned so slowly - she had wonderful protection during very crucial times in growing up, such providential care throughout her life, and she was rapped repeatedly over the head for attention with these "out-of-this-world" experiences.

Yet still she wandered away, almost lost for a long time, not quite but almost completely out of touch with God even when occupied with questions about Him. She

tried debating in her mind questions atheists, agnostics, occultists, pragmatists; humanists put to her in her reading - just for sake of argument usually. She was principally stymied by the supposition that faith and reason, as our little minds perceive them, must have a reconciling squaring up.

Then for a still longer time she gave up the arguments

altogether and gave in to only having a good time, making a career of living her "busy whirl around a central emptiness" . But she did learn. Thank God! She has still has plenty of fun but with what a difference.

Now, with the assurance of God's hand in mine, I'm trusting in the Lord's adequacy to reach others with what he has revealed of Himself to me. I begin to see why God let me have those baffling fumbles in prematurely trying to tell of those unusual times when He dealt so personally with me. The purpose of this whole effort in "passing it on" is purely to show how an ordinary life can be lifted up, out of itself, to the extraordinary joy and sense of fulfillment that comes with the closer walk with God. I expect my tracing back of the major experiences may not be as they happened chronologically

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always but as they occur to memory or as they fit with some spiritual matter. And much must remain untold even though important to me in that they too speak so plainly to me of God's omniscience and goodness.

I know people all down the ages and in our present time have had experiences too that parallel in effect those I have had in graphically, unforgettably illustrating for them God's reality and power in human life. My continuing prayer is that others will be led to think back over their lives for their own first hand experiences that spoke to them of God's presence and action, which were important to their spiritual growth and events in their lives. Hopefully, too, to be led to share their faith made vibrant and everlastingly firm through these experiences.

Parents, who regret too late how little they actually knew of their own parents' earlier lives and thinking, in which they had no part, should remember their own children will be having the same wistfulness someday. Tell them - even before they say "Mommy - Daddy, tell us about the olden days". Often faith has its beginning built on the evidence

of faith shining in those we love and trust.

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CHAPTER 2

I LEARN SOME THINGS ABOUT PRAYER

When I was in eighth grade I went with a playmate and her family to visit mutual friends, two related families, the Norlins and Larsons, living on adjacent farms at Wolf Lodge about twelve miles from home. They owned jointly a huge barn that was built flat up against the excavated side of a steep abrupt hill, with a hillside road running above immediately next to and parallel with the barn's roof. When the hay was cut it was stored solidly in the barn by hoisting the roof open and dropping the hay down into the huge cavity of the back half of the barn's interior. The front other half was timbered off and that is where the cows and horses had their stalls.

My friend Vivien Berg and I were dressed in overalls and looked forward to climbing the ladder that scaled the dividing wall to romp in the soft, slippery, sweetsmelling hay.. And after lunch, as soon as the grownups had taken off in the car to inspect some mining property, we headed for the barn.

It was great fun tumbling around and I was making my gleeful way toward the

roof eaves' large log rafter that divided the area when suddenly I felt myself being sucked into a cleavage between the hay closely stacked together directly under the rafter, not visible to the casual eye. I quickly flung myself across the rafter and cleared myself safely to the other side.

v

"Be Careful", J shouted and turned to warn Vivien. She was nowhere in sight and I stared in horror at the slight movement of hay at the cleavage and, in the breathless dead silence of the huge barn, heard a faint slow swooshing kind of sound and knew my warning was too late. Sure that the two stacks of hay were so tightly packed together her descent would be slow, I screamed for her to grab my feet.

I had thrown my arms

around the rafter with my feet pushed into the slight indentation . I quickly realized it was a silly maneuver with the rafter already cutting into my arms and straining my hold. If she had been able to reach my feet she would only have pulled me down on top of her.

I was barely able to throw myself free of the entrapment.

I kept screaming to her if she could hear me but got no answer. All the while my 11

vr

mind was racing frantically about for some possible way I might reach her before she suffocated thirty feet down in the densely packed hay. Maybe a rope with some kind of heavy anchor - maybe someplace there's a loose ladder I could push into the cavity - wild ideas - was there anyone at the house to help - only Grandpa Larson and he was blind neighbors at least a mile away. The hay that had been such fun was now a malicious, capricious, frustrating enemy that kept spilling me to my feet as I tried to think and act at the same time.

Finally the futility of any action on my part in time and my utter helplessness caught up with me. My panic was suddenly quieted by holding perfectly still with the wordless prayer, "God, it's yours to do". Immediately the trembling lessened and in a loud sure voice I called again, "Vivien, can you hear me?"

And in the big hollow

stillness of the barn from down below I heard her faint but joyful answer "I'm all right".

I could tell where her voice came from and I scrambled down the ladder to the other half of the barn and there I located her trembling muffled words and safe breathing through a thin crack in the planks dividing the loft and the horses' mangers. She had pushed and scratched her way when she reached the bottom to the right side of the barn the other way would have landed her against the heavy log side with no breathing space against the caulking and solid earth wall packed against it.

Assuring her I would be right back I raced out of the barn to find some kind of help. My first encounter as I pushed open the barn door was smack into the face of the bull that had always previously terrified me. Now I looked him squarely in the eye unafraid and told him with no nonsense "get out of my way". When people speak of talking with the animals, I always think of that bull and the communication our eyes had at that moment. He was startled when the door swung open so fast almost in his face and surprised to see me of all people and then I swear his body relaxed with a twinkle in his eye that said, "well okay, but my bluff was good while it lasted". More about that bull another time.

At that moment I could see far down the road the family returning in the car.

12

There was much excitement and concern until Vivien was finally extricated by removing enough of the wall planks for her to squeeze through.

All during the evening meal our talk was about the narrow escape and I can remember so well feeling a little detached with my thoughts and wondering if and how I could tell them of that moment I knew God does answer urgent, direct, believing prayer. It was as wonderful to me as the actual rescue itself. But I was very quiet with ~

my own thoughts. The big thing then was that vivien was safe and I felt God understood V the timing of my silence as treasuring a very personal relationship. He was so close - we had a secret between us and I'm sure it was He then prompting me with "ssssh, not now".

A good thing. I might have stupidly sounded like I was trying to take some credit for her saving because of my prayer when actually all during my wild frantic frenzy Vivien was already in God's hands. God's answer to my importuning was that sudden calm assurance of the fact that she was in His hands and His clear "quiet, little one, everything's all right". It was that instantaneous tum-about sureness of His living saving presence that was and will always remain so ineffably precious to me. Neither Vivien nor I had any idea about the tiny breathing space in the wall. But God did and He provided Vivien with both the direction and physical strength to reach it.

That same year just a few months previous I had another such lesson in God's reality - a different situation but similar authentication of His presence to enforce my faith in Him. It was just after World War I. A huge army tank was being displayed in our town, perhaps as a spur to sell more victory bonds - I don 't remember. We had never seen one and the Central School elementary classes were given an impromptu midmorning dismissal to hurry down the few blocks to the foot of Tubbs Hill where this amazing iron clad beast was showing how it could climb and crush anything it its way.

After all the excitement my good friend Connie Elder looked at her wrist to tell us the time and discovered her wrist watch was gone. We, her friends, were as distressed and as near tears as she - a wrist watch at that age in those days was the most prized

13

possession one could have and we shared Connie's pride in having one.

We had no time to search before getting back to school on time. But I knew what I was going to do and, as fast as I could, I ran home, which was just two blocks from school and on my way. Luckily no one was home - no need for explanations - no need to even run upstairs to my room to kneel beside my bed for the urgent prayer bottled up inside me. The piano bench was closer and quicker. Victor Hugo said, "certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when , whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees". That I know and is the way of most of my prayers, But there are some times when being on my knees is so right as the utmost in direct, concentrated communicative prayer. That was one of those times and only took a minute to say it all.

Running all the way to school and out of breath I barely beat the bell but I was happily anticipating there would be good news for Connie. Which came as quickly as class was assembled; the principal entering the room to report the lost watch had been turned in. I still see Connie's face searching mine for the reason why I so ecstatically blurted out, "I knew it, I knew it". I could never explain how I knew it.

I have had many wonderful experiences with real prayer since those early revelations to further verify for me the dynamic connecting power of prayer with God's omnipotence - enough at long last, in spite of other times of fumbling around with it, to finally find prayer become more and more second nature, as natural as breathing, a continual communicating with God's indwelling Spirit about whatever confronts the moments of my day, hardly conscious of it as being prayer - just the flash of a thought sent upward but always sure of God's clairvoyant understanding of the unspoken. How often is my conscience piqued with annoyance with myself that the thought prayer will /JA'

not/flashed in time to check the impulsive silly meanness in me or temper the nasty ' critical comment about another. But those times are dwindling down . There was a time when awareness of the available indwelling God's Spirit had little viability in my way of thinking and being. That changed with the closer walk that brings such joy, love, and aspiration that there is less and less room for whatever is contrary to that unity.

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There was a period of time when my prayer life was dull, merely dutiful, so mechanical, discouraging and sporadic that I gave it up all together for a time as a meaningless, ineffective ritual. The moot question is - were my prayers empty because I was empty or was I empty because my prayers were? The communication between Spirit and spirit must be real. How many prayers must of themselves fall on deaf ears they have never gotten off the ground.

What can you expect of a prayer that has no heart, addressed to a far-away God, void of reality and trust - recited prayers that issue from the self-centered, stiffnecked, self-righteous soul that has no intention of ever forgiving, without some retaliation and a vengeance, that one unforgivable grudge producer - the prayer that presumptuously blueprints for the Lord just what and how His answers should be, exacting God's promises to the size of its own mentality and interpretation - the prayer that asks God to take sides, try to curry His favor in allowing triumph over another of His children rather than the granting of free for the asking guidance and strength needed for doing one' s best whatever the outcome, making good use of whatever the outcome.

The prayer that is afraid of asking, unsure if it comes within the realm of God's will, within God's good nature to accord. The timid prayer that hasn't learned we find God's will through the praying. It is not required of us first to determine to our little mind's satisfaction just what His will is before we can pray rightly and ask boldly. The Lord at least is not confused about it - He will make the answer plain enough to the earnest prayer that has within it the understood yielding of self-will. We need less worry about discerning His will and more teachable contented desire to do it.

There's the prayer that hesitates to ask for the needs of our mundane daily lives.

Maybe God should not be bothered with them - He has "bigger fish to fry" and there is so much He must concern Himself about all over our world and those beyond. In Dick VanDyke's delightful book, "Faith, Hope, and Hilarity" (a child's eye view ofreligion), he gives the prayer of a little boy who, after listening to adults worrying about the conditions of the world, said, "God, take good care of yourself - if anything happens to 15

you, we're all sunk".

There's also the prayer that puts its own human binders on the limitless power of the Almighty to perform the impossible, the miraculous, letting its own faith, mind, and experience decide what the Lord is willing and able to do - perhaps thus denying himself the chance to ever find out.

And the last ditch prayer that says half-heartedly and ungraciously maybe God can do - nothing else has worked. Some ruggedly proud characters, who have never as much as nodded to God before, may not be able to humbly ask of a stranger. Or with scarcely concealed arrogance take the attitude "all right now, God, here's your chance to prove yourself to me11 • There is also the prayer that dies on the lips before the barrier that failure with sin has erected, the sense of unworthiness too heavy for yet another approaching, standing on the outside ashamed and wanting to weep alone. Only those who have known and loved the reality and closeness of God's presence can long endure the guilt and estrangement that creeps into that relationship with the repeated yielding to bad habits that have had their reckonings with the Lord many times before in fervent prayer for their needed eradication.

"Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" - that was a stickler for me. For some time I could not repeat those words in the Lord's Prayer without one unforgivable (I thought) face interjecting itself and giving me pause. And I contentiously wanted to make a point that, while God does forgive, there is still chastisement for wrong that we need for our own good, for our own learning. And, if there is someone who has clearly wronged you and others with a pattern of treachery and underhanded manipulation about which a plain talk confrontation availed nothing, doesn't continuing forgiveness simply encourage a continuing of the same pattern? Aren't there those who will not learn any better - for their own good - except by the sharp bite of the sharp snub and don't we only contribute encouragement to obvious character delinquencies with too charitable forgiveness, mistaken for condoning?

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Counterpointing such contentions was the self-accusation of sitting in stiff-necked self-righteous judgment of another with no inclination of heart to try to understand what inherited temperamental or circumstantial influences may have triggered and shaped the ambitions and personality quirks so offensive to me - little inclination either to take any pot shots at what quirks of character I have that offend others.

But I wasn't ready to forgive until there was some sign of reason to trust. It seemed almost unfair for the Divine to expect the "oh-so-undivine" to manage forgiveness as big and wise as His own. To have an active long lasting animosity or grudge against another is not really natural with me. When it happens, it bothers me, I'm sure, more than the one to whom my hostility is directed. It's been said in effect that we do homage to whomever we allow our minds and ill-will to dwell upon. Abraham Lincoln said, "most of us are about as happy as we make up our minds to be" . I'm sure from what we know of his character that he made that observation after experiencing his own steady reliance on the Lord for his spiritual equilibrium in the midst of brutal afflictions and personal trials.

In my own case, when time was not doing this usual ameliorating of my feelings, I finally had to take them helplessly to the foot of the Cross. It was a situation I could not manage to just walk away from and the tensions continued to build up to further upset and occupy my mind, taking its toll in me and my relationships with others, particularly keeping me out of tune with the Lord.

So I came to a real "put up or shut up" time, finally acknowledging I could no longer expect the needed and desired God's forgiveness for my own brand of waywardness until I was willing to extend it to another. It became a rock-bottom truth that was through with any more of my evasions, debatings, reasoning away nonsense.

The situation that I had thought was wickedly and totally uncalled for began to seem like a God appointed case in point He intended for my personal discipline and growing up.

After deliberately, honestly, and trustfully turning my problem and myself over to the Lord, I waited for His sure handling of what I could not do by myself.

17

And in the waiting I began to know first hand God's cleansing power, how real His redemptive, atoning, liberating purpose can be when we, as conscious participants, willingly bring our own shortcomings to the Cross for their crucifixions. The very thought of being implicated and sharing in Christ's ordeal for our saving shames our sinful ways and silly complaints out of our stricken hearts. How wonderful and beyond comprehension are God's ways, how deep His caring, how sufficient His mercy and grace for the training and discipline we must have for that required cooperation with Him - the "we must before He can". Our human relationships are the actual proving ground of how either truthful or pretentious we are in following what we can know of God's Word to us. God sees both our human frailties and divine potentials - he doesn't ask the impossible of us but He is able and responds to the seeking heart, he equips us with both guidance and strength for the being and doing and stresses always we stay close through the channel of prayer at all times, gratefully giving Him the Glory.

If we remain merely poor imitators of Christ's example, uninvolved in that crucifixion, we can never in our own might and main or by self-flagellations ever successfully handle our own mischievous consciences, uncharitable attitudes and behavior.

Or ever come to know the blessed release from those besetting warring human instincts or learn the glorious trust in God's power within us to do for us. The Lord is both good and wise in requiring of us, if we His children expect to ever be pleasing in His sight, that we love one another, try to understand and in love forgive (which in love is healing and not confused with soft condoning), before coming to Him in prayer and going on about how much we love Him. It can't be true. He knows the bitterness still rankling within us for another and He tells us what we do to others we do to Him. He would have us not only forgive, then forget, but go on to the advanced lesson of being willing to help carry the other's burden. That can come as a surprise if we think we've already come a long way in forgiving and forgetting but it does much more in changing the complexion of our thinking. Declaring love for Him while hating a brother or sister only makes Him sad, anxious for all of us and makes us unworthy of His Fatherly concern.

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We can honestly admit to not liking all we see in another but with understanding and our eye focused on God's brand of love - agape, as it is called - and marvel at His patience with all of us, there is little inclination then left to look so hard and narrowly at a difficult object, a negative circumstance. The word "hate" applied to another human being becomes an obscenity we never use. Liking is another thing when applied to what that human being does. Christ hated the sins of the money lenders desecrating the Temple but He loved and cared for the souls of those same sinners.

A truly contrite heart gladdens God's own and we find whatever seems unjust and difficult to let go can go limp in the thought of the warm beneficence of His smile, the feel of harmony and the cleansing goodness of the free-flowing "living waters" that personifies God's love. In prayerful trust we do learn of Him - that His yoke is easy, His burden light - He is fully able to carry both us and our burdens when we draw near to His leading, willingly yoked with Him. Then we wonder why it has taken us so long to learn such vital truth centered only in God Himself, His atonement and His working within us.

It took such a long time for me to arrive at the point of honestly relinquishing

every bit of my own self-will to God's, with no little secret withholdings, rewordings, evasive mental shenanigans. Often I wanted to claim a vagueness in knowing just what God's will was in particular cases but that is when the need for the closer walk is most apparent which has a way of dispelling the question about His will - just assurance that it is good, that God has His way of keeping our priorities straight and we come to know the questions that arise are the grist for growth in knowing God's nature and purpose for us.

I had to come to see that being totally subjective to God's will was not an abject surrender of my God-given mind, will, and personality, but a positive healthy response to a loving invitation that would allow these same individual attributes of being to expand beyond themselves. And leave behind that little unnecessary fearful crippling reluctance that more would be required of me that I would want to assume, that my precious

19

independence would somehow be threatened as well as the possibility of a change in comfortable lifestyle to perhaps a religiosity gone overboard, a fanaticism with which my friends would be uncomfortable, a change which wouldn't really be me.

I have learned more and more how good and wise and constant God is; how safe and blessed it is to surrender to Him and His power for us, to rightfully give Him absolute first place in life. He didn't promise me a rose garden of my own ima~nings but the flowers and fruits of the garden He has provided have been my soul's dee6need, shelter, fortification, and best fortune. He has never Jet me down and He has let me be me - only, bit by bit, better. Encouraging! Gently, even in the chastisement, He turns up the wick of my dim lamp for new and blessed brighter light to follow Him. And, as I more consciously stop, look, and listen for what He would have me take to heart, the days take on new fresh excitement, joy and meaning. Almost forgotten incidents in my life come "out of the blue" back to mind vividly for insights I was blind to at the time.

Until the constant attitude of prayer became part of my being, I had much to learn and will continue to learn until face to face I know even as I am known. But long past now are those times I once asked God if He was really real - was I merely talking to myself in a kind of self-hypnosis, trying to bolster myself with half-hearted, half-believing hopes that seemed too good to be true. My thoughts were constantly wandering off and, if and when recalled, would fall back on trying to concentrate on the Lord's Prayer to give more substance to the process. I had to strain to catch the full impact of the prayer Jesus outlined for the Disciples when they asked that He teach them how to pray. But I had committed it to memory before it was committed to heart and understanding. Until each thought contained in such nutshell conciseness had by degrees expanded in meaning for me, it was recitation too often with the mind far afield.

My prayers often felt canned. Like another little character in Dick VanDyke's book - the sweet child who assured her mother that she had said her prayers the night before and added, "when I got on my knees I began to think that God hears the same old stuff every night so I told Him the story of 'The Three Bears' instead". I am sure the 20

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Lord would want to hug her in delight, finding her story more interesting and refreshingly honest than many long-winded, heart-absent recited prayers. Christ rejected the Pharacee's showy loud prayers meant to be heard by men rather than God. I have a copy of John Baillie's "Diary of Private Prayers", badly frayed after twenty years use. Beside each page's morning and evening printed prayers for the month are blank pages for writing in other prayers one wishes to keep, one's own or those of others that have special meaning. They pick up lagging spirits at the dull times; speak for and heighten the exultation of the high moments; straighten out moody kinks in human nature that need attention; makes intercessory prayers for the needs of others and country very definite and urgent, often sparking a continuing prayerful dialogue about other matters with the indwelling Holy Spirit, at other times so satisfactorily and completely expressed for me that all I can add are fervent amens. These preserved prayers, both the printed and scribbled in, have been so helpful to me I would like to share some of them as a supplement in the back of this book in the hope they may become part and parcel of someone else's life as well.

When we neglect true prayer our spiritual life withers for lack of the vitalizing current direct from God. I know prayer is the beginning of any spiritual revelations and does not go unanswered - if not immediately, the answers do eventually become plain the "no" may have led to a much better "yes".

Every real prayer I ever trustfully

directed to God has had its answer, not always as I with my short sight perhaps hoped for at the time but certainly in the long run as best for me, as I begin to see God's pattern in my life. A caring God who can see at once both the soul's need and its best solution.

Prayer is a constant two-way blessed communicating that gives the indwelling Holy Spirit its chance to assure, instruct, strengthen, and brighten each day and the soul its need to open up, be itself, express its repentance, its love and gratitude, its needs, trust an dependence.

There is a three-way blessing in our intercessory prayers for other's good: For God Himself and His pleasure in knowing His children are sensitive to the needs of 21

others; for ourselves in broadening our vision and aligning our concerns with God's own; and for whomever our prayers have been extended. We can make a good habit of asking God's blessing on every passing unhappy brow-furrowed face encountered.

Prayer wells up quite naturally and gratefully when our soul's spirit reaches for the Holy Spirit in true relationship, knowing that, however mysteriously beyond our comprehension is the Almighty God of Creation, He has a yearning for us and will stoop to our needs and understanding for the vital effective relationship He desires with us.

Not to be able to approach Him just as we are would lead to silence and estrangement, as arid and joyless as living a bottled up life, never really communicating by word, look, or gesture with the one you love or ever confiding comfortably with one's good friend .

As in communicating one's feelings with one's spouse, there are times when we don't get through to each other - estranged but certainly not strangers. Even a marriage that may be richly blessed with loyal, enduring, protective love may not have minds and temperaments that exactly ditto each other every minute. Unless both are extremely able to keep disagreements from becoming disagreeable, occasions will pop u路p when sparks can fly - both partners may be of a mind they'd gladly trade each other off for a shetland pony - knowing all the while it is only tantrum talking. But love remains and we can know the comfort that Dinah Craik wrote about in her poem "Friendship" "Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, Having neither to weigh thoughts, nor measure words but pouring them all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, Certain that a Faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and, with the hand of kindness, blow the rest away."

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CHAPTER 3

A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN

There was a time God said "no" when I prayed so frantically that my younger sister Evalina would not die. She had been hurt in a coasting accident. Sliding down hill "belly-buster", a friend was kneeling over her when the sled crashed into a tree. The friend's knee came down heavily on my sister's chest, breaking a rib that punctured her lung. Rushed to the hospital she was in a coma for three days under an oxygen tent and I was with her as much of the time as was allowed. It was unthinkable that someone as good and dear and young as she would die. I was then a Senior in High School and she in the eighth grade.

On her last day I had slipped away for a quick bite at the little cafe across from the Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, feeling sure that, even though she was still unconscious, she was going to recover. But in that half hour things changed. When I returned my parents were crying - the oxygen tent was removed and the doctor only shook his head compassionately at the frightened look in my face.

I was immediately on my knees beside her bed, tugging at her hand and with all my desperate determined might trying to force her will and strength to keep fighting for her life, breathing with her every labored gasp of air she could manage, each effort shaking the bed.

The long struggle for breath ceased, her body relaxed and quieted, and suddenly her eyes lit up with the most beatific smile I have ever seen, her face aglow and awestruck wonderment and a radiance I simply can never describe. My sobs and urgings were suspended in mid-air and I felt on the very brink of having Heaven's great mystery unfold right before me. But only for an instance before I realized it was not meant for me yet but I was shaken to my depths by the unmistakable utter happiness in Evalina' s face. In awe I whispered aloud, "\Vhat does she see?" and then she was aware of me and turned her face towards me and now clearly conscious she looked directly into my eyes, the radiance quickly cJouded over with concern and pity for me that I should have tears 23

streaming down my face. As clearly as if she had spoken aloud, her eyes said, "Oh, Ellen, if you could only know", and I felt my prayer had been out of order, very willingly I relinquished her to the joy that was hers, knowing in a flash my grief was only for myself needing time to get used to the physical parting.

Of all the basic beliefs and assurances we have of life beyond this here and now none can speak with more absolute, completely wonderful certainty than that one last moment of seeing Evalina's rapture mixed with pity for me that I should be weeping.

Anyone foolish enough to waste time ever trying to tell me dead is just that - foolish.

How doubly sad for those who must face the fact of losing dear ones here with no real assurance that they are safe in those everlasting arms wherever "there" is.

I have

sympathized deeply with those left to grieve and to be saying goodbye for now at funerals but the sadness is never any bitter murmuring against God's will in taking that soul home.

I love this life here and want to live it fully as long as I'm meant to. There is no dread of death for me - if the choice were ours to make, I would not want to miss it, the next big adventure. Anymore than I would have wanted to miss being born into this life here, which is part of the same mystery - the mystery of when and how the soul enters as life in our bodily frames, so marvelously fashioned .

I make no assumptions or

speculations about any details of life after death - it is enough to only remember Evalina' s rapture and I'm content to wait for the knowing.

The closest I can come to an analogy for eternity's progression is the familiar one of viewing the human soul's advancement with that of the butterfly. The essence of its life is there in all its continuing stages - larvae, cocoon, and the blossoming of the lovely winged butterfly.

It is at least pleasant to think on, marveling at the mystifying

transformations that develop, wondering if it might be true of man's blossoming soul as well.

This "here" is one part of eternity we are aware of and our preparation and growth for the next "there". In our Father's House are may Mansions. Our preparation here makes a difference if we have any care about what kind of mansion we have hopes

24

for. But our motives, principles, and sights should not be concentrating on those "stars in our crowns", "getting our rewards in heaven" . I wince when anyone comments to the effect that I am entitled to any heavenly rewards for any possible good I might do here.

Doing what we can as our grateful response to God's abiding love and for his Glory alone, not ours, is itself the soul's true desire and reward ever. We can never do enough - we can never be enough but God's grace covers for us.

We are meant to live as citizens of this age and the age to come. It was Cicero who said, "There is, I know not how, in the minds of men a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence and this takes the deepest root and is most discoverable in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls". I can not claim to be either a genius or a most exalted soul but I

do~w instinctively, with a deep natural trust in such an instinct, that v

this is true.

Our life here is but eternity's flick of the wrist and not to see this life measured by eternity and against the day of judgment is to miss the very essence oflife's meaning.

Goethe said of immortality, "those who hope for no other life are dead even in this one".

And I like what Cicero said further, in speaking of that presage of a future existence: "When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past and such capacity of penetrating into the future; when I behold such a number of arts and sciences and such a multitude of discoveries thence arising, I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself can not IJV'T be immortal".

What would Cicero, who lived a hundred years before Christ, think of the multitude of discoveries that have taken place in the ages since the time he regarded with amazement. Think of all that has taken place in just the past one hundred years. The world in Cicero's days had yet to discover the earth was round - the idea of a trip to the moon would have been too fanciful to imagine. Electric light at the flip of the switch would have boggled his mind.

Awed as he would be by the stupendous output of man's creative mind, I wonder

25

what kinds of grade he could give to man's moral progress. Has our human nature made any comparable advances? I listen to seemingly astute knowledgeable persons expounding on the networks their impressive reasons for the necessity of more and more escalation of our war weaponry as our one dependable defense against "them". I have to fight the depression that wants to overwhelm me and I begin to wonder how long God will continue to let us off the hook, if we are not actually in the predicted last years, as so many others are now taking seriously - is this the limit our own stupidities can take us to?

Our world has gotten so crowded together; other countries no longer strange far flung places but as close as the button on our television s,ets; jet planes circle us around the globe in faster and faster flying time; media coverage of news; closer looks at governments through interviews with heads of state; panel discussions; watchdogging and investigations - why, oh why, in these times of easy communication possibilities, should it remain so stubbornly hard to see other people as people, to try to understand and accept them as God's children, however different our ways, stages of development, however mistaken, lost, depraved, indifferent, greedy, tricky, exploitive, striving, erring, ignorant, good, caring, or wise we like to judge ourselves and others. Those to whom some light has been given and are in a better position to help build a better world, when that light and ability remains of no good avail to others, those souls must be of more exasperating concern to the Great Shepherd than His ~d concern for those other lost sheep who just don't know any better.

Christianity today, in the estimation of many believers, seems a far cry from that of its early proponents, the disciples and martyrs who struggled and gladly paid with their lives that the good news of the Gospel might be established in every heart. Today it is honored , it has a respectable, if somewhat devitalized, good community standing; flexible enough in interpretation to adjust to most anyone's opinions; there is little difficulty to claiming the name without the game, it is easy; it is useful for one's public image and oratory but not expected to carry real clout with them in the nitty-gritty practicality of

26

solving any of society's corporate problems or the world's wrongs in which human beings are caught up.

It would be interesting to have a Cicero long view estimate of any moral

advancement mankind may or may not have made since his day. History may keep repeating itself but do we as a whole inch ahead ever so slightly - forgetting the vocal unlovely deviants usual in every age? Dr. Laubach in his book "The World is Learning Compassion" gives us good reason to think better of man's efforts. But he too asked if it was a true refinement of heart and senses or have our discoveries and circumstances Q,:;IC I/ ' r

scared certain restraints upon us, making us behave and do what Christians ettl: to have V been doing already all these past centuries. What affects those in other parts of our world affects us too and must force us to begin to work for lasting peace in new ways, with new understanding and less self-centered nationalism. Good sense must finally acknowledge that Christ's way is the only real and lasting way to peace and good will on our earth .

All the horrors of modern nuclear warfare and the tensions and threats of the godless may be good for us - for all mankind - it may be God's way of saying to us, "Say, You, when are you going to start to practice what you preach of My Word to you?

You've had centuries of history repeating itself of man's inhumanity to man - plenty of time and experience to learn the folly and wretchedness and futility of disregarding divine admonitions. You were created with minds to use - why don't you - for your own good?

Another war, with the "smart" weapons you have noWperfected and counting on, and v you'll find yourselves blown off the face of the earth you were meant to preach the gospel to". It may be God's way of finally getting our full attention - telling us our own age faces a crisis and a choice preceding centuries could not have known because of today 's technical advances - man's inventions that are capable of such good or such destruction. A choice all sensible men and nations concerned about their own survivals must universally ascribe to and work as diligently for as they have done in mobilizing for destruction. Satan and

God ~ ~ow plainly confronting each other - we can't go on v

forever not making our choice. Do we have enough confidence in God and His working

27

through us to match will and action to our words, to our prayers "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven"?

However our final demise here, at individually appointed times or by global holocaust, there is resurrection for the souls aligned to God's promises. It was Harry

t:Jlf.4-4.0

Emerson Fosdick who helped me see death as another birth - its/ of the unknown drezd., the pain, and new life. He pointed out that we can not remember our own physical birth, our soft snug confinement in our mother's womb; the painful shock to our bodies when we emerge into this world. If we could have our "druthers", we probably would have clamored for the comfort of the womb.

A true story, told to me by a close friend about someone she knew of, parallels the written records of many others who have had their glimpses of life after this one.

A young mother of two pre-school boys and a wife of an adoring young man was in a coma in the hospital and not expected to live. In her coma she heard the doctor and the nurse exchange some words to the effect that her end was eminent and she thought of her two little boys and distraught husband. She prayed earnestly she might be given long enough time to see her sons safely grown and then she saw Christ standing at the door in light all around Him. He smiled at her and she knew her prayer was answered.

With the realization she gave a deep happy sigh, which the doctor took to her last breath.

"She's gone", he said as he reached for her pulse. "Oh, no, Doctor", she told him, "I just saw Jesus". She lived not only to raise her boys but also with new assurance that death is not a dreadful end but a new adventure to anticipate.

My very favorite book of fiction, given to me by my husband forty years ago, is Christopher LaFarge's "Each to the Other" - a beautiful novel in verse in which the main character, Tom Cottrell, recounts in first person the events of his life so remarkably that every nuance of his thought and feelings in all the episodes becomes a life-breathing part of the reader's also. At least it was for me and, when his lovely young wife Judith was killed in an accident, I felt and shared with the bereft Tom all his personal shock and grief. But then there was the comfort of the epilogue in which Tom says in part, "What!

28

Death a tragedy? No, it is sorrow, it is a pain so deep that it delays always the breath a little.

But not tragic.

No, there'd be tragedy in the small, the false hatreds and

jealousies, in the petty spites, the mean dilemmas of divided love .. . . . " and he continues a long list of other tragedies of the unfulfilled, unhappy lives in this here and now. The closing stanzas are a glorious outpouring of his gratitude for the love they had known.

Death does not matter, can not touch.

The glimpse of heaven I saw so clearly in the face and eyes of my sister Evalina as she went on beyond the limits of my horizon, returns vividly to mind whenever death is mentioned or another dear one is called home. Until my own time comes I will not know all the pity in her eyes wanted me to know. If she has her ways now of knowing anything about my own assurance, she will be happy that I can now say - this I know -

"Life is eternal, love is immortal, and death is only an horizon and an horizon is only the limit of our sight". Or, as someone else said so truly and beautifully, "death is not extinguishing the light, it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come".

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CHAPTER 4

THE GREAT PHYSICIAN

Something else the Lord made clear to me when I was in high school was that he is truly the Great Physician.

We all know individuals who go through life always demanding to see the manager, disdaining all underlings. The manager may have given much time, thought, and inspiration, good training and counseling, and wisely assigned duties to those working with him. He and his crew may be working together in true team spirit, sharing the same desire for the good of the company. Such a manager stands by such co-workers, who in turn stand by his directives. There are, of course, poor managers as there are shaggy rabbit characters beneath him who chase the business out the door. But in the highest type management, when the one in over-all charge is constantly and unnecessarily burdened to do what he has assigned to trusted co-workers, it must be very taxing on his patience.

I feel that way about the medical profession. They have special assignments and tremendous responsibilities as members of God's family in caring for the well-being of the others and the finest of them know themselves accountable to God in that caring, fully aware that the healing and final decisions still rests with the Great Physician who said, "Go - heal the sick".

A good friend of mine an exceptionally fine surgeon, once said in casual conversation that he never performed an operation without a keen awareness of God at his shoulder. I trust those whose trust is in the Lord. Dr. Alexis Carrel, late Fellow of American College of Surgeons, recipient of many honors including the Nordhoff-Jung Medal for cancer research and the Nobel Prize for success in suturing blood vessels, wrote with penetrating insight of his deep belief in the power of prayer as being a sure connection and source of energy in tune with the Infinite and the healing vitalizing change it works within us, how it becomes a way of life for us, how necessary it is as the prelude to a better world. He was well aware from his own experiences that many of 30

life's phenomena cannot be scientifically explained. He knew that miracles of healing do take place and he spent weeks at Lourdes studying them, where he witnessed a cancerous sore shrivel to a scar before his eyes.

There do come crisis times when the co-worker must acknowledge his limits in caring and the impossible is given in trust to God. Suclh was my case. I had had a number of appendicitis attacks during high school and finally one so severe I was completely bent over head to knees, unable to straighten up, and the pain so excruciating I could not hold back the screams. Something inside me was about to blow and I knew I was dying. Clara Wiggett, who raised me after my parents had been divorced, was a Christian Scientist and she asked if she might call her practitioner.

I was quite devout myself at that time. I often went with her on Wednesday evenings at her church's testimonial services and I still remember some vivid true stories told there. Her husband was an Episcopalian - sometimes the three of us went to his church's Sunday evening services. I grew up in the Pr,esbyterian Church, always in attendance on Sunday morning, active in its youth's Christian Endeavor and was then teaching bible stories to a fourth grade Sunday School class. While I felt God's presence could be as much at home in one as another, I couldn't hear Him ever claiming proudly, "I am a Presbyterian, or an Episcopalian, or a Christian Scientist, or a Roman Catholic, or a Mormon, a Baptist, whatever"-none have completed wisdom and obedience or a monopoly on God's mercies, grace and light.

II

Grateful that His healing h~ is available to believing mavericks too, I urged her v to please, please hurry, hurry. From my room upstairs I could hear her on the phone below although I couldn't make out the words. Then I drifted off unconscious. About a half hour later I awakened with a blessed sense of relief from any pain. I remember so well the cool feel of the sheets as I stretched my feet down to the foot of the bed, blissfully marvelling at no sign of any hurt as I uncramped my body. Just like that - after days of increasing agony I was well and getting dressed. And never once thereafter did my appendix cause me the slightest discomfort.

31

Twenty years later in another town an interesting discovery was made inside of me. A tubular pregnancy I had finally necessitated a partial hysterectomy and after the operation my doctor came to my room when I was able to visit and he asked me for the history of my appendix. I asked why and he told me it was the big surprise when they had cut into me and it had gone the rounds of the hospital staff. He said they were all # astounded. It was the largest, most malformed thing he had ever s~ blackish and atrophied and curved around my pelvic bone. It must have been on the point of bursting, he said, and he wondered how I could have walked with it. I had danced , skated, swam, golfed, surf boarded with never a twinge of any kind.

I told him about my miracle healing. He was silent for awhile before telling me that medical men often hear of such things and that he too was a believer in the Great Physician. He was a good friend. I remember a time earlier in his presence when I was t)

sounding off a,?<it some church claim I couldn't see that he cut the discussi on short with his quiet "well, all I know is - the Lord in my shepherd".

1 had occasion to remember that miracle healing of mine almost thirty years later when 1 so desperately wanted healing for my niece Beverly, whom I adored. She had to leave the University of Washington in her Sophomore year because of rheumatoid arthritis that developed into lupus erythematosus.

She was young, talented, engaged to be

married, beautiful inside and out. Her loveliest quality, which rubbed off on all who knew her was her real radiant faith and trust in the Lord. It sustained her all her life and at its short end enabled her to meet her Maker with wide open arms.

But how I prayed that she could stay with us. One morning towards the end, when it became impossible for any further artificial means to eliminate uremic poisoning, the doctors told the family that unless her body functioned on its own within the next few hours she could not live. I drove her distraught mother, my sister, to her Catholic church for the solitude of the sanctuary for the urgent prayers crying within us.

One of the things I admired about the Catholic Church was its quiet reverence.

I have often wished our own church had less of the town hall meeting atmosphere buzzing 32

v

with friendly greetings - okay - but seemingly with little awareness of the Lord's presence as well. I was as eager to get to my sister's church as she was. But once inside for some reason my mind felt diverted by the very surroundings and quiet I had sought. It wasn ' t the church's fault - only an inability to concentrate in unaccustomed surroundings. My prayers felt like a record being played over and over, not really getting past the words to the Lord Himself.

And I kept thinking about my own healing so long before and, because Clara had called a practitioner in my case, I felt I must find one now for Bev, whatever the rest of the family would feel about it. I remembered there was a Christian Science church just across from the Deaconess Hospital now long ago giving way to a state highway. I felt I just had to get there as soon as possible. When we returned to the hospital and, saying

nothing at all to the rest of the family, I dashed across the street.

It was a week day morning but I hadn't thought the door at the church would be

locked. When I found it closed, I cried out, "oh, no - no - no" and my body began to shake with the desperation and frustration I felt. But then, the door opened and a slightly built elderly man, who was tending the church, asked me to come in to find out what he could do to help me so obviously in need of it. I explained and asked if he could give me the name of a practitioner - I felt the need of someone nearer to the Lord to intercede for me.

We sat down in the back pew while he briefly tried to suggest someone but sensing the need was too immediate to take time to run someone else down he turned his own mind directly to God to help me, his thin face reflecting the prayerful concentration of his thoughts. A few challenging questions to me about the depth of my faith - I don't remember exactly what he said to quiet me but suddenly the need for the name of anyone else vanished and I realized I had as direct a line to God as anyone else and we have a caring God and I broke in to tell him so. His face lit up as mine had done, and so did everything around us with a strange burst of sunlight flooding through the windows but more than that it came up from all around the pews and dark corners as well. I felt the

33

strangeness of it but accepted it without comprehension or comment. I quickly thanked and blessed the man for talking to me and rushed back to the hospital.

The first news when I got back to Bev's room wa:s that the crisis had just past she had just had her natural bodily elimination. Such joy all around that the Lord had heard and answered our prayers - each in our separated settings and in the specifics we had asked.

She lived past this crisis but God finally did take her home with Him. And when He did I experienced an unexpectedly peaceful relinquishing of her to Him in my own mind. I, who had wept through so many prayers for her recovery, now found tears were past with no bitterness in the parting. The grave had lost its sting. Trust doesn't have to know the how and why of everything.

About a year later my father was in the same hospital with a gall bladder operation and while visiting him on a Sunday there I decided to attend the service of the same little church where its custodian had been so helpful. Filing out after the service I saw him and asked if he remembered me and the circumstances of our meeting. His face broke into a big smile and he said "Of course, of course - I've thought of you so often. There was a strange light that suddenly burst out all around us when you got up to go - the whole church lit up - I've always wondered if you were aware of it too."

I don't even know his name. I would like to have known him better - why didn't I seize the opportunity - he was truly a dear, dear person. That was more than fifty years

ago - he must now have been at least thirty-five years .e

:W3h happily with the Lord

he trusted in so implicitly. I must be content now that our souls were evidently meant to touch fleetingly, with its everlasting unadulterated good to remain permanently precious to me.

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CHAPTER 5

I THOUGHT I WAS SO SMART

Tracing back again. To when I went off to college - a time generally conceded to be rough on the faith of young people being away from home environment. In those days we had no Campus Crusade for Christ International or other religious youth organizations to help transient students keep their heads on straight about spiritual matters. Every minute of my time was so full and engrossed that the only realities were the excitements, the involvements, study pressures and four hours a day part time work.

I would look back on those days I thought were happy enough with more fondness and satisfaction if I could shut my mind's eye to the shame of ignoring the Lord who knocks at our heart's door with his nail-pierced hands and loving concern for us. I made one appearance at morning church service the first Sunday after registering. Thereafter, it seemed a hassle to get there alone and it became easy to drift and be led by the crowd and circumstances. Part of my love for God now is emphasized by the ache and disbelief that I could have so neglected the One most important to life - and gratitude, too, for his continuing faithful love in bringing me through those days of feeling my way. But his understanding of our make-ups, our ignorance, and growing up extends beyond those foolish times.

He holds off judgment, letting sin do its own punishing, while we hold our occasional rap sessions, questioning everything, taking what we think is the hard look but easy bait for kooky ideas and false sense of values, with the reality of God becoming intellectually fuzzy, confused by the differing ideologies, arguing for arguments sake, often glibly vociferously sounding off about half-baked suppositions that pop into heads even as argued - arguments less than skin-deep. As a good friend used to say, "brains get in the way" . Another remark heard since would be a salubrious one for the budding brains of that age period - "it's what you learn after you know it all that counts". And I like the quip that says, "the older I get, the more I listen to those who say little".

I don't mean to sound so scornful of that opinionated and mixed up time of my 35

life. Our degrees of ignorance remain relative anyway and it is all part of this particular Pilgrim's Progress, a part of God's long plan in allowing me to go my way muddling through the isms that sound so plausible before doubts have had their day and I come back honestly His - heart, mind, body, soul, and strength. Doubts have their purpose and time. Like anger - there are timeSwhen anger is inevitable and can be a good thing but V only, as someone pointed out to me, if it is not easily provoked and if it does not linger long and corrode.

We want reality - total, consistent, and constant reality - so does God even though so much remains mysteriously beyond our depth.

"Faith honors God - God honors

faith" . He also honors honesty and it has been said that two men please God - "he who serves Him with all his heart because he knowfHim; and he who seeks Him with all his ~ heart because he knows Him not".

Georgia Harkness has done much for my faith and in her book "Beliefs that Count", she writes that "a person cannot really worship a being about whose very existence he feels uncertain. Doubt is not wholly bad, for it can drive us to serious inquiry. But when doubt possesses the mind and dominates it, faith fades away and persons lose much of the vitality of their religion.

This situation creates a serious

problem for many minds. On the one hand, the whole climate of our time is directed toward a trust in science, applied science that rests on the desire to find out with certainty what can be known about the world of human nature. On the other hand, Christian faith is often defended by repeated assertions that 'the Bible says' ..... without any attempt to recover the historical situation in which the Books of the Bible were written or to get beneath the surface to find out what God is really saying through it. If Christian faith is to be vital, our knowledge of God must rest on firmer ground than either of these procedures".

But, as she states further, "the desire to know the truth is not the only form of man's quest for authority.

He wants to know what he ought to do ... . .. how to

live..... what he can solidly stand on". This book, as well as others by Georgia Harkness, 36

a professor of applied theology, has very lucid helps for those seeking that solid ground for faith to stand on. And how many others, scholars and ordinary laity, have been witnessing and writing of their fir~and insights given to them in the fellowship of God's v Holy indwelling Spirit. I've never known book stores to be so well stocked as they are now with religious materials to meet the interests of such an eager market.

Duva¡r Even though my own period o f â&#x20AC;˘ lasted much too long, the last years of it v unsatisfactory, purposeless, and comparativelyJ>leak, filled only with perpetual pursuit of hectic fun, fun, fun; being in the swim of thitft and adding to our material possessions; ...even though my growth was spiritually stunted most of the time for lack of any spiritual feeding and I do regret all that loss of time - still I might have been only a Juke-warm going-through-the-motions lip-service kind of Christian, taking it for granted thoughtless! y, if I hadn't learned from that prodigal experience of feeling separated from God and unwhole. St. Augustine was so right in saying "You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee" .

More than restless, I was becoming thoroughly unhappy with myself, with my thoughts and actions and attitudes about others and the way my life was going. I just wasn't much of a person without God - we both knew it and He led me back to Him through the kind of reading I felt hungry for.

An English major at college, I had read a great deal and had been an avid book collector when I couldn't afford it, but my reading had been mostly fictional. I looked for the good story, a biographical or historical novel, well laced with philosophy, but too much a book's appeal for me was based more on its literary style than on its content.

Now fiction, unless it was religiously based, became an indulgent luxury of time I could no longer afford. It could wait. I was hungry only for such reading that would help unravel mysteries and verities beyond limited logic, give me reasons for my discontent and help point my way out of it.

But thankfully because of people who were part of my life. Over the years I had read most of the Bible in a hit and miss fashion, many of the passages so familiar I knew 37

them by heart (at least the words); and I was pretty well acquainted with the Bible stories and characters, having taught Sunday School as well as attending since childhood; I knew enough to realize there was too much meaning hidden within it all to be gulped down easily without concentrated, consecrated savoring and understanding. It is a perplexing book and often sounds contrary to itself. I've never been impressed with those proudly proclaiming to have read the Bible from cover to cover x number of time in x periods of time when it appears to have been only an accomplishment without a though provoking, life changing, life lifting experience.

At that time I was in too much of a hurry and not bright enough to try to fathom the Bible myself verse by verse.

I sought the short-cut route of reading the

interpretations, commentaries, daily devotional guides, the "how-to-read-it" books of those who were real Bible scholars and deep-down Christians who had already found what I was seeking. However we do it, the Lord is true to His promise - "seek and ye shall find".

Though I loved Jesus for His loving and sacrificial life, I had my troubles confronting His divinity and His question "who do you say that I am"? It took a long time before the partially true but incomplete, insufficient definitions fell away before the single overriding awesome fact that God did so love this gone-astray world so much that he chose to bodily, visibly enter into our human history at a point in time and in the person of His only Begotten Son Jesus Christ to redeem us; forgive us and take the burden of our sins upon Himself at the Cross; to point the way; to make His purposes explicit to us, His Word becoming flesh to live among us that we might better understand His nature and thereby our own; to assure us His Holy Spirit would dwell within us, available for the needed guidance, power, and strength for those who genuinely respond heart, mind, body and soul to such amazing love.

Such love is more than our human minds can easily conceive but, until we reach that point where we can say in truth, "I can't understand fully how such things can be but I believe - help Thou my unbelief', we remain only on the periphery of what Christianity

38

is all about and what God intended by it. There are other great prophets, teachers, martyrs, and other great souls with God given purposes to do His will, who should be honored for such but not to be confused with God's manifestation of Himself in Christ, as had been prophesied in the Old Testament of God's Word.

The capacity to believe and to love God's kind of love - agape love - are God given gifts we come to recognize as such only after there is human willingness to accept.

Then we begin to experience the evidence taking place within us. Of all the revelations of God's lighting my way, this one realization of God Himself and His Word becoming incarnate in Christ is so basic and climatic of all the rest that I sit lost in the wonder and sacredness of that fact - all further thoughts and words now going mute before such awesome contemplation.

But now later, anticlimactic as it still seems, because others too take such a long time evading Christ's question, "Who do you say that I am"?, and because there is so much starting and developing from that major revelation that wants to be said, I must go on with my own account of God's dealing with me.

I knew at the beginning that God's hand in mine, the impact of His mind on my own mental processes, the persuasions of His heart to mine, would lead me through the telling. When I feel myself officiously taking over apart from Him, I feel the tightening of my Master's grip. Please, God, quicken all of me with all you would have me know 1 be, do - I want no barriers between us. Your way is straight - make mine straight, pl~ Y and honest. Let my witnessing count only for You. Knowing it is a prayer that You continue to grant, I ask again the same benediction my Senior Sunday School class used so often before dismissal - "Enlighten our minds that we may know Thee and let us not be unfruitful in that knowledge". I know Your grace is sufficient for all I need - I love You for it - I thank you for it.

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CHAPTER 6

I BLUSH FOR SOME PRESUMPTIONS

The phenomenal experiences in my life I know God intends for me to disclose but the when and how will be in the course of remembering God's every day providential care for me through the valleys and mountain tops of my life.

The valleys and heights are as much in the realm of my misconceptions of God's Word has been as important in turning my thinking, my attitude and behavior around as any imposed by life's circumstances. And how often, as if to clear my machine, I have shaken my head in wonderment that mankind all down through the ages since early Biblical times discovered these self same truths for his own sake and his own time others have known it all along and here am I just now :realizing it myself - truth ever new , ever old.

And I would see laid in the dust some of those smart stubborn opinions I had held that I fancied made me a rugged individualist not to be taken gullibly in, not needing any kind of mythical crutch to get through life - never aware of my own self-inflicted crippling by such egotistical assumptions. But always such opinions ran ~to a solid wall and died a natural death , inevitable stopped short before the final bid' question and ~ mystery - but how? What? Blind driving force, evolution, mutations and survival of the fittest, a mindless accidental fitting together of elements to make up our universe, vast and minute as it is, were no answers for me. Such attempted ultimates did not create themselves - they all wind up, separately or all together with every other created thing, as manifestations of a Supreme Being who is never done with us - we and His universe are still in the process of being shaped and molded.

To think everything is only

happenstance makes no more sense, as someone pointed out to me once, than picking up handfuls of printers type at random and throwing them at blank pages and expecting a book to take form.

For the want of a defining causal term for that ultimate mystery we have the name God. I remember my first attempt at trying to define God's name for myself or anyone

40

else. I was only a high school student trying to teach Bible stories to a small fourth grade Sunday School class. They listened well to the stories but one little girl wanted a specific answer to her specific question, "Who is God?". Anne Fulton, the beloved head of the Junior Department was close at hand and I asked her how I could possibly answer such ~

a big question. She told us we (or anyone else) coulcyever stretch our minds or find the ~ words to really answer that question. But one simple way to begin to understand what He is like is just to put an extra "o" in the middle of God's name - about as understandable and satisfying and true and adequate as any we can possibly come up with as a starter in truth's realities.

If people say they do not believe in God, they should be asked what their ideas of Him are - chances are we wouldn't believe in their immature versions either. The atheist has no more scientific "proof' for his Non-God than the believer can adequately claim for God - or whatever our interpretation of the term means to us. It was Jaubert who said, "We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define Him".

Atheism wants proof of the pudding before it has even been cooked, let alone eaten.

Being destitute of scientific proof and other things being equal, I asked myself - until questions begin clearing in my mind, why not try, as William James puts it pragmatically to "operate on the hope of being right rather than fear of being wrong".

Pascal put it this way - "should a man happen to err in supposing the Christian religion to be true, he could not be a loser by the mistake. But how irreparable is his loss and how inexpressible his danger, who should err in supposing it to be false". And Levator supports this thought further in stating "all belief that does not render us more happy, more loving, more active, more calm, is, I fear, aJ).d' erroneous and superstitious belief'. So for some time, I was satisfied with this pragmatic view.

During my long estrangement I never became atheistic or lost my deep down reverence for God, the Creator of all things and the vast universe itself - it was only some claims about Him that I questioned. God in His creation of us planted natural instincts within us that innately normally reject the aberrant godless view of life.

41

Even the

v

supposed godless, when saved by the bell from some great impending danger will say, "Thank God"! Doesn't he mean it?

I have had friends - good, decent, kind, intelligent about many things, and loveable - who have declared themselves to be non believers but I haven't taken such declarations seriously. Their minds are in limbo, I tell myself, as mine was. They just need time, and open and searching mind, and exposure to the true person of God in His triune and manifestation to us - as God with us in Christ His Son, as God within us leading and enlightening. Perhaps in their experience they have been presented with only someone else's unappealing caricature if the genuine article that has little resemblance to the Living Presence they could honestly bow down and worship. Trying to reach sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises and interpretations does not solve their minds' quandaries. Or perhaps their lives are so caught up in following other gods of their own ma.king - wealth, career, ambition, pleasure, whatever - that they don't want to be disturbed by, to their minds, such a demanding supreme One God in their lives.

It is not that god has it in for these things in their rightful places, giving additional zest to life. He wants us to be happy children. He would like to see these extra goodies extended to all His children. But he knows for our own soul' sakes that love of these things taking first place in our lives does not lead to the fulfillment, joy and blessedness that can be ours when we are true to the very first Commandment, "Thou shalt have not other gods before Me" . If that is interpreted as God 's jealousy, it is because he cares that much about us His children.

The penalties we pay when we do not take this

commandment to heart, and then find life so much less than it could be, are not signs of God's wrath with us but of His concerned caring and wanting only that we work with anD not against that love for us, the best for us.

Life does not spread to all individuals an equal sameness mental, spiritual,

emotional, and physical equipment and we are pretty much what we have been exposed to and have dealt with.

There are physical factors where the difference in the

chronological and psychological ages of a person do not always visibly show the great

42

disparity that exists between what a grown person appears on the outside and what is in within. There are cases of arrested and/or declining development needing a push in the right direction before inertia lets them settle for the lesser, the poorer, the false.

In my scrapbook of quotations I have wanted to save, I am always arrested by Spurgeon' s statement - "that there should be a Christ and that I should go Christless; that there should be a cleansing and that I should remain foul; that there should be a Father's love and I should be alien; that there should be a heaven and I should be cast into hell, is grief embittered, sorrow aggravated".

Today's ecumenical movement has done much good in eliminating one of the insidious roots of conflict in many minds, who have seen too much "churchianity" confused with Christianity - too much meddling, sanctimonious fanatics unable to differentiate the majors from the minors, who think they alone have seen the light and exhibit smug superiority or pity for the unenlightened. I can understand how one feels in having a churchy tract thrust at them by a stranger with the blunt equivalent of "are Jj

you save"? - implying if you don't know they are there for all your answers. l never 路v know what to do with their assumption that the Lord and I are strangers.

It is true that often in church during that time of questioning for me that I was

quite unimpressed and discouraged with the many who seemed set so stolidly in their regular pews by force of habit with dull faces or nodding heads reflecting nothing really or preoccupied with matters far afield. If there was any radiance in their souls for the gift of the Holy Spirit it was carefully hidden from view.

And there was the old man I had grown up thinking was a nice gentleman , who quite regularly passed the collection plate at the service. Sitting next to my best friend and me one evening at a movie, jhe surreptitiously but unmistakably slid his hand over her thigh and would have kept it there if she hadn't jumped and immediately hustled us both to some other seats - shocked disbelief and disgust thereafter indelibly associated with him in our minds. Perhaps impulse can make fools of even the best at times but I expected more of those adults claiming to be God's elect. It was rather a bleak time then 43

vi

anyway for any real witnessing and inspirational support for the idealism of young people.

I came to know later that God came to call sinners to repent, to be healed and transformed and one way or another and in degrtJ; yiat includes us all. Much later our 1 past minister Lyman Winkle often emphasized in hc:t sermons the influence we all have, V often unbeknownst to ourselves, and his repeated caution for us not to minimize our influence became both challenge and shame.

From somewhere I have recorded in my scrapbook of fortifying thoughts of others one that says "there seems to be three kinds of people - those who always seem to bring out the worst in others; those who consistently make it easy for others to be their best selves; and those who never seem to make any difference to anyone. The Christian who drifts along without any particular influence for good or bad may have a bit of the light of Christ in his life but it makes him no different than those who have no light since he covers it up and keeps it hid. As Luke 11 :33 says "No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar under a bushel basket but on a stand that those who enter may see the light".

Some folks make the darkness darker for their lives radiate only confusion and evil. The person who is successful in helping others to be their best selves has the light of Christ in his own life and lets Christ's influence be seen through him.

A few years ago I saw this graphically illustrated by an incident that to my mind is like a story to be continued many years hence perhaps. I was attending a State Cancer Board meeting in Boise and, after a long day of committee meetings and before trying to condense notes for the next day's general meeting, I switched on the television screen in my hotel room for the evening news. Instead I tuned in to the middle of what I guess was intended to be a discussion on the realities of religion. It was hardly a discussion more of a tirade by a large domineering hostile woman determinedly front center without restraints loudly attacking with scathing scorn anyone who had the temerity to try to stand up against her atheistic point of view.

Her large framed body seemed to be without a trace of tenderness, humor,

44

compassion, understanding or Jove. She scowled like she would snort at the very word "Jove", human or divine. There was something shocking, abnormal and frightening in the force of her hate and scorn, almost as if the very devil himself was embodied within her.

It was like tuning in on a scene of baby chicks suddenly confronting a boa

constrictor - an uneven and unexpected match. I still hear the protesting words and see the face of one thoughtful woman, dismayed and anxious not so much by the clashing opinions as by the hate she felt hanging over them, a hate that was charging the atmosphere and agitating its reciprocal hate.

At the end the loud disclaimer was evidently pleased with herself, thinking she had won the day after she had interrupted, squelched, and sneeringly shouted, "Shame on you - who don ' t you stand on your own two feet - what do you need a God for"? at a man she wanted to seem like a weakling when he tried valiantly to cut through the hate polluting the air to get across in such an atmosphere something of what the Lord meant to him. Seemingly unsuccessful, he retired before her vitriolic summation of him without undoubtedly his male ego for the moment smarting but with something greater the victor.

The triumph of the meek and mild leaving her to Heaven - to the God of love and

<-f'

ultimate judgment - He whom she railed against bu~ whose Word can not be mocked. \../ I think the man must have felt the evident warmth of understanding hearts there present radiating toward him for his efforts. She might have thought she was a winner but what had she really won?

There was anger in the depths of our dirty black hearts that wanted her struck down then and there for her blasphemies - our _human revengeful impulses finding it too difficult at the moment to forgive and to successful1y emulate Christ's capacity for compassion. I wrestled with my own feelings about her most of the night, with the necessary notes scantily attended to.

But the God who knows all the infirmities of all His wayward creatures, loves regardless. He was able to pity and love those who drove nails into His hands and feet while reviling Him. But for all His love - or because of it - He cannot be a soft indulgent 45

God - punishment is sure, which we bring on ourselves.

"The Law of the Lord is

perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgment of the Lord is true and righteous altogether. By them we are warned".

My reaction to the woman that evening was that she was so destructive to the human spirit that she shouldn't be given television time - the same way I reject physical violence on the air. Only later did I begin to see a compensating beneficial feature to such a program - forcing a good lesson, if nothing else, on what not to be. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right in stating that the first lesson in history is that evil is good. A concept that our emotions and minds have difficult with at first until we come to realize that down through history it has generally been true that when evils have grown insufferable they reach the point of combative resistance and cure. Evil is evil in itself but how we combat its threat to ourselves and God's Kingdom is the good that character may grow on and develop some spiritual muscle.

We need the wrestling, never taldng the good for

granted. We don't learn patience if nothing ever tries our patience; we don't know the true meaning of love if only the loveable are included; we don't find the depth of our commitment if it is never challenged for performance.

For me there was a second installment of this woman's serialized true life story ( so it appears to my thinking) when I accidently again turned in on another television program on which she appeared in the past few years. Again it was in the middle of the program and I have yet to know her name, about which I have little curiosity except to wonder what will become of her eventually.

This time the scenario was quite different and so were my feelings about her. She hadn ' t changed but her hate has lost its impact. The others participating in an orderly, calmer, more controlled discussion were not baby chicks but mature minds made wise by study and application, sure of the foundations of their faith and well able to hold their own with sound reasoning for their surety without sarcasm and meanness. The closest touch of the razor's edge came from a man who remarked dryly to the effect that,

46

whatever the woman's personal opinion of the Lord was, He would continue His reign as He has from the beginning of time, to which the audience in toto responded with I:>

smiles and chuckles. My own thoughts went to a prayer by E. Stanley Jones copies:-into my book of prayers - "O God, we have been feverishly trying to support Thy universe with our puny arguments. We are like those who would organize a society for the protection of the sun when someone slings mud at the sun. Forgive us and help us to trust implicitly in Thy self-authenticating truth" .

I ~路t know if I'll ever see any further installments of this woman's life story but inevitablacomes the day of crumble for that physical body trying so stridently to proclaim 拢./ its own supposed self-made, self-sufficient might; for that mind she has such evident selfpride in, unaware of willfully, stubbornly stunting its development in a genuine inquiry for truth; for the heart she has steeled against giving or admitting love. I pray, in spite of the feeling she would now jeer such a prayer, that for her own sake, she may before that inevitable time, see the foolishness, the needlessness and poverty of her life of bitterness.

All things are possible. There was Saul struck down and blinded on the road to Damascus and, instead of Saul the determined official persecutor and exterminator of the new Christian.,s he became Paul, the great believer and wonderful writer and proponent V of Christianity. During his physical blindness new light dawned on his soul. Perhaps on that Damascan road , before being struck down and hearing the Lord's words beating at his soul, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?", the recent sight of the stoning of Stephen in which he had participated haunted him - unable to shake off the sight of the goodness and faith of such a man taking the stones and reviling and yet able, with face turned steadfastly to heaven, to pray for his tormentors, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge".

For many saying "yes" to the Lord as the Lord of one's life does come

hard. Robert G. Tuttle, the joyful, well balanced, spirit filled Christian who wrote "The Partakers", tells in it that he was afraid of a powerful God who can and will change us if we yield to Him. He said, "I honestly believed that it would be easier for me to die

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than it would be for me to become a Christian. I was afraid of the yes with a diving catch; the 'yes' that entails other 'yeses':â&#x20AC;˘ Tuttle went on to say "I recently had lunch with a man who kept emphasizing how God's gift is free, and then, being reminded of my initial struggle with God, I added, 'true, but if you accept the gift, you belong to the Giver. The Giver - He is my problem' I was certain that He was some kind of benign killjoy. It never occurred to Jtle that all God wanted for my life was that i should get everything good in life that is so much a part of abundant living. I had no cause to fear such power. The Holy Spirit wouldn't embarrass me; I wouldn't have to appear strange and self-righteous. After all, my being a Christian doesn't make me better than anyone else, it makes me better than I was. Furthermore, God didn't wish to put me into a box.

I could still be reasonably free. In fact, I could receive not only His gift of salvation, but all His good gifts and still be genuinely me".

To me knowledge and wisdom are two separate but contiguous things and are never humanly complete or completed but an every growing unfolding realization. I wonder at times if I seem to others like the story of the man who ran around excitedly urging his neighbors to hurry on over to his barn - he had just discovered the sun - it was beaming a stream of light through a knothole in his dark barn . We are all in different stages and degrees of development. We arrive wherever we are through such varying environmental circumstances,

heredities, temperaments, influences,

talents and

capabilities. God sees them all and He bids us learn to look at others as He looks. He came not to condemn but to save; to set us free of our own crippling misconceptions and presumptions.

I remember an early morning a long time ago I was making my hurried way to something on a deserted back street in Sandpoint and approaching me was a man who was very tipsily recovering from a long night of drinking. Barely able to navigate, he weaved unsteadily towards me. The haughty self-righteousness in me figuratively drew my tidy self together to meet this dishevelled derelict with the scorn I felt. Just as we

w'

met we exchanged glances and in a startled instance I sai someone totally different. This v

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man's physical likeness to my dear father in all but his clothes and drunkenness was so amazing it caught my breath and in a twinkling of an fjje - and his did have that same twinkle I often had seen in my father - that distaste I

h~was

now turned against myself.

There but for the grace of God went my father and how fighting angry I would have been at any snip who could have scorned him ... . . My father never drank and I can't imagine him ever in such a condition, but, since that moment, I have so often thought of thatpan with a fondness, wondering what could have put him in his situation and invariabt. with the v thougJfgoes up an apology and a prayer for him.

Some of my hesitation in speaking of the things of God comes from having learned how often I have operated under misconceptions and that opinions of mine could have been responsible for turning others off in search of truth. God, deliver me from being a spiritual know-it-all. Keep me so in tune with You that I am cleansed in the deep places - the faults secret even to myself - that I may not be guilty of being anyone else's stumbling block.

I don't want to confuse evangelizing with proselytizing.

Anderson Haley's poem "Intolerance" cuts sharply: Across the way my neighbor's windows shine, His Roof tree shields him from the storms that frown, He toiled and saved to build it staunch and brown, And, though my neighbor's house is not like mine, I would not pull it down.

With patient care my neighbor too had built A house of faith wherein his soul might stay A haven from the winds that sweep life's way.

It differed from my own - I felt no guilt -

I burned it yesterday.

Ooooooooh, as I say, God, deliver me from the careless word.

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Molly

CHAPTER 7

ROOTS

I may perhaps come back later to the dawning of light on some of my misconceptions but now I feel some of the circumstances of my life that had their impacts want telling.

What can I say about my childhood? I seldom speak of it - some of it I have wanted at times to blot from memory, acutely aware of being one of nine children all growing up like Topsies in a messy home where Mother seemed blissfully unaware that the other women in the neighborhood must have looked askance at her ways of child raising and house keeping. She was like a happy-go-lucky inattentive child herself, with a good-natured kind of sentimental affection for us without realizing any responsibility for seeing that we were regularly fed, clothed, and disciplined. She was never unkind.

I can't remember ever hearing her scold any of us.

I loved my mother in spite of

wanting her to be more mother, which is something I could never admit to myself even until I was full grown and could think of her aside from the fact that she was my mother.

Sometimes, although I never felt it was necessary, I'd ask her permission to go someplace or do something and she would seem surprised and pleased that I did and the answer would be "yes, if you want to" - but I didn't really want to - I wanted her to say "no" like the other girls' mothers. She never questioned where we went or when we returned.

I don't think it was indifference - it was just that she didn't know it was up to her. She liked for me to brush her hair and that was when I felt closest to her and protective - like she was the child and I the mother.

I remember one wonderful day when I was in the first grade - all of it vividly.

Mother awakened me on a Sunday morning to tell me our neighbor, Mrs. Oliver, was going to take me to Sunday School at the Presbyterian Church, where she was the primary department head. And another glorious surprise was a pretty new dress and beautiful high shoes of a red velvety material between the shiny black patent leather bottoms of the shoes and a band of the same at the top, with about ten pearly buttons up the sides. The most elegant things I had ever owned and all for me.

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Mother was as excited as I was while she helped me into the dress and , hoisting me up seated me on the table's edge and, supporting each of my newly shod feet against her soft tummy, she zipped the buttons through their loops with a button hook.

I

remember the long self-conscious tongue-tied walk with Mrs. Oliver, managing to tell her I had a penny for the collection. And the distressing realization when the collections \.

were taken that somewhere I had lost the penny. What would Mrs. Oliver think - I saw she saw. I never found out or tried to explain.

I remember too the fate of those shoes while they were still new and so beautiful.

I shouldn't have had them on in the first place - spring rains had made great puddles everywhere. Our grocery store in those days made deliveries and when it stopped near me the wagon's tail gate was extended, inviting the impulse to hang on and hitch a short ride.

Which I did for about a block before dropping off.

But to my horrified

consternation I landed in the middle of a large dirty puddle that came more than half way up the lovely red velvet shoes. Sneaking into the house unnoticed, I hid the shoes in the closet, hoping to put off as long as possible the punishment I knew I had coming. Only it never came.

Maybe Mother had forgotten all about the red shoes or maybe she

guessed what was making me so quiet and unhappy . She never said anything about them.

I remember my first attempt to cook dinner, finally breaking into tears because the water in the pot with some vegetables wouldn't get hot before my father entered the kitchen and explained that the stove had to be stoked steadily with more than little kindling for the fire to stay alive. Another day I tackled a mountain of dirty clothes without knowing what I was doing, wetting them down with more than our old-fashioned wash machine could be expected to accommodate and then baffled with what to do without soap and small hands unequal to wringing out such a load or reach the top of our clothes line. I have no recollection how that fiasco ended.

And there was a time when we were alone and I felt in charge of my five younger brother and sisters - I was only in the sixth grade myself. I was determined we would have our lunch of sandwiches together as a regular family around the large sturdy

51

octagonal table my father had built. And we were going to say grace, as I had seen it done at my friend 's house. Not knowing the words for any, I substituted the Lord's Prayer and they were going to ?epeat it with me or else. I need not have been so bossy and stern - I still see their faces looking at me with interested surprise and a nice willingness to comply.

As I knew my grandmother - Mother's mother - better I could begin to understand my mother's inability to cope as homemaker and mother. She grew up as an only child in the hotel her parents owned in Borlange, Sweden (where I also was born) and was never shown the simplest of homemaking skills, financial management, or personal responsibilities. She was not cut out to be a mother, or trained to be one for even one child, let alone nine.

I can remember myself leaning against my grandmother's fence talking with a classmate who happened to be passing by. I was much too young to really regard a member of the opposite sex as anything opposite myself. He was only a boy who sat next to me in class. Whatever our greetings were I don't remember but they were totally innocent and suddenly to my bewilderment Grandmother yanked me into her house with the severe admonishment, "don't you ever talk to a boy".

He must have been as

bewildered at the glare she gave him I hoped he hadn't heard what she said to me. It was an embarrassing but also an enlightening moment. I began to wonder about my mother's life as a child and how she must have been happy to escape the strange strictures of her own mother Searching my memory for characteristics of my Grandmother, little episodes that might explain her to me, I wrote a long paged judgment of her. After which I sensed the Lord at my shoulder taking a critical look at what I'd written. "Huh-uh'" he said to me, "what do you really know - you can't be her judge - you don't know what her pressures were - her past or circumstances - delete that." So into the waste basket went my glib pigeon-holed appraisal of her.

As the Lord went on to remind me, I was basing it on an isolated instance when

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\.

her peevishness and unfairness to my father got to me. He himself did not seem upset with her. "She's not well and she's old - things have not turned out well for her", he said to me.

When she had become ill several years after my parent's divorce,

Grandfather then deceased, her own daughter, my mother, never coming near or offering any help (although she was living only thirty miles away with her new husband), I felt it was stinky, uncalled for, that she should fuss and quarrel with the patient nurse my father could so ill afford to hire.

Nothing my father did seemed to suit her or be

appreciated.

But I have needed this rethinking of my attitude towards my grandmother. My negative feelings about her I know was her treatment of my father but he seemed to understand and overlook her peevishness - he was kind and patient because I think he saw through her and felt her load of unhappiness with a daughter she loved who disappointed her.

I don't recall my father ever speaking to us directly about God but certainly just by being himself, he passed on some very godly injunctions that I am grateful for. I never heard him ever condemning anyone else or engaging in even mild social defamations of anyone' s character.

He didn ' t preach about it but rnmehov.: in his

presence mean snide remarks about others had a way of drying up. He was a happy good person to be around. How I need to keep remembering his example!

How often we make quick judgment of people , based on isolated misunderstood circumstances that may in fact not be at all their usual nature and behavior and then for the rest of time hang on to that one impression, that grudge, never giving another chance or be willing to allow that people do change. Bad for both the accuser and the accused the accuser with negative feelings better off junked and the accused living uncomfortably with having been judged for something he would very much like to have stricken from his record and memory.

In my appraisal of my grandmother, I did tell that she had once made me feel

guilty for giving her a warm fuzzy flannel nightgown. All that fuzz on the new gown was

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what almost cost her her life, she told me with blame plain in the tone of her voice. She had lifted the stove lid to put in some papers, the flames flared up and swish went the fuzz. She was able to quickly brush away the flame, leaving the nightie only slightly singed. I had bought it with my first hard earned money but pleased thinking it would make her happy. She spoiled the thought as the little accident had spoiled the nightie.

To my shame I had let these little off-center exposure loom up in my memory bigger than the many, many times we took so for granted when she in her advanced years took over her daughter's responsibilities of feeding her brood, having some of us under foot so much of the time and doing her best to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Children aren't expected to be other than innocently unaware, thoughtless, exacting easily aggrieved by small things - they are forgivable. But to be grown and still thinking childishly and unfairly and ungratefully is a low-down as I am now feeling, thanks to that nudge of the Lord and what He thought of me. I thank Him for reminding me of my debt to my grandmother, a good human being overburdened and vulnerable to human faults as the next - I thank Him for my shame and regret and for the new warm love I have for her. A snapshot I have of her is especially dear to me now - her short rotund figure with her hair pulled back in its old-fashioned knot, with her arm around my shoulder and smiling down on me. I wish I might have known more, when I had that chance, of the complexities and circumstances of her life culminating in the person she was to me then and now.

My grandfather was to me quiet, enigmatic, even tempered, withdrawn, impersonal, a no-nonsense man, short and neat, looking very much like the Kentucky colonel with his goatee - only very sober. He was not a grand-daddy type with open arms and an ample lap for climbing into but even then I sensed a depth in him that I respected but never expected to get next to.

I adored my father, so gentle, good and honest and my heart continues to ache for him as I remember beginning to understand his burden in trying to earn a living for us as carpenter and excellent cabinet maker, often away from home, and also trying to be

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....

father-mother for so many. He made many allowances for his child-wife in his love for her and I never heard quarreling until the frightening loud words only about a month before Mother ran off with someone else, leaving us to fend for ourselves, much as we had done anyway when Dad was not around.

A few years ago my husband and I visited the place of my birth in Sweden and that of my older sister and two brothers. There I learned many things in visiting with my father's relatives. They too had ached for their Golden Boy, their family nickname for my father be.cause of his endearing personality, character, and what they felt was surely a promising future. Together we tried to juxtapose what little information we could piece together of the man Mother had run off with. They told us of a Swedish man reportedly in love with my mother before her marriage. After losing an arm some way he had left for the United States and the time of his leaving coincided fairly closely to my Mother's desertion of us. His name and identity had been lost to my relatives and the question remains mere romantic speculation with my father and mother now long deceased.

I loved that trip to the scene of my birth, learning of my roots and visiting with .)

relatives who had known my parents. Coming to the United States with four preschool children, I the youngest a one year old, must have been a handful for my parents but my sister almost six then remembers holding me in her lap on board ship and watching our parents dancing beautifully together. My mother's parents had sold their hotel and come to arnerican shortly before us, going directly to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where Grandmother enrolled in the old Swedish College (an imposing structure then that is now known as the Coeur d'Alene Hornes) while Grandfather opened his cobbler's shop. Our own family spent four years in Minnesota near my father's relatives before also coming west to Coeur d'Alene. Every year or two another child and our family grew to nine children and, while Dad was a skilled workman and always had work, with such a large

family and a wife temperamentally so inept as a homemaker, he had more problems than I will ever fully know.

I was in sixth grade and knew all my classmates were aware my mother had

55

deserted us and were talking about it.

I was acutely unhappy about the impending

divorce, mostly on my father's account. I had never heard a grown man cry and this was my own father in his rocking chair with his face contorted with open sobbing, unaware that I was within earshot. I felt frightened by the sobs and helpless to comfort his private grief. I only stealthily made my way to my bed upstairs, trying to keep my own sobs quiet.

I wish I had gone to him and thrown my arms around him, knowing now too late that it certainly would have comforted him, however bittersweet. The most persistently clinging memory I have of my father is one that I find hard to recall without an almost automatic involuntary smarting of tears, remembering how he comforted me at the very dreariest moment of my life.

I must have been in about the second grade and one exciting day my father was to take me from our house to pick up my older sister staying with our grandparents almost a mile and a half down our same street. Because we were going to the circus .)

my first which I had anticipated for days.

All the while I had been noticing on the shelf beside the clock in the living room two dimes that had been there so long they were as dusty as all else on the shelf. I thought no one else was even aware of them or would miss them and I might need them.

I simply slipped them into my tight little fist, which also curled around the handle of my cherished bright parasol, and then waited outside for my father. Mother ca11ed out to me, asking if I had seen a couple dimes on the shelf and I bald-facedly said no. Then waited guiltily.

We hadn't gone a block before I felt the dimes beginning to slip between my fingers and the parasol. My clumsy attempt to retrieve them, get them to my other hand where they should have been in the first place, and the guilty distress in my face trying to keep my father from noticing my dilemma only called his attention to it. "What's the matter?" he asked and the awful truth came out. All he said was, "why did you lie?"

I couldn't answer and the rest of that long walk was in silence I had seen a flash of deep

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regret, worry and anger in his eyes and the sober unhappy tightening around his lips.

Knowing my mother handled the truth as it suited her, I knew intuitively what he was thinking - the sinking feeling that it might be my pattern. He was so completely the opposite - the most honest person I have ever known. There were times when he could have avoided an unpleasantness by simply maintaining a silence with no blame but it was not in him to shield or camouflage a lie that way.

I don't remember anything about the circus - he left me and my sister and an older friend of hers at the circus with the arrangement that I was to stay the night with my sister at our grandparents. I was miserable the whole time, growing worse at bedtime and unable to sleep. It must have been near midnight when I shook my sister to tell her I was going home but she was too much asleep to understand me. The whole household was dark and still but I got into my clothes and slipped out the door. I knew we lived north on the same street - sixteen long blocks of dark. At that time street lights that way were not as plentiful as now and much of the way was without sidewalks.

I was so eager to get home I can't remember being afraid of the dark or any stumbling along the path - only the wonderful relief when I reached the back porch steps.

Home was in complete darkness but all I wanted was to get to my own bed without disturbing anyone. I gingerly turned the doorknob and to my utter dismay and disbelief the door was locked. I didn't know it had ever been locked. I couldn't bare to awaken and face my father. So I sat down on the steps of the porch and faced the dark night and the bleak prospect of sitting there until morning.

All the unhappiness of the day , beginning with the hurt I had caused my father at the start, engulfed me and the deeply pent-up tears at last broke forth, hurting my throat with their force and the effort to stop the sounds. But at my worst moment I heard the key turn and there was my father gathering me up in his arms, shushing me, kissing me and carrying me up to my bed. Such ineffable comfort - it was to last for the rest of my life. When he had had his own deep need of comfort some four years later I am so sorry the child in me couldn't believe that I could give him some.

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In the midst of the divorce turmoil one day after school instead of going home I walked the nearly two miles to the lake, where I lay flat down on the very end of the long floating dock that extended out into the lake, deserted at that Indian Summer time of the year. I lay for a long, time staring memorized into the cool live water's depth with dark thoughts gathering of how it would be if I just threw myself into it, knowing I couldn't swim - no more thinking, no more feeling. In later years I learned to swim like a fish but at that time the lake held an allurement both fascinating and frightening, which finally sounded an alarm in my mind to get away from there before my thoughts could possibly become an impulse for no telling what.

I don't think that long by-pass to the lake had been for any other reason than only to delay my return to the conflict at home. Certainly suicidal thoughts are totally foreign to my makeup and I'm not one to really feel sorry for myself. I only tell this incident because I think it gave me more insight into the feelings,needs, and impulses of youngsters not yet equipped emotionally to handle problems big for them and I think we as adults need to be more sensitive to what is going on in their heads.

We read some shocking statistics of how many suicides there are among young people and, when it happens close to us, we are baffled and can be plagued with our own afterthougtits of times we perhaps should have sensed were our opportunities to reach out a hand and respond someway to the obliquely or faintly expressed calls for help. Forgive us, Lord, for the times we are so occupied with our own pursuits we do not see, hear, or sense as clearly as we should. And teach us too how to reach out in true sympathy to those who are bereft by such a tragedy and apt to be searching their own minds for the times they might have recognized danger signals. We are so afraid of being flat-footed angels, trying to say the right things, but as friends we should be able to simply open hearts and arms without verbalizing and help divert them from needless remorseful mighthave-beens, any guilt complexes that hold them back from facing life again as God expects of them.

If guilt has any foundation in fact and there is true contrition for whatever may

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have been remiss in ourselves, God's forgiveness is ours. We pay a price but forgiveness is ours. However, we need to remember forgiveness is a two-way action, ineffective without our acceptance. Margaret Singleton calls it "Insubordination": Forgive yourself is part of the command; The pardon, generous, is incomplete If half of it I, willful, countermand Continuing to grovel at His feet.

My father tried to keep us together as a family with a housekeeper for a while but finally we were separated into a number of other families . It was eight years before my father married again - this time to a fine woman who made the rest of his life happy.

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CHAPTER 8

I LEARN BY OSMOSIS

Someone has said "there are no disappointments to those whose wills are buried in the will of God. And one great characteristic of holiness is never to be exacting, never complain. Each complaint drags us down a degree in our upward course. If you would discern in whom God's Spirit dwells, watch that person and notice whether you ever hear him murmur."

Nice words - they have accused me too. But the more I have allowed God's Spirit to occupy my mind and heart the less room or reason there is for any complaining - the more honestly I am able to view whatever happens as a challenge and opportunity for equanimity - the more I want to turn a deaf ear to anyone fussily "sweating the little stuff" . Much of our grousing may have become simply an unconscious bad habit, something for the tongue to flap about as a kind of conversation piece, a pitch for

attention or commiseration, so wrapped up in ourselves we don't realize the depressive 1

effect a chronic case of complaining can have on others and what an unattractive image it gives to personality. I'm thinking of the perpetual phony Pollyanna but, it we have little room for God's will worldng in us, the petty discords are quick to move in. The more we heighten our consciousness of the saving grace and presence of God, the more the grumbles are shamed out of us. Whatever the experience, happy or contrary, they shouldn't be wasted.

That summer in the country with the Norlins and Larsons passed all too quickly but was a very important seeding and sprouting time for my slow growing spiritual life that would eventually and at long last have fruition in knowing God's reality and the truth He intended for me. It was a time God knew I needed more than I knew myself comforting, instructive and healing. The divorce and our scattered family was a fact that brooding about would not change- an early lesson for the familiar prayer -"Oh God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish one from the other".

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I was not at all lonely there, suddenly an only child with seven caring adults.

There was so much to explore along the creek bends and nearby wooded hills. It is little wonder the William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsies" had such appeal for me later that, simply because I liked it and not as any class assignment, I memorized it all so well it has never faded from my memory. Bryant was only eighteen when he wrote it, learning early that "to him, who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language - to his gayer hours she has a voice of gladness and a smile and eloquence of beauty and she glides into his darker musings with a mild and healing sympathy that steals away their sharpness ere he is aware". The rest, of course, deals with how nature speaks to the approach of death - a theme unusual for such a young poet but not too unusual for anyone attuned and "listening to nature's teaching".

I too learned how nature speaks to our moods and needs while I explored her abundaryce now all around me. Very often my communing with nature also included communing imaginatively with my two best friends I had known since the first grade, who seemed actually to be at my side delighting in all the new experiences. I remember wanting to tell Aunt Nellie who my friends Connie and Dorothy were, awkwardly trying to include her too in their imagined presence. I hadn't gotten to our fun discovery along the cool shaded side of their mountain road of a big smooth boulder, covered with moss and curved perfectly for a comfortable contoured chair. But then I saw a troubled look in Aunt Nellie's face that seemed to be saying "poor child, she's lonesome for her friends". I realized I had fumbled the telling but didn't know quite how to make plain to her that I wasn't at all lonesome, if that was what she was thinking.

I loved it all - priming the pump outside the kitchen for the coldest, most quenching pure water I've ever had since - helping to churn butter and storing it and crocks of milk and vegetables in the cool root cellar - climbing the tall cedar tree that towered over the cellar, puncturing with my thumb nail the fat blister on the tree trunk to release its pungent smelling oil to ooze over my sticky fingers, its perfume to be sniffed at repeatedly and deeply until time to wash for dinner.

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And such dinners - called suppers then. Nothing ever smelled more heavenly than fresh bread and other wonderful cooking odors coming from the massive black stove in the low ceilinged cozy kitchen. From which three steps led up to the parlor that had a pump organ and a bookcase crammed with adult reading but also stacks of many years subscriptions of Youth's Companion. I was constantly torn between the desire to spend an entire afternoon trying to catch up with all those issues and the beckon of all the yet unexplored places out doors.

I had the choice of three places to tuck in at night but my favorite was the cot on the high porch where I could see falling stars streak across the sky, hug the soft down comforter around my neck while breathing deeply the cool pine-scented, intoxicating night air, soft breezes sometimes picking up tantalizing perfumes from the flower beds near .

1 .

In the middle of my first night out there, I was awakened, chilled with heart

pounding alarm, by the yelling and echoing of coyote calls that sounded so close I lay afraid to move a muscle until finally their calls began diminishing in the distance. The fence surrounding the house and garden was reassuring but I still had visions of their squeezing through. The next day the family assured me that they would never come near - I would get used to them. Fear gone, I began to look forward to those occasional eerie night calls, which were especially spine chilling when the moon was full and all things with daytime familiarity took on a special difference, transforming the landscape with an exciting but subdued strange clarity.

Nature had a few scary places herself. Like the swampy half acre of impenetrable underbrush and tall spindly trees - an understood "no-man's-land" by all sensible people.

But I was dared by an impulse to try to take a short cut through it - an idea quickly abandoned to the little water snakes the first time I sank through the waist high rushes into the water almost swallowing me up.

And the dark woods in the narrow canyon between the mountains, which has since given way to a four lane highway. I can whiz through that spot, as we often do on our way to Kellogg and Montana, without remembering my timidity in venturing too far into 62

the awesome unknown privacy of what seemed hallowed ground, where tall pines and steep cliffs on either side shut off most of the sun's brightness.

Norlin's son Carl was home from his last year at the University of Idaho and he must have learned in his childhood there to have a special love of those woods, unafraid of its dimly lit depth when he went through it to round up the cattle. But I couldn't help believing that at one time he too must have had some of the same intimidation I had of its depth and aloneness and such silence that the first time I made some tip-toe sort of venturing into it the only sounds I could hear disturbing the cathedral quiet of the place was the thumping of my own heart. A soft cushiony blanket of shredded pine needles underfoot and little sunlight filtering through the thick over arching boughs of the trees reaching so high into the sky kept at a minimum any cluttering underbrush, low hanging dead branches were kept pruned and salvaged for firewood , making the way an easy inviting lure to penetrate further into its unknown stretching ahead. But a gingerly caution kept me from ever proceeding far to find out if actually I might lose myself in there or if something would swallow me up. I have an idea Carl would have allowed me to tag along with him if I had asked - at least once anyway to see if I'd spoil things chirping and chattering all the while. He didn't ask and, while part of me wanted very much to know those woods as he did, I didn't ask - a better part of me didn't want to intrude into his private sanctuary during his own short summer time's vacation from school.

My time was divided between the two farm homes and the nicest time of the day at the Norlins was when Carl would sit on the low hassock with me on the floor in rapt attention beside him as he played his accordion and sang lilting and funny tunes, entertaining as well his mother as she busied herself in the wide open kitchen getting the tantalizing smells to the supper table, and drawing his father's attention from his reading in the worn overstuffed chair to smilingly join in the fun of the music. I remember Carl asking, with genuine interest in my answers, which of his books I had been reading and liked best - well known children's classics that he had once enjoyed himself. I was in awe of how grown up he was but he never treated me like a child whose opinions were of no

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consequence.

They were all kind, gentle, well-educated but mostly self-taught people who were wonderfully good to me and for me. Nellie Norlin had been a nurse at our home when my youngest sister Emily was born and, while not related to us, her family and parents became familiarly known as Grandpa and Grandma Larson, Nellie's sister and brother were Aunt Julia and Uncle Andy - they lived with the parents at one house and at the other were Aunt Nellie her husband and Carl. Her husband alone was always dignified as Mr. Norlin and I felt a reticence with him but never with the slightest suggestion of rejection.

Aunt Julia taught all the grades at the small farm school house. She made fun and challenging games of grammar corrections, which I needed badly. And while we were washing out some things on the platform by the creek, she told me things all young girls should know.

They all taught me much that summer - mostly by their innate serene acceptance of life as it comes with an undergirding faith, part and parcel of their being that never strained for vocal expression. I was never preached at - I learned from their goodness of character, their contentment and love for one another, their way of not taking themselves too seriously. I can recognize now what they had was unshakable trust and joy in the Lord. They were too far removed from an organized church and too many farm duties tied their time schedules but I know they walked in close communion with God every day of the week - a communion that had its counterpoint "communion" ingrained as well. I know I was much in need of instructions about many things but so light-handed were they with it all that I was only conscious of good every day.

I have frequently been given credit for taking things in stride, adjusting quickly to adversities but, if true, it is not because of virtuous straining for such an attitude - the lessons of that summer began their influence on all subsequent growth in dealing with circumstances. But I must repeat - I'm a slow learner. I do know now when a change of direction is due, there is purpose andl opportunity involved in it, not to be met with

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phlegmatic acquiescence and resignation but to be seen as a new challenge. In all things praise be to God even when one door closes and we can't know what another door is opening up to us.

It was Mr. Norlin who drove me back to town, to Wiggetts, when school was

about to resume, the seventh grade for me. It was a three hour horse and wagon trip over the old Mullan Trail road, where we stopped at one point to watch dozens and dozens of tiny green baby frogs crossing the road . When he left me at Wiggetts, he didn't kiss or squeeze me goodbye as the others had done but his smile spoke affection. He shook my hand and said "God bless you, little Ellen", and I felt truly blessed for all time. He meant

it, I know, and I still see him looking back at me once again after letting himself out the alley gate.

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CHAPTER 9

BELIEVING THE UNBELIEVABLE

Most of us are constantly limiting our Lord with our half-belief, our small estimations of His might and willingness on our behalf. All he requires of us for our own saving is that we ask, we open up and seek to know Him, trust and obey Him. His loving care is behind this requirement - not to remind Him but to make us understand our participation and cooperation is needed if we are ever to know the reality of His presence.

Then the wonders can happen.

We begin to see the situations in our lives are allowed or appointed by God as our opportunities to learn of Him, to learn the extent of our faithfulness,how well spirit and cll'aracter stand up to our professions. In dire circumstances we find how natural it is to our make-up to instantly turn to Him in trust, knowing all things are possible, responding as He directs with the assurance that nothing is beyond His power to do. It is when our minds stop to ponder -"really now , isn't that too much to expect - how can He help - it's against the laws of nature - even if He could why would He upend all natural law just to rescue the likes of me - as undeserving as I am". With such negative interference, faith dwindles to nothing, cutting off the current of God's power.

I said earlier in this account that I had more to tell about that bull that was once my tormentor who was not about to let me share the landscape with him. I spent one whole summer, after my parents were divorced, in the country at Wolf Lodge with the Norlins and Larsons at their adjoining farms - the same place where later I turned my panic in the hayloft over to the Lord. I loved every minute of that wonderful summer except for the fear of that bull who didn't seem to like kids. It was two years later that the incident I've already told about happened, when that bull and I met close up eye to eye as I dashed out the barn door and we had our quick exchange of mutual understanding changing fear to respect.

I often sat on the little foot bridge spanning the creek that divided the two farm houses, built less than a quarter of a mile apart. Sitting on the edge of the bridge I would play a fish line into the clear depths where I could see the fish so plainly enjoying

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themselves free and lazy in the pure crystal water, occasionally nudging each other for a game of tag, zipping in and out with a little flip of their tale motors. I felt I must be as visible to them as they were to me. So pretty, graceful, sleek and interesting - so indifferent to my being there. I tried to tease them with my fish line just to get their attention and see what they would do but I didn't really want them to hurt themselves on the hook. The only sounds punctuating the serene stillness was the incomparable pure liquid trill of meadow larks singing their hearts out. My only caution was to make sure of the whereabouts of the bull in the meadow beyond.

I also had an eye out for the little water snakes that I hadn ' t gotten used to yet tiny and harmless as they were they still gave me an involuntary start and the shivers.

Until one of those days when I sat dangling my feet over the bridge, drowsy with the sun and air's caressing softness and warmth. Lost in dreamland imaginings I was suddenly aware something else alive was brushing against my hand that rested on the planks of the bridge. I jumped away and to my feet at the sight of a little garter snake, which was as startled as I was and hurriedly took off in swift wiggly hast. And I pursued it as a mortal enemy. Imagine! It slithered into a deep hollow made by a horse's hoof print when the meadow had been squishy with spring rain, now like a deep, dried up hard well.

I had it cornered and stood over it, mentally measuring the size of the rock in my hands to the hollow it was in, aiming to crush the fearsome thing, until in a rare moment of "beastie" and "human" eyeing each other, reading each other's mind, I saw the trembling little baby thing, trapped and fearful for its life and, with a catch in my breath, I saw myself for the Ogre that I was. I threw the rock away, thoroughly contrite. He had trusted me and only wanted to be friendly in cozying up to my hand at that peaceful moment and my silly childish fear had spoiled a good thing. I wanted to apologize, pick it up and try to soothe its wildly beating heart but I wasn't quite that brave yet and I thought the nicest thing to do for it then was to make myself scarce.

One day I had just crossed the bridge, walking along with Aunt Nellie Norlin, when away at a short distance was my adversary, the bull.

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At the sight of me, he

bellowed and snorted, lowered and waggled his horns, his front hoof pawing the ground as if to make a charge at me. There was nothing I could see in that wide meadow for close protection. There was the water flume, built by the Rutledge Mill through their property to float logs down to the lake for transportation to the mill.

Why I should run to the flume was not for me to reason why. It was too high for me to reach even stretching my utmost. While I was limber in gymnastics, I didn't have the strength or ability to chin myself on a low crossbar.

Yet, without a second' s

hesitation, I was leaping high to reach the top rim of the flume and, with absolutely no effort on my part, my body was lifted and flipped over into safety of the flume, at the time empty of water.

It all happened in the twinkling of an eye, it seemed . One moment I was facing

the raging bull, the next moment staring back at him from my safety's perch. And what did I see? Aunt Nellie clapping scolding hands at him and in a strong authoritative voice \.

telling him to "stop that". And he did - he simply relaxed and started nibbling the grass.

I marvelled at her lack of fear and control of him. Gratefully I slid down into her waiting arms and, secure by her side, we continued our way to her house. I thought shamefully that, while I was bent only on saving my own hide, I hadn't shown concern for Aunt Nellie's safety although I seemed to know the bull was only interested in my skin. It seems strange to me now that Aunt Nellie didn't ask me how in the world I had managed such a jump - hadn't she watched? - was she gauging the flume at her eye level, forgetting my tiny height? It would have been a feat for any full grown acrobat.

So again, another inscrutable, accepted gratefully as God's action without any probing.

I know there are countless incidents of God's instant astounding action in many other lives that have been told - more that should be for those who would love such an interchange of experienced evidence of God's power and for those too yet unable to fully and absolutely believe and thus, to their great loss, can not or will not learn of it. I thank God and praise His Holy Name that he thrust that learning experience on my own mediocre belief. I no longer have any reservations about His power and the miracles told

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in the Bible are real for me.

We can only know in part now but, if all were as plain as the skeptic's nose, there would be no call for faith's attesting. Credulity is not to be confused with absolute belief that we come to know and claim for ourselves through personal response and experience and the now knowable can be and should be sufficient for assurance that God knows - this is His world and we are His - He tells us we will one day know even as we are known.

That is enough. Those who insist can occupy the scorner's bench. I don't have to.

Adam and Eve, in that allegory of our beginnings and God's plan for mankind, started all our strugglings when what they were given to know was not enough for them.

Instead of being content with having dominion over all God's lesser creatures on earth they wanted to be equal to God Himself, know as much as He did, have every power He ha& with no "no-noes" for them - they couldn't resist the temptation of the fruit of the single forbidden Tr{'.e of Knowledge, wanting to know all the ultimates. But God knew

the struggles were also part of the long plan - separation of the wheat from the chaff, the partnership and cooperation He intended we have together with Him - a partnership of love and trust but one that acknowledges reliance on the omniscience of the Master.

As with so many of god's other revelations to me, His lifting me to safety in the flume had deep meanings beyond my understanding at the time but they remain in my mind to germinate, take root, and keep growing under His care and light. Whatever more I am to learn from it, I know this - I will never question His power to do. We waste such years half asleep to the realities of the Almighty God in our lives. Why are we so faint of heart to really, really believe? Especially when we are given such concrete personal evidence of Himself, the Creator of all things known and unknown in the Universe and yet caring so terribly and tenderly for each and every one of us. But He must wait for us to come to Him. The least we can do but the big important thing is to ask, as trustingly as a little child. Again I wonder at God's patience with the slowness of me to understand. We sign "Standing on the Promises" - we say we believe but our lives say we can't totally absolutely take Him at His word - it takes such a long time for

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so many of us to understand before we quit putting our own limitations on what He can willingly and in our best interests do for us. Our discouragements are self-inflicted.

If we sincerely wish our spiritual understanding to grow and flourish, we must

develop the daily habit of looking for and praising God within us for His illumination.

Just as a plant depends on light from the sun to sustain its growth to maturity, so we depend on the light of His Holy Spirit to do as much for us. How wonderful are His ways! How too bad for anyone to keep living in the dark - perhaps not even seeing that its view c<>f life is that of a mole scrambling for an existence.

My sister and her husband were relaxing on their patio one day, looking with satisfaction, admiration, and exhaustion at the results of their long day's labor in setting out dozens of flats of flowers against their fence at their lake home. Suddenly in the still air one plant began to shake violently and then, wham, to their astonishment it disappeared into the ground. A nice lunch for the moles that continued to plague them the rest of the summer and had such litt1e regard for the sore muscles, aching joints, and expenses that furnished them such treats. God, we don't always recognize ourselves as moles in your garden - why do you put up with us? I know - You love us - You'd like to see us different.

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CHAPTER 10

SPROUTS

If I could have taken the longer view at the time, I would have seen that the

divorce probably was God's rescue. From the haphazard way I was growing up at home, where I might have drifted is hard to :say. But now I was in a home so completely opposite, so organized, so shiny clean and strictly regulated and sternly disciplined that, while gratefJl for the care and security Clara Wiggett gave me, before the end of my high school days I began to long for the time I could chart my own course and declare my independence.

From one extreme to another - from a whatever you please attitude about where we went, when we returned , to boot camp precision obedience. I remember the exciting invitations to our first boy-girl parties and, in the middle of such new games as "Wink 'em", "Spin the Bottle", "Post Office", or "Last Couple Out", before the host or hostess had even served refreshments, I would have to scoot home fast on the ditty-dot, not five minutes late or Clara would phone or be at the party to take me home.

However

unhappy it made me I never argued about it. But one time I confided my grumblings to my diary and wrote that "Claraphine (for Clara Josephine) wants to make me a carbon copy of herself' and then underscored the big letters "I DON'T WANT TO BE!" The next time I opened my diary I found Clara had written in it that she had been looking for a pencil (I knew better than that in her well regulated house) and knowing I kept one in my diary had opened it to see her name and had read what I had written, then lectured me that what she did was for my own good. I'm sure it was but why couldn't there sometimes be a little speck of leniency. I quit writing in my diary and weeks later when Clara asked "aren't you writing in your diary anymore?", I answered with a quiet unembellished "no", which left her question in the air and she did not pursue it.

But Clara taught me many things I needed to know . She was such an extremist

in the area of housekeeping and thrift that she became an object lesson in reverse. I did not want to be consumed by such finical sterile housekeeping regimen and am now neither an indifferent, inept housekeeper like my mother nor do I make housekeeping the 71

fetish Clara did. Where money had been poorly managed at our home, Clara's case there was an abundance of it but she and her husband were so frugally restricted by nature that some of their economies became eccentric and the parting of the smallest sum painful.

I have no particular hang-ups about money from either of these opposite influences.

I do have qualms about spending much money on clothes and gadgets but that

stems from the experience of the rock-bottom depression of the Thirties that had first postponed our marriage and then strained its first few years so stringently that its influence can not be discounted. But we are happy in the life we have worked out together and able to enjoy - a home that is our joy, comfort and contentment, precious friends often with us in it or, as we clink our classes of wine or V-8 juice together alone in our own good company, it is with conscious but unspoken blessing on each other.

There is always some unfinished business hanging fire we hope to get to eventually. We appreciate. t Everyone looks for happiness. So many can never recognize it when they find it.

Speaking of money, as our wherewithal increased so did the sense of stewardship we should have about our good fortune. That sense I know came directly from our church participation and , when we first set our tithing goals, we wondered if it might be a struggle in our straitened circumstances. The wonder of it since and continuing has been all the unexpected goodness it has been for us.

God's abundance, of course, has deeper connotations than the material things but what we call "the good things in life" materially are certainly included as His blessings and meant to be enjoyed. And somebody - many somebodies - may be depending for their livelihood on those goodies we buy. God's concern for us is that we put first and best first and best, not letting possessions possess us, not letting ourselves become indifferent to those who have neither God's best nor the little goodies. Life itself makes its claim on the soul, with chastisement eventually for those who clutch greedily for the gifts without the Giver, who have never engraved on their hearts the words sung in church, "we give Thee but Thine own, whate'er the gift may be, all that we have is Thine

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alone, a trust, 0 Lord, from Thee" .

When the rich young man came to Christ and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, Christ's answer "go, sell your goods and feed the poor" was aimed not at the possessions as wrong in themselves but at the place of position in the your man's priorities. Christ's answer to any of us would be about what to us comes before God Himself.

How can giving in response to God's love and blessings be otherwise than glad and whole-hearted. Blessed is the one who can shrug an indifferent shoulder at the right hand's derhand for and accounting of the left hand's generosity. What we do may never be enough but there should be gratitude and gladness in what we do.

I always felt so sorry for Clara, who did more real mothering for me than my own, for not being able to do the things she longed to do because "how much????" had such importance in spite of their abundance secure in bank accounts, real estate, business and mining stock. A life thwarted because her husband (one of the wealthiest men in town) had such overblown love of money for itself.

She was an intellectual who studied constantly, able to translate in four languages.

While a rather ordinary pianist herself and never trying to be an artist, her interest and knowledge in music and art, as well as history and literature, went deep. Except for some trips before her marriage and a few visits to her family in the East, with conniving help from her sisters, her travels into the lands steeped with the history and art she would loved to have known first hand were only through her books. Even after his death, her husband's wealth was so stingily in trust for her that she had little opportunity in her short remaining seven years after his death to do much of what she had wanted. She died of a heart attack in an Iowa City library the day before Pearl Harbor was hit by the Japanese on the first trip she had managed since coming into some money of her own.

Her card sent to me a couple of days previously reported happily of attending a concert and visiting an art gallery. I don't know much about what happened to all her husband had accumulated - some distant legal relative who mush have been surprised.

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Because she very much wanted to put me through college, she intimated to friends that they were in fact doing so, neglecting to make clear that it was a loan for a year at twelve percent interest, an exorbitant rate at that time and used to incense my young banker husband as much as the claim they had put me through school. But I knew she wanted to and I loved her for that although I knew it was fantasy land for her. t

She asked my father on one of his visits if he would allow them to adopt me. As if I were not even present or to be considered and I was totally unprepared for such an idea. Without an instant's hesitation or a look at the consternation in my face my father immediately said, "oh, no, no - I could never do that". I didn't want to appear ungrateful For Clara1 s overture so with care I restrained my impulse to rush into my father's arms.

She had been dear to me and I owe her so much in the care she gave me and the start of appreciation in many good things that had interested her and my need of education.

I earned my education by working four hours a day at the University of Idaho as secretary to the Dean and four professors in the School of Law and again for the Department of Agriculture at Washington State, with a year in between for a full time job to save enough to return. How my jobs materialized and their ensuing good fortune is a long story in itself. I might say "thank my lucky stars" but that is not accurately acknowledging God ' s providence.

In love, Amidee and I planned to get married and both work to finish two more years at the University. But the depression hit. At the same time his father died of a long painful disease, leaving large medical and business debts. Marriage and further education had to be postponed. Amidee arranged an understanding with the creditors for a stringent repayment program over the next three years, taking the major portion of his new banking apprenticeship salary and that of his two brothers and a sister, who all found jobs at depression wages to help at home.

It was a bleak time for us - for him because he felt the future stretched ahead so

far and so dismally with debts and uncertainties that he couldn't ask me to be a part of it. For me too because he didn't ask me to be a part of it. Instead he, who had always

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been quite needlessly upset with other fellows' attentions to me, now tentatively questioned if I wanted to be free to date others - I was then working in Spokane thirtytwo miles awar. A jolt to me then wondering if he really wanted me to do so - if he could be trying to ease out of our engagement. But finally assured again, I knew his love for me was as real as his duty to his family and I loved him all the more for his integrity and responsibility to them. The waiting time was a valuable one for a more realistic look at how our Feisty Irish-stubborn Swede personality differences might service in marriage.

We had a jump on those starry-eyed that so often diminish, if not break, under the clash of unlooked for personal adjustment disagreements. How much of life's happiness and fulfillment depends on one's marriage - how blindly so many are entered into.

Sometimes I have told my husband what marvelous surprising good sense I had when I said yes to him, to which he can be depended upon to come up with the quick flip quip about how hard he was to catch.

And we grin gratefully, realizing what a gamble

marriage can be and how our own has steadily grown better and happier. We both know an occasional "blow" is strictly superficial to remind us of our separate individuality within our inseparable unity, in which boredom can never gel.

It was during our engagement and first four years of our marriage that I quit going to church. I remember having lunch in Spokane with two mothers of classmates from my Coeur d'Alene High School and one of them asked why they never saw me in church anymore when I came over for weekends. I told them I wasn't getting any answers there - more irritation than inspirations - words to that effect. One of them disappointed in me said, "Oh Ellen, shame on you" and I could only shrug my shoulders. I could not very well tell her that one of the disenchantments was her husband the one with the sneaky fingers at the movie house.

It was true I wasn't finding my answers but also true that I had attended with a critical attitude and expecting the minister to tailor make his sermons for. my particular questions of the moment. I wasn't there to worship. I am ashamed now but I know we can't be scolded back to God. The other mother was more helpful and I loved her

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making it au><>int, as we were waiting to pay the cashier, to tell me not to worry - she remembered her own questions when she was my age - she knew how it was and made me feel that the estrangement was only a temporary phase.

It was Harry Emerson Fosdick who helped me most when I finally reached the

point I could stand the estrangement no longer. My copies of his books are copiously underscored and one passage I want to quote sent me back to church again with a very different attitude.

He said, "personal Christianity is a profound inward relationship

between the soul God, and its innermost expression, as Jesus said, comes in solitude in a chamber with the door shut. If someone says that that inner relationship with the Divine is the very root of Christian experience, I agree. But it is just what it is - the root, the invisible, underground, vital root; but it is not the fruit; and any Christianity that tries to be all root is just as much a failure as a tree would be that tried that same impossibility. When we segregate Christ in a sacred niche; namely, by the wrong use of intimate personal religion, which makes religion only a private affair between a man's own soul and God, a perpendicular relationship that links the individual to a divine source of help which is nobody's business but his own .. ... to tum one comer of your own soul into a religious retreat and suppose that to be the whole of Christianity is to misunderstand it utterly". I like the gesture of one had reaching upward for God's hand, His electric current going through to the other outstretched the had of another human being.

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CHAPTER 11

THE VISION

After I began regularly attending church again, I wished my husband would go with me although I never pressured him to do so. He wasn't opposed but always seemed to be saying, "not today, maybe next Sunday". We were then in a new community, having been transferred by him home bank to other Idaho offices - first to Kellogg and then to Nampa, where I had begun avidly seeking my way back to God, mostly in my reading.

We were there four years when we were again transferred - this time to

Sandpoint, back close to home in North Idaho. It was a newly purchased bank and a difficult situation with unusual trying business circumstances.

We lived for six weeks in the hotel before finding a place to rent, eating all our meals out and every night my husband and one of the vice presidents would talk far into the night about the many problems. After one month of this, on Saturday night a dinner I told the two of them I wished they would forget their problems and attend church with me the next morning. They agreed but it was two in the morning again before they called it a night.

The next morning my husband was true to his promise and, when it was about time to go, I went down the hall at the hotel, rapped on the "veep's" door and asked if he was ready to go. Still in bed, he answered, "oh, no, you're kidding!" But I wasn't and he hurriedly dressed and joined us. A sermon could never have been more made to order for them both and from that time on it has been my husband who always makes sure we never miss church service. We began reading the same daily devotionals and experiencing a sweeter, closer companionship than ever.

It was in that same Presbyterian Church in Sandpoint that I experienced the

ultimate of all revelations, so important and sacred to me that try as I might, waiting in a kind of mute paralysis, I find I can't force words I simply don't have. To share this experience I have no choice but go ahead with such as I have - weak, inadequate, hesitant to speak of my vision of Christ.

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It was a usual Sunday morning service, the usual congregation in their usual pews.

I have no recollection of what Reverend Harro' s sermon was about. Suddenly there was an abrupt absolute stillness as if everything everywhere stopped, as if the whole congregation in a single instant in unison had pulled in its breath together, holding it with me. Then an unexplainable stir of electric movement in the air, always to make me wonder thereafter if that is what the Bible described as the "rushing of wind" at Pentecost.

"What's happening?" I thought and turned quickly to look to the back of the church.

There I saw Him standing very plainly in sight at the back center aisle,

enveloped in a light through which His physical form was apparent but no detail of dress.

I knew it was Christ.

As I stared dumbfounded He began moving down the aisle

effortlessly to the front of the church, quickly but not so fast that I couldn't see him clearly approaching our pew and the hairs at the back of my neck began to stand on end.

We were seated next to the aisle and as He came up even with us I looked up directly into His face. The only way I can ever describe what I saw of the of the deep caring concern in His all-encompassing, all-embracing eyes and strong beautiful face yearning for ev'eryone everywhere is the echo of His words, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings but you would not let me".

"Like as a father pitieth his children" and careth for them, I was included in His concern so achingly, intensely expressed in His face for all of us who have eyes but see not, ears not hear not, and in a flash I felt my oneness, knew my kinship with all of God's human creatures and that none of us in His sight can claim rank.

He did not single me out with a direct look at me - a merciful sparing as it would have been too much. A face so good, so strong and beautiful in its deep caring - not a sweet sentimental kind but so real and so good - and I was suddenly afraid, overwhelmed and wanting to hide from Him what I saw in myself stripped bare of all self-indulging excuses for what is wrong in me, overcome with a brand new awareness of how sinful

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human nature can be on its own. I looked away, my head down, eyes tightly closed and holding my breath while all the bad in my life was lumped together in general indictment, engulfed in common shame.

But I had to immediately open my eyes again and He was now standing directly in front of our minister, looking up at him and Reverend Harro seemed to be looking at Him and not saying anything. "What's happening?" was my continuing wonderment.

All that suggested itself to me was could this actually be the second coming of Christ was He going to materialize right before us in flesh and blood? But then the thought, "oh, surely not - not here - not in this little Sandpoint, Idaho church - the Holy Land maybe - but HERE?" Incredible - and with that negative thought the vision vanished.

I looked at my husband, no doubt amazement written all over my face and questioning his, "did you see that?" He put his hand over mine, puzzled and whispered, "are you all right?" and I knew he hadn''t. As suddenly everything seemed normal again - the sermon continued - the congregation was breathing regularly as ever, with little fidgets here and there, and I sat shaken and totally at a loss for what to make of what had just happened. When we filed out of the church I felt isolated, mechanically returning greetings but searching faces for some clue that might tell me I had not been alone in what I had seen. I couldn't speak of it myself and I wouldn't subject it to anyone's questioning looks.

This had come shortly after several other incredible happenings that I could not and did not try to explain. Even with my husband I was hesitant to speak and had trouble .)

revealing my real feelings - what little I shared was more a tentative essaying for help in understanding how such things can be - I treated them with a deliberate off-hand casualness that would belie real importance to me. What had happened that Sunday was for absolute real but for the time it had to be another secret between the Lord and myself.

Stories of visions told about in the Bible and to others down through the centuries came to mind but such things had happened to some who seemed a breed apart, not to my mind and everyday character like myself. I needed time for feelings to sort, my head to clear,

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to make sure it wasn't some trick of the mind. I told no one.

But two weeks later we were having coffee at the doughnut shop with our friends, Morna and Art Oberg, after church as we often did. I hadn't seen her the day of the vision - she had remained behind that day and I had gone on ahead of her. While we were having coffee and with some hesitancy she finally said to me, "did you, by any chance, have a very strange experience in church two Sundays ago?" I immediately came alive, "yes, did you?" and, oblivious to any reactions from our husbands, we poured out identical details of what we had both seen and felt. We had both known it was no hallucination but it was so good to have corroborating strength and fellowship with it.

Especially good since she and I had had some previous time together sharing mutual difficulties we were having in applying Christian admonishments to the realities of our frustratingly uncharitable feelings in handling practical Christian matters. Simply ordering ourselves to "be charitable, be charitable", wasn't getting the job done - neither of us at that point had learned to let go and let God. In the first place, we probably has some lurking suspicions we might not be so almighty right about the matters anyway.

It was a time of garbled communications - like the little plaque propped up on my kitchen

window sill over the sink that says, "I know you believe you understand what you think I said but I', not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant" .

Anyway, it was of some significance to me that, if anyone was meant to share the v1s1on that Sunday, it would be my mutually seeking friend.

A lot of years,

circum(tances and distance have separated us since. We exchange Christmas notes with real fondness, always hoping to get together for a good visit and more and more I have a deepening urge to relive with her that vision for what we have mutually and separately learned from it.

For myself, for one thing, I realize we cling to and fortify ourselves with saving, strengthening, edifying, inspirational scripture and truths made clear in the telling - they point us to our good - but it is the Person behind the words we really reach for, we really love and cling to when we can't even remember the words. And the awesome wonder 80

that I saw Christ as I know He is must remain something I can never fully understand but always with ever deepening gratitude. His face will be forever as clear and wonderful as it was that Sunday I looked directly up into his face.

Pictures we have grown up with that are supposedly what Christ looked like fall so short of the dynamic reality of His person - as feeble as my own verbal attempts to describe Him as I saw Him and keep on seeing Him. There are resemblances in the depictions we have but they are for looking at more than looking into - into the very heart of Him. In contrast they seem almost impersonal and detached. Some characterizations, in paintings or movie making, are too weak and pathetic to ever reflect the vitality of His inner power, His assurance and purpose, His deep love, wisdom and tender concern. A face like His, even at the height of His suffering at the crucifixion, would evoke a heartbreaking but awesome wonder at the depth of His inner strength - not pity. The pity would be there for those who knew not what they were doing.

I see His face at every mention of the Cross. I can easily understand how people were drawn to Him as naturally as the needle "steel magnetized will seek the pole". The shock is how such a One, once seen and living in their midst, could ever have been subjected to any human being's mocking and cruelty. My mind can hardly take in the scene and wonder of Christ's submissive strength and obedience for whatever His Father's purpose for Him was to be in that ordeal. How could the mob do such a thing to such a One and invariable the words of the old negro spiritual wells up within me "were you there when they crucified my Lord?" I may want to believe I would have been there with the weeping Mary and a few others. But other words expressed so powerfully in verse by John C. Slemp indict and overwhelm me with realizations of my own past blind implications of myself in the Cross. That child of me, who was first drawn to Christ through the story of the Cross, had those years of forgetfulness, questionings and indifference and now can't read Slemp's charge without becoming completely undone and crying for forgiveness.

0 Christ, who dies upon a cross, my soul attests your sharpest 81

pain; 'Twas not the spikes in hands and feet, ' twas not the spearthrusts in your side; These were but instruments of death from which your spirit never winced.

No, Lord, the sword that thrust you through was in the hands of faithless friends; Their gross indifference to your fate was sharper than the keenest blade.

To know that those you trusted most had failed you in your darkest hourThat was the stroke that pierced and brought release to death's grim power, 0 Christ, whose cross is ever new, alas, it must be so today As friends of yours still stand apart and let you die with bleeding heart.

But it was because and for that immeasurable gulf between the crucifies and the crucified, the horrible difference between them that God Chose to made Himself incarnate in Christ for our redemption and our ultimate understanding of Himself, to help us identify with Him and His Word through Christ in the kind of relationship that He the Father desires to have with us and to come to know and make effective His redemptive power through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

I know I am on hallowed ground in trying to fathom the fullness of such love in that redemption of our gone astray souls. I can only point to the Cross where God alone could make such fullness plain, He Himself making atonement for us and reconciling us to Himself in the suffering and death of His Son. There at the foot of the Cross we with weeping contrite hearts must bring our failures for the cleansing and full work of God's

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atonement.

What a perfect word - the double meaning intact in its single spelling and separate pronunciations - "atone-ment" for God's purpose in making us new creatures; and "atone-meant" for His desire that we all have the same harmonious unity that He and Christ had - that it was meant seriously and possible in His might and our cooperation, our understanding of God's nature through His triune manifestations of Himself - God above, with, and within - God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit - through which we realize the heart to heart communications, the guidance and strength we need in our daily walk with Him. For the rest of my life I will continue to see Christ's wondrous face at every mention of His name, every time I hear it taken profanely, as I do also in any recounting of His conversations and moving around with those who walked the earth with Him. As I do also when I listen to words spoken today that testify to God's living presence or read of the same thrilling evidence in the long history of generations since the Good News of the Gospel was first proclaimed by God's incarnation in Christ.

Each day's reading and experiences are in some way now affected by that vision and time spent pondering that startling undeniable appearance gradually makes some answers begin to emerge. The various mysterious ways God deals with us individually can be so beyond us but we can trust there are good reasons in it. One, I am sure, was to help me see the basic disunity that existed in my life. I was not all of a piece. There was a distinct separation of the secular and sacred in my life. I was not walking hand in hand with the Lord in all of it. There were areas where I would drop His hand with the felt "excuse me, Lord, this you wouldn't care about - see you later - next Sunday for sure", With awareness of God's presence in everything we do and with absolute trust and loyalty to that Presence, what would happen to the nasty story wanting to be told, the mean attitude and cutting remark, the getting even, the putting someone down, the disagreeable outburst with situations and trying characters, the drudgery of daily chores,

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the exasperations, the throat cutting in business and social climbing, the character assignations in politics, the plain awful physical and mental abusing, the bigotry, the filthy human exploitations, the pornography, the pompous self-righteous superiorities, the greedy gettings, the disregard for the oppressed and hungry as long as I get my own, my rights, my opinions, my pursuits, my use of time and talents just for me, my wishes, my great big ego, my! my! my! What would happen? Could we know His presence and continue to ignore or defy Him to our own hurt? Why won ' t we come to know the blessedness of belonging to Him? Christ said, "not everyone who saith unto me, 'Lord, Lord' shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in Heaven".

I must admit an awful slowness in me before I honestly recognized that disunity in myself. But, at last, at least, I now know the difference and I pray that nothing in my daily dealings in any areas of my life will want to exclude rather than lean on God's presence. He is no kill-joy - I find Him my greatest constant joy - He makes all of life

good and beautiful. He has no long list of "thou shalt nots". He changes the negatives to happy affirmatives done in love of the Lord. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and soul, mind, strength, and your neighbor as yourself and all else falls into place.

Thou shalt not kill becomes thou shalt lift up - in love of God; thou shalt not bear false witness becomes thou shalt be true, kind, and helpful - all for the love and glory of God. Go over the Old Testament's Ten Commandments yourself and add the positive goodness of the Lord to them - then feel your soul's voice wanting to sing "Onward Christian Soldiers".

In the engrossment of my day's business I may be taking His presence for granted without consciousness but, when anything pops up that seems contrary to His nature, there is a halting for the Christ-referral, Christ-deference attitude that daily becomes more automatic and I thank God for that progress. Make no mistakes - I make so many of them - but the feeling of disunity is melting away. Praise the Lord!

I have also wondered if there was still some of the doubting Thomas in me that

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Christ as my Savior, were there traces of faltering faith at times that , while not actually saying so, were nevertheless in deep wonderment just how such things could possible be was God the Almighty really incarnate in Christ? So fantastic - could it possible be fantasy?

We have a little friend who broke his arm and after the accident received many get well cards, one of which in expressing his great regard said "you are my best friend most of the time". Most of the time my faith was a little like that. I had my moments I hardly admitted to myself.

Poor Thomas, of practical mind but sincere heart, a little slow and skeptical of the unusual he couldn't understand. He has been given such poor grades for the size of his faith ever since by those who do no better themselves. When the other disciples told him of Christ's resurrection from the tomb and appearing to them, it was more than Thomas could take in as truth and he said he would have to place his own fingers on the nail prints in Christ's hands and thrust his hand into Christ's spear wounded side before he could believe. Eight days later when Christ again appeared to the group, this time with Thomas present, Christ asked Thomas to reach out his hand and touch the wounds and Thomas overcome fell to his knees crying, "My Lord and my God!" Then Christ said, "Thomas, because you have seen me you believe, blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed".

Was Christ chastising Thomas or was it an uncensorious statement of fact about the makeup of human beings - those happily blessed by nature or whatever with great belief based wholly on pure faith - and those to whom belief comes hard, whose practical natures and emotions have difficulty with things beyond their ken and sphere of understanding.

I am only trying to understand Christ, Thomas and myself in this

question.

We need to put ourselves with that small intimate band of Christ's disciples and understand the utter depth of their dismay, sorrow, and personal terror at the crucifixion.

Christ has been their life, their Messiah - how could such a thing happen? For Thomas 85

the death of christ and all his hopes was too much and I can imagine his bereft heart would steal itself against any added cruelty of possible hoax - he would not be taken in by something wild too good to be true. But it was true and God in His goodness stooped to Thomas's feeble faith, his honest doubt. My own heart with Thomas's is prostrated and crying "My Lord and my God". I know how real He is - I know how I long for His Kingdom here on earth for every soul dead to their need of Him. Another thought from out of my cogitations about the vision centers around the Second Coming of Christ. It was the only answer that came to my mind as it was so distractedly asking "What's happening?" And it was at the point I negated such an idea that the vision vanished. I keep wondering because some time before it had been the topic of Reverend Harro's sermon to which my thinking had taken defin ite exception.

He was exploding my favorite personally conceived theory, my own fancy private interpretation of the meaning of the Second Coming, which was different than his literal rendition. I had chosen to think of the second coming as the time when the historic Christ becomes a living reality in each separate person's life, when Christ comes and enters the inner being of all individuals who open their heart's door to Him. I hadn ' t yet come to realize the promise and working of the Holy Spirit doing just that. I hadn't yet learned that the inner voice of God and conscience are not necessarily one and the same thing.

Ethical principal and conscience may have their roots in the prompting of the Holy Spirit or merely in what we ourselves determine by our mental gymnastics is acceptable behavior. Friends may give the tongue-in-cheek admonishment, "let your conscience be your guide", knowing how much latitude that may allow. Our standards are all in the way we look at things.

What appears as reprehensible to one person can be easily

dismissed by another as only a way of "getting one's jollies" - or, as Charles Stork put it poetically, "white is the skimming gull on the somber green of the fir trees; black is the soaring gull on the snowy glimmer of cloud".

We may never know the big difference between what we call conscience and what

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we can know as the true inner voice - God's indwelling Holy Spirit, never to be mistaken with any fake "voices". We can never know until with trust and honest total surrender of self-will we open ourselves to God's redemption, receptive as new born creatures again for His light, wisdom, guidance and strength, letting His working within flow through us spontaneously and unself-consciously, with no thought of self-congratulations if, in appropriating that light, we come to realize any success in "doing for the Lord". Our "doing" is simply a "spin-off' from a life hid in Christ - acceptable to Him if it proceeds from a trusting grateful heart centered in God Himself. We may make fairly safe and correct moves much of the time through life based on what we have learned in expedient, legal, proper and acceptable to other but still remain inwardly the "whitewashed sepulchers" missing the point of God's redemptive purpose, never knowing the real peace, the effectiveness and fulfillment that can be ours when what we really are is laid bare to God's view of us for His restoration and direction. When that happens, there's no mistaking it and no measuring of all the new life's potentials beginning to emerge.

Because we are told there are portions of Scripture written in allegorical language we do some fancy side-stepping sometimes in taking liberties, choosing interpretations that best suit us, adjustable to our own comprehension - we can even begin to congratulate ourselves for our supposed perspicacious. Some gross statements, behavior, and circumstances, even heinous crimes, have been laid on God by what someone said He said. And we hear His Word misused shamefully for the personal aggrandizement or a cover-up for the nefarious intentions of sanctimonious phonies bent only on destroying their opponents at any cost. Dear Lord God, cleanse us at our depths.

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CHAPTER 12

GOD KNOWS WHERE THE THING IS

I mentioned that the Sunday's vision had followed a number of extraordinary happenings. The most vivid is one that will always continue to amaze me how personally and intimately God Himself cares, how quickly He will respond to our needs when we rush to Him with our distress as trustingly as a child to its parent.

That summer I had spent a long hard day with other volunteers at Camp Stidwell, out of Sandpoint, preparing for a ten day Girl Scout encampment. I had been all over several acres of ground, cleaning latrines that stretched the length of the Camp Stidwell, out of Sandpoint, preparing for a ten day Girl Scout encampment. I had been all over several acres of ground, cleaning latrines that stretched the length of the camp units; helping to get the beach and swimming area set up; up the hill to select a high ground open circled place for a Scouts Own ceremony; crossing the makeshift slippery tree trunk bridge spanning the creek end of the lake to check fences meant to keep out the grazing cattle - all over the place I had covered a lot of territory. I was the last to leave and knew I must hurry to get back to town, pick up my husband at the bank and get to a dinner date. We had only one car then.

In the car, ready to take off, I reached into my blouse pocket for the keys and found they had come loose from the key chain. They were all there except the ignition key. I was alone and the plight I was in quickly unhinged me. Where in all that expanse of ground could that little key be - how could I get word to my husband ten miles away the lodge's phone not yet connected - the closest neighbors at least two miles away of dubious help anyway. I had spent a great deal of time on the long front deck of the lodge arranging for crafts - the floor planks there had spaces between where a key could easily slip through to the rocks below. Hopeless to even think about.

I unlocked the lodge and stood quietly for a moment in the doorway between the kitchen and the main big room. Again, as in the hayloft, I realized the situation was beyond me. God knows where it is and the prayer went up in absolute trust. Then, as in a trance, I moved immediately and directly to one large cardboard box among the

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many we had all helped pack in and store on the benches against the wall. I had no recollection whatever of handling that particular box. It was a carton filled with parents' consent blanks, health reports, schedules, program ideas, menus, all the business of the encampment, tightly filed together. On my own I would have never in the world selected such a totally unlikely far-fetched hiding place and then know precisely where to wiggle my fingers down between the exact papers to reach the bottom of the box and pick up that thin little missing key. Audibly exploding my relief and thanks to God , I scooted away, terribly grateful and yet not then surprised. Not then. But the wonderment of God's instant marvelous providence remains to continually astound and humble . .

I wonder how God feels about the almost casual way we accept His abundance.

Does He sometimes shake His head bemused at what little trusting but heedless unthinking children we really are - grabbing our goodies as a matter of course and scooting on. " Of all your gifts, Oh God, give one thing more - a grateful heart" . I am and was truly grateful and the Lord knows it, however offhand my that-yours are sometimes extended. We learn to recognize God's hand in all of life and life becomes a long continuous gratitude for His care, our good intended in His answers even when our prayer is little more than a sigh and a wish sent upward.

As yesterday, on my way back to help at a Cancer benefit rummage sale. Feeling sorry for those who had worked so hard and were discouraged with the lack of customers, I sent up a tired little wish for them and the sale.

They were about to

abandon hope and close up shop several hours early when I walked in and quite suddenly so did a good dozen others from off the street, with a steady stream thereafter until necessary to close. Skeptics may call it happenstance - the way it is sometimes with sales - but as the women working expressed surprise at the sudden influx of customers, my secret thanks went happily to where my heart felt it belonged. The time didn 't seem right then for sharing those feelings.

There was the occasion when Christ, after healing the two blind men, told them to go but tell no one. Other time we are instructed to publish abroad the glad tidings.

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I'm not always sure when to speak of what I feel lost I turn someone off with much claiming and exclaiming. The hesitation and restraint we often feel in revealing such secret assurances and talking too glibly and familiarly about God's presence is an innate sensitivity and caution that we in our clumsiness may be the cause of having His name and power taken lightly. There is a time for speaking and a time for keeping silence.

As there is a time for "big hand" and a time for quiet homage. I know I am not alone in silently cringing at the times there has been applause that seems inappropriately extended to performance after the rendition of a musical number meant for God's glory, when the goodness of the message was used and diminished as a bid for some self-glory attention. The more moving the words and music, the more offensive are the emotional affectations and grade B acting, the body gimmicks and phony theatrics. We see enough of that kind of histrionics on television with vocalists screeching and agonizing over dumb, shallow, monotonous lyrics with little real meaning.

Religion is not meant to be long-faced - only true. The Lord does not decry the "joyful noise and cymbal's crash" - the happy faces. It is in the vacuous self-satisfied faces, sure of everything except the worth of the precious material they try to use as a handle for their own "big hand" applause, that is the embarrassment. Sincerity can not be fabricated out of pretense. In church we do not applaud outwardly the minister's particularly touching prayer, his extra penetrating sermon, the choir's stirring anthem the same reverent response should be reserved for God in whatever is intended to be to His Gory alone.

I love to see and hear little children singing with happy un-selfconscious gusto words they probably do not yet fully comprehend. Like the little fellow who told his mother what they had sung at Sunday School, "Weak and sinful though we be" was to him "We can sing though full we be".

They are delightfully entertaining without

knowing it, just being their natural adorable selves - not trying to fool anyone. They can be giggling and jostling a chum beside them or waving to mommy and daddy in the congregation while singing "Jesus loves me, this I know" - and we all know it too.

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There are good gospel singers on the airwaves and what makes them good, besides beautiful voices, is that they seem in tune with the words and sing them straight - as to and for the Lord. I am thankful for them as I think of the many half-believers and nonbelievers listening and making their critical judgements,perhaps thirsting for something real for a change - not just more of the same loosely termed "entertainment".

Back to that summer of unusual happenings.

One on top of another, these

occurrences seemed centered so on lost articles and many others since then in the same vein in even more striking circumstances, have occupied a great deal of my thought for what the Lord may have intended to eventually "get through to me" - something deeper even than His readiness to bless as we see blessings.

But I am still shy of divulging much of these embryonic cogitations until their whispery vagueness becomes clearer. I am finding in this attempt to record and partly assess my own Pilgrim's Progress that so often, after I have barely completed expressing myself about an action of God's in my life with what I hope is some sufficiency, it is son soon again wanting revisions for the more clarifications coming through the working of the Holy Spirit. I've said it before - I say it again - the Lord is never finished with us.

I must remind myself not to feel discouraged with my slowness of perception but to gratefully use what light has been given, knowing that then more light will be forthcoming.

In the Jost articles we wish so to recover, as in the shepherd's search for the lost sheep, the poor widow's search for her lost coin, we may see some correlation between what we seek and God' s own seeking of us. Consider His estimation of our worth to Him as He illustrated it on the Cross.

And this thought too - are we not more richly blessed if our searching experiences for things will lead us to the profound and happy acknowledgment that in the process we find God's presence in all the big and little circumstances of our daily lives - His power and providence in the big and overall, His wonderful intimacy in the ordinary little as well, his eternal goodness in all of it. That gives the fullest meaning to the beautiful

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word serendipity.

I'll try to be quick about two other "lost item" instances of that summer. One day shopping I found the precisely perfect gift for a friend's birthday, thoroughly delighted with my purchase of this one of a kind. After going to a number of shops for other things, I suddenly missed the birthday package with the others. Retracing my steps I had no luck and I was greatly disappointed when I finally gave up at the variety store, where the clerk and I decided someone must have made off with it lying on the counter. A full search produced nothing.

Weeks later, the incident completely out of mind at the moment, I was again down town and, while not even aware of passing the dime store, I suddenly stopped in my tracks with the clear unmistakable direction flashing in my mind, "go in and pick up your package". No plausible reason - no ifs or buts - just go in and pick up what I just knew was there and so happy to get back.

Another time I was again shopping and stopped by the bank to speak to my husband. He told me if I would hurry and bring the car around, parked a couple blocks away, we could make it in time to get to the railway station where President Truman would be making a reelection campaign whistle stop. I hurried across the street to the shoe repair shop for an item and, coming out, reached into my purse for the car keys and found I didn't have them. All the places I have been to flashed through my mind but not to the door of the ice cream lunch counter right at my elbow. The message to go in there for my keys came quicker than any recollection of having been there earlier. Whoopie, I was on my hurried way. It was an astonishment to me and, if others want to say it was just my subconscious at work, that's all right. I know who created the subconscious mind and I recognize when God's heart is also at work.

Praise be to God - He let me wade for some time in the shallow waters before taking me out into the deeper mysteries of His purposes. I overstayed my time in the shallows but even so it too in a tender back-handed sort of way spoke plainly of God's patient caring. Persisting even through those silly times when, because of God's past

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goodness in leading me so directly to these lost items and other blessings, I tried to capitalize on the experiences, attempting in little kid fashion to figure how to make it work every time, a kind of system for getting those frustrating times handled, expecting the Lord to always put it right in my hand every time because - well, because He had done it before and He is so good. I would even lay out for God's information just why it justified delivery. Even in such things as bowling and golf, instead of concentrating and putting forth my best effort, I would in slip-shop inattention to the pro's instruction send the ball on its way with an "okay, Lord, make it good", then with a disappointing flub-dub would be a pouty surprise "how come - you didn't".

God, of course knows the difference between needing and wheedling, the kind of discipline I'm short on, the growing up so long overdue. Whenever the need had been genuine, the trust enforced, or He has wanted to tell me something about myself, He has never failed me. We need to see there is no contradiction between the Lord's statement "without Me you can do nothing" and another that says "God helps those who help themselves". He is always available to us but He does not continua11y smooth away every obstacle in our way - for our own good, for the might of our cooperation.

He is

available as the air we breathe, ready to steady us in our stumblings and give us direction even with the trivia1ities that try our tempers and attitudes. He is the Almighty who stoops to our needs, who wants His best for us and takes the long look, even for spoiled kids due for chastisements in mistaking Him for Santa Claus.

Looking back I can see that summer coincided closely with the time "The Power of Positive Thinking" hit the booksellers' shelves, which quickly becomes a number one best seller for many readers - almost a second Bible to some - and the emphasis in much of the current daily meditation reading tended to the "abundant life" theme.

Even while interested and in agreement with many good points made, the more I read the more I felt there was something missing in it, something my mind wasn't ready to put a finger on but which kept coming between me and the printed page and faintly protesting "yes, I know but. . . ". I wasn't sure what the ambiguous objection was but

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finally I felt surfeited as with too much dessert - where at God's banquet table were the meat and potatoes? And the caution grew to take a closer look at what our notions about abundance and positive thinking associated with it really amount to. Why, in all the lovely talk revolving so principally on how to get-get-get your entitled to abundance by thought processing and affirming one's claims - why was there seldom much reference to the central fact of the Cross and Resurrection from which abundance and right thinking are the end products, emanating from the principal quest for the Giver of all good gifts, not the gifts in themselves. The Cross and Blood of Christ, so central to our relationship with our omnipotent God, was God's own thought for the redemption of His own. In the Cross in the awesome awareness and wonderment of God and wherein we come to know the reality of His presence, His care and providence. It is through the Giver that we become quite naturally positive, joyful and grateful human beings with straightened out lives.

The gifts He provides enables us to deal constructively with whatever life presents - hardships, sorrows, tribulations included and learning in them that all things taken to the Lord at the foot of the Cross to work together for good. And saving us from any haughty thought that any suffering others may be having is somehow because they are not "thinking" correctly - for the kind of "figuring out reasons" that Job's friends had for him in all his misfortunes. With minds shut off to the reality of our own sins and our world's real miseries, we would be prone to extend the kind of concern that the Zulus recognize in a saying of their own: "the full-belly child say to the empty-belly child 'be of good cheer'".

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CHAPTER 13

A SERENDIPITY I QUESTIONED

Recently I was hunting for a illusive article I thought I had to have and was finally deep into a large box of many scrambled notes and clippings that hadn't been disturbed in years. I might have become more impatient if I hadn't found a number of other odds and ends from the past to linger over nostalgically. Then I came upon one that stayed all further search while I settled back with mixed feelings to read, remember, muse, and battle the thought that, because of the timing and subject matter, this thing seemed to be asking for some special attention and inclusion in this accounting of mine. Most of me was quick to reject the idea. My natural inclination was to say "huh-uh, Lord, let's skip that - I didn't like that controversy - I don't really want to talk about it - what's the good - let's forget it". I thought I had forgotten it and told myself it just goes to show that time, with help from the Lord, heals bruised feelings.

And I tucked the thing back among all the other souvenir bits and pieces of my past, quite ready to believe it was only my imagination claiming that there was anything "appointed" in this chance coming together again. I resumed my search but now had to keep reminding myself what it was for. And my reluctance and conscience continued to feel the pestering of an insistence that I take another look at why - why the reluctance, why the avoidance, why did I question there might be some possible good in rehashing an unpleasantness I had thought was a closed chapter.

Finally, with no enthusiasm, I did take another look.

It was a notebook of

quotations and an unfinished manuscript that was started as a summer time project of the Senior High School Sunday School class I was teaching about twenty years ago. The class of about eighteen students decided to meet on Sunday evenings during vacation time instead of the morning, combining the sessions with picnic suppers in our back yard. The "school's out" mood wanted to relax study time from the prescribed curriculum, do something else and the program most appealing then seemed to be that we start collecting quotations we liked that would more or less reiterate or paraphrase God's Biblical messages to us - exceptional revealing thoughts of others that would stimulate our own 95

thinking and uplift our own spiritual understanding. The practice was meant to make us more alert in our reading, more selective in seeking out good food for thought, "trying them on for size", and, if good, digesting the meaning for some real growth, fastening them in our minds with the added effort of jotting them down and bringing them to class for sharing and possible discussion. In no way were they ever meant to be thought of as substitutes for the Bible's Word. Quite the opposite, they were only meant to help us see the impact of His Word on all generations of believers since Biblical times. E . Stanley Jones has said, "the way to keep from erring is to know these two things: the Scriptures - the past revelations; and the power of God - the present continuous activity of God. Revelation issuing in experience and experience inspired and checked by revelation - these are the two things that keep life from erring."

All summer we had a good time with it and it seemed to be going well. And we had fun. No getting around the fact that at that age what "he" said, what "she" said and the language of exchanged glances can be more eloquent than the ponderings of the most profound sages. But many of them did come through with some excellent material. They seemed enthusiastic about their own teenagers' scrapbook of words to live by and also seemed to be of one mind that they would like to finish it up when regular classes started again.

But that was vacation mood talking and when fall classes resumed there were new students to be filled in on the project; the repetitions and task of revising and editing soon palled - some were interested (maybe only polite), some indifferent, some becoming openly bored. And so the project floundered.

It was not important to me whether it continued or not - the vacation mood

evaporation was there for me too but I felt I should stick with their decision. I know now I was quite obtuse, and maybe stubborn, in not more quickly gauging the real and changed attitude of the majority, which should have called for a frank reconsideration.

Instead I let it ride to become a divisive element for no good reason, with unrest and some hostilities becoming apparent.

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What happened then was finally a confrontation with those in the class who were objecting, with two couples, who had our mutual love and deep respect, present to find out exactly what the project and the conflict was about. Their neutral judgments and understandings were ameliorating for all of us but I was fully aware then that there were others critical of me. I can't blame them - particularly with parents wondering why I should take this deviation from the church's provided class curriculum, which was very good.

Whether the criticism was just or unjustly based on partial or biased information no longer mattered. The upshot of it was that I felt under a cloud that would only be worse by remaining with the class at that time but I did help recruit three excellent teachers, who, although not available for the full year, were willing to devote full attention and thought to divided but coordinated periods of teaching time - thereby also giving the students a change and fuller viewpoints.

It worked out fine - well, there was one little hitch - the three time appearance of an uninvited adult seeking a church home who thought the high school class was it and who, by monopolizing most of the hour with her own views on every question, killed the spontaneous give and take of any student participation in the discussions. She may have figured that for the free lectures, you couldn't beat the price. She had problems of her own she couldn't handle but good at solving others. I don't mean that unkindly but that was how it was and, if there is a pipe line from Heaven to Earth and she is tuned in on it, I hope she forgives me for the remark.

That whole controversy was only a part of a time of touchy tensions within our church, as in many others then, when the threat and study of communism became all important to some and not so much to others. I was one of the not so much - mostly I know because I had already been through that scare almost thirty years before.

Someplace I still have the notes I took of a speech I heard Will Durant make in Spokane in the early 1930's at the old Hippodrome Theater (long ago dismantled). It strikes me odd now that I avidly short-handed his lecture, which was certainly not a habit

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of mine at others. But I had just finished reading Durant' s "The Story of Philosophy", admired him very much and was eager to hear him, especially for what he had learned about communism on his visit to Russia to gather material.

I went alone and sat in the balcony, taking copious notes and what he had to say I felt could not be propaganda and it was frightening . His graphic description of how the brave but apprehensive Russian chambermaid at his hotel had unburdened how she felt about her government stays with me yet. And just as disturbing was looking down from the balcony to see a couple in the audience on their feet at the close of Durant's speech and shouting angry things I couldn't make out. That made the threat shockingly close and it was easy for me to feel both fear and hate for communism and additional reading thereafter increased those feelings.

But the years went on and the world did not capitulate to the imminent disaster I felt was hanging over us. God was still in charge and I found constant fear and hate something I couldn't live with.

I know strength, constant vigilance and judicious

handling are needed not only to help keep the world free and at peace but also for the straight look at ourselves, at our own motives and moral shortcomings, at the opportunities we might take in being truly effective peacemaking leaders in the world.

Don't tell me it is done with mirrors and war machine escalations - tell me people are people the world over, capable of being transformed from suspicious, fearful, angry, greedy, stupid, misguided, stunted lives to truly God's whole and caring family on earth.

Steady hate, fear, and suspicions feed on themselves, taking possession of perspective and warping judgment. Trust makes me want to sing out with renewed unabashed assurance, "This is my Father's world, oh, let me ne'er forget that, though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet". That is not whistling in the dark. Nor am I unaware of our time's complexities and wicked injustices. My trust is content to leave the time-table for the Peaceable Kingdom in god's hands. Our concern must be that our nation's hands do not hinder it coming. We are an achieving nation - oh, that we would put all of our energies, resources, and brain power toward new, effective, 98

ungreedy, useful, peaceful ends.

From Biblical accounts, when kings led their armies to war as regularly as others went to the fields for spring plowing, there had been an unending history of war's horrors. But history has now come to its most crucial significant time and we are the people of this age who must make the unflinching, irreversible choice for God's way, truth and life or annihilation. In our own life span has come a vision of a world of peace - the thought of its possibility finding more unwilling to accept the old common resigned comment "we've always had wars, we always will"; more and more taking heart that "it ain't necessarily so"; more and more actively seeking ways to give the vision enough substance to know it can be done and courage finally to say we will do it. If we set our minds, hearts, wills, and "know-how" to the vision we will come to know God's Kingdom for all mankind in reality.

Beginning with ourselves we have much to learn there before we can expect to be equipped to carry God's banner anyplace. I begin to see a glimmer of understanding the reason for that serendipity's challenge ~o "rehash" that experience of so long age. There was value in the manuscript itself but what I am learning for my own immediate good in the closer look is first cleansing myself of any possible lingerings of hurt feelings and then acknowledging the value of criticism - how they extended and received - and knowing that tensions, if constructively dealt with, lead to closer scrutiny of oneself and hopefully some new dimensions in understanding and character. My usual reaction to unjust criticism has generally been either "blow my top" or avoid possible embroilment by simply walking away from a controversy - perhaps smoldering, perhaps only shrugging a shoulder.

There's nothing wrong with reasoning together.

Except when emotions are

inflamed, with suspicions, anger and name calling gone crazy, then it seems best to postpone the reasoning, let time cool it and strike a balance. During my own walking away from the controversy there were a couple quotations in the booklet we had given up that helped sustain my equanimity. One that said, "instead of wishing that all men

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were of our mind, we should count it one of the first blessings of life that there are men who do not agree with us. The currents of sea and air are not more necessary than the currents of thought". And another that said, "when opposition of any kind is necessary, drop all color of emotion out of it and let it be seen in the white light of truth" - adding my own conviction that we are badly in need of a constant Christ referral attitude in search of truth- opinions must plumb with His nature and character, our opinions must not be more important to us than what He would have us know. One reason the vacation time change of program appealed to me was the hope of avoiding any further bristling over parts of the year's curriculum. When feelings are touchy, quick to take offence when none is intended, quick to criticize and accuse, go softly. A superficial look at our class study that year may have taken one part of it as pointing an unfair finger at dissenters. The three years' curriculum covered one year's study of the Bible, the next the life and teachings of Christ, and the third the history of the Church, which was then the current study, ranging from its beginning through its major influences down through the centuries - the Moslem Conquest, Charlemagne, The Great Crusades, the Inquisition, the Great Chism, Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin Knox, the Revolt in England. But it was the Deviants of the Middle Ages that had to tread gingerly - the Dominicans, Franciscans, the Waldensians, maybe others. With them the main point made was for the need of God's loving spirit in the church in any of her conflicts and confrontations. It told of the effectiveness of Franciscans who approached the church officials for needed reforms, well sustained by God's Holy, loving, and reasonable spirit, and the ineffectiveness of the Waldensian Representatives who came with belligerent self-righteousness, harsh condemnations and demands for the same reforms but were rebuffed because of their abrasive attitude.

We need to remember the first Christian disciples were also Deviants, disturbing the Jewish faith, which was wary of false prophets, about whom we are also cautioned.

But we need not be badly fooled if we seek to know and trust God's true nature and His Word for us.

It is well to remember what Gamaliel had to say about those early

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Christians - the advice he gave to the Sadducees Council, when the majority of its members were alarmed by the way Peter and the other early apostles were preaching and performing miracles and attracting such crowds in spite of the Council's orders that they were to desist.

The apostles had replied that they must obey God rather than men and must - they must speak of what they had witnessed. In spite of real dangers to their own personal experience and could not be denied. Why would they lay their lives on the line for some make-believe? So many men and women were then openly declaring themselves believers and as many more, not daring to join, held the apostles in their highest regard. The Council's furious mood was to execute the whole bunch of these disciples, afraid only what effect such actin would have on themselves.

The Biblical account of the proceedings says that there was one of their members, a Pharisee named Gamaliel (an expert on religious law and very popular with the people), who stood up and requested that the apostles be sent outside the Council Chambers while he talked. Then he addressed his colleagues and cautioned them to take care and cited a couple examples of others in the past who had drawn crowds to their thinking only to be harmlessly dispersed and scattered. His advice was to leave the apostles alone, saying that, if what they teach and od is merely on their own, it will fall of itself but, if it is truly of God, you will not be able to stop them, lest you find yourself fighting even against God. The Council took his advice, called in the apostles, had advice, called in the apostles, had them beaten, told them never to speak the name of Jesus again and finally let them go. They left the Council Chambers rejoicing that God had counted them worthy to suffer dishonor for His name. And every day, in the Temple and in their Bible classes, they continued to teach and preach that Jesus was the Messiah.

In all the tensions and upheavals of an imperfect church made up of imperfect Christians such good advice is sound. The ingrained habit of a Christ referral attitude is necessary to permeate all conflicts that arise and to clear our opinions in that light.

When god deals with us in such various ways - so plain and purposeful to Him - so 101

mystifying and often perplexing to us - and we come at last to fully realize how sure and trustworthy and right His precepts and guidance are, there is a glad and absolute relinquishing of our total selves to His omnipotent care. And the words keep echoing against our human presumptions: "be not wise in your own conceits" .

It no longer matters who were right or wrong in that church controversy - or even

if either faction at that time was able to "drip all color of emotion out of it and view it in the white light of truth", or were equipped sincerely enough then to make sure they were devotedly on God's side, not trying to convince themselves or anyone else that it was the other way around. god was on both sides, smack in the middle of it, behind it, way ahead of it, and patiently high above it. His concern was for all concerned, wanting us all to grow for the better. And I think we did - once we willingly let go the last vestiges of our little mads, enough to feel a sincere wish for our own and their growth in the Holy Spirit, glad for the Lord's corrections, healing, and lessons learned.

Church affiliations are much like home styles with their individual personalities.

Not everyone feels at home, sheltered, instructed, inspired, supported, and comfortable in the same identical family setting. Church groups branch out as do family units and the Church Universal need not lament how shameful it is that we can't all live together, always agreeing. Our diversities of home styles within the "Body of Christ" may not be as dismaying to Christ, the Cornerstone, as it is to us. Religion's health may in fact thrive on a few hot family disagreements - as long as basic love remains - as long as it is centered unmistakably on the Living Lord, making it a truly seeking, striving to be an obedient and serving part of God's Kingdom.

Unbalanced "weirdos", kooky cults, false prophets, wolves in sheep's clothing, who use God's name as a popular drawing card or a pious facade for godless intents, must fall of themselves. They serve only as a caution to the true and faithful. "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of the sinner, nor sitteth in these at of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the lord and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the 102

rivers that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf shall not wither and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. " (Psalms 1: 1-3) Christ has said that when two or more are gathered together in His Name, He will be there in their midst. Where His Spirit is truly reflected, the "head count", traditions, customs, activities, programs, and decor become secondary manifestations only of a wish to somehow in them and in our diverse ways glorify His name, not bent on competing with and trying to outshine others with these secondaries.

Christ accepts us where we are - He seeks us for our good and would be happier if we tried harder in His guidance and strength to extend a loving awareness and witness to the larger fellowship in His Name. We can't - at least we think we can't - really understand all with whom we are called to rub elbows but it helps when we recognize each as a child of God also and dear to His heart. Some we may do well to give a wide berth, leaving them to Heaven with an intercessory prayer can be better than simulating a fellowship that is both phony and corrupting. It takes the wisdom of God Almighty sometimes to recognize wolves in sheep's clothing. And it takes the love of God to find real love in ourselves for all others - all others, including those who do not agree with us.

Sometimes that is a bigger order than we can handle alone. But what rare and beautiful examples do we see exhibited where both forgiveness and the extension of prayerful help have been given to the guiltiest of beastly actions. Such exemplars have learned the lessons of Gethasame, the Cross on Golgotha, and the Resurrection. They make so small our little persisting resentments and self-importance, so silly our dredging up of reasons and self-justifications for continuing ill will for anyone. By letting them go, letting God have His way with our unruly hearts, we come to the crux of our Christian commitment - we know we are Christian by our love.

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CHAPTER 14

THE UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT

After finding the manuscript at such a seemingly appointed time, but feeling the resistance to the Lord's nudge to include it, the dialogue between us include His answer to my original timid spineless "Lord, can't we just skip that" . His final response to that was "come on now - you know that was a time you were so in earnest in wanting to make Me more real to those kids so that, as they went off to college or on their own, their faith would be more solidly established than your own had been at that age - in fact, that was your major reason for taking that age group class in the first place - you could remember your own doubts and fogginess at that age. What you were trying to do, even if not so good, was good - so forget the unpleasantness - use that experience now. You remember you really prayed hard to me about it. Do you think I have forgotten?"

That is like a squeeze to my heart and I am ashamed - silenced. The Lord had waited patiently for me to finally pick up the unfinished manuscript. I soon found myself smiling as I read again the had written contributions of some of those students, remembering their energy and wit, the often surprising depth of their perceptions, their eagerness and basic goodness. I read it through with the growing conviction that it was a good experience worth passing on, all the effort and disappointment meant for something more.

The nudge now told me "all that was the matter way back then was your timing, it is better that you waited with it. The matter with you now is your wish to avoid offending in any way those with whom you were philosophically and theologically at odds - you liked them - still do - many of them are good personal friends - you know them as sincere Christians and intelligent. Except you felt the grip of their fear of communism, which you could understand, made them go to foolish extremes, equating every person's and institution's lack of zeal to go along with their thinking as being soft on communism and their judgments had become so absolute there was little use in arguing. " I stopped listening altogether finally when I heard the preposterous glib statement, "oh yes, didn't you know - Dr. Leuback is a communist." I was shocked speechless.

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The basis for the label amounted to the charge that he was not against UNICEF. I don't know if he was or wasn't or what my informant considered was so wrong with UNICEF, but I think time spent reading so much hate the communist fact or fiction might have been used to better advantage by taking to heart Dr. Laubach's book "Prayer, the Mightiest Force in the World" or his "The World is Learning Compassion". I had read and been inspired by so many books Dr. Laubach had written - I loved the man - to me there didn't exist a more sincere, practical, and sane Christian, totally at odds with a godless philosophy, his whole heart, mind and life bent only on trying to improve the lot of human beings wherever he was called upon for his literacy programs, irrespective of the "bad guys", the complications and confines of the intricate current political questions of national governments. It was not that he was ignorant of what was going on in places but his eye was single and in focus on the human needs of people. His heavy schedule left him no time to hate anybody - period.

His book on prayer as the mightiest force in the world was further entitled, "Thoughts for an Atomic Age", and another of his books "Wake Up or Blow up" tell of his concern for the world - thoughts we can't afford to dismiss. At the time of that writing we were living in daily dread of the Frankensteins our scientific age had perfected. The topic at most social gatherings gravitated to the question to build or not to build a fall-out shelter in one's back yard.

It was interesting to note those who

preferred annihilation, if life on earth should ever reach such a low, to the alternative of living as a mole underground to save one's neck. Those who felt sure of their soul's safety in eternity exhibited their degrees of calm and trust.

Dr. Laubach made the point that we were indeed living in a most fateful, significant age - perhaps other ages have thought so too - but our scientists and those most knowledgeable with the might of our own inventions are in agreement that the prospect of annihilation in real unless we learn to control these inventions. He said, "annihilation and Thy Kingdom Come on Earth have never hung in balance or been as near and possible as in this age, and the choice we make - whether we disregard God's

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plain word to us or adhere to it - was never more crystal clear. God has stood before other generations and knocked for admittance; each age has had its few dedicated and fervent souls - certainly the early Christian martyrs make our formalized religion seem anemic - but God has given us a long time to learn. With all man's experience in past history telling us the price of hate, greed, war and sin, as against the blessedness of walking in His way - when will we learn? God's leniency should rightfully run out unless we as a race put His word into practice. We need more than a few prayirig coworkers with God. We need a whole people convinced that the Christian religion must work and certainly our church people, at least, sure of their role - going out to all the world with the Gospel of Christ in understandable convincing ways."

When we think how easily annihilation could be triggered off by godless, blundering unpredictable mad men in power, willing to risk bringing the whole world down with their recklessness if they have to, then, as we do in our own personal panics, we will reach higher in hope and desperation for the mighty weapon God gave us long before He allowed the know-how atomic weapons.

But it is the weapon of prayer that we need to know more about to use consistently and effectively. How many prayers are said with the conviction that they matter vitally - that enough prayers can transform this world? Dr. Lauback makes an earnest plea for Christians to believe in prayer, in God's promises, and pray like it matters, joining a universal praying army of souls for God's Kingdom Come on Earth, for the church's own pentecostal awakening and her part in the world; for all the world's leaders that they stay close to God; that the causes of war be removed and the festering places be cleaned up.

He quoted some of the foremost research scientists' thoughts on the need for man himself to catch up with his discoveries. Leonard H. Day, who said, "it is unscientific not to believe in God" - and Charles Steinmetz who believes "someday .... the scientists of the world will tum their laboratories over to the study of God and prayer and the spiritual forces which as yet have hardly been guessed at."

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When I heard Dr. Laubach called a communist I had to believe the woman simply had not gotten names straight or she had allowed herself to be taken in.

I thank God now for His intentionally directed serendipity of the forgotten unfinished manuscript and for patiently steering me through my reassessment of its worth.

I now willingly share that long ago experience with assured trust that some of the excerpts "we" are passing on will have meaning for others as well.

The booklet stated our purpose in collecting quotations that deal with our Christian faith, attitude, behavior, and growth, should, as I have already said, be to gather those that emphasize in other words what the Bible says to us. We tried to point out that the Word of God was written by men prompted, led, and inspired by God, who where moved to put God's speaking to them into safe keeping - a book, the Scriptures, the Bible, God's Holy Word.

But in all generations smce, mankind has discovered the same truths and enlargements of them in many ways and have also been moved to express themselves differently. God is forever speaking to His people - He is never through with us - the world changes its customs, rituals, life styles, but His truth remains the same. We should try to make the Bible God 's living word in our own generation, in our own situations, in our own language,in our own hearts, without any watering down of its vitality - not thinking of the Bible only as the most revered but hard to understand book writ!rn about and by and for a different people long ago , whose customs, conditions, and phraseology are sometimes difficult to understand. We have an expanded world knowledge but our human natures and needs and God's truth and availability are still the same.

The Bible is held in reverence as the truth even when people don't know or begin to practice the truth that is in it. In court, with hand on the Bible, witnesses swear to tell the truth - in conversations people will testify to someone's veracity by saying, "he swore on a stack of Bibles" - or to convince others about one's own honesty will emphasize "that's the God's truth, so help me God". Our aim must be notjust to acknowledge that truth is there but to find it for ourselves.

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It was William Channing who said, "Religion, to be true, is central truth and all

knowledge which is not gathered round it and quickened by it and illumined by it, is hardly worthy of the name".

With that, we will now sift through the manuscript for a few of the nuggets that were special to us, now willingly shared. An early quotation in the booklet was by Phillip Brooks, who said, "we are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it". To which we added that we do not want to grow up unaware, not recognizing that we are children of God with His divine image within us - but desiring to make the most of our possibilities, availing ourselves of the abundance life has for us when we approach it as we should.

Another by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick in his sermon, "On Being a Real Person", said that "the central business of every human being is to be a real person. We possess by nature the factors out of which personality can be made. And to organize these factors into effective personal life is every man's primary responsibility". He went on to say, "three elements enter into the building of personality:

heredity , environment, and

personal response. We are not responsible for our heredity; much of our environment we cannot control; but the power to face life with an individual rejoiner - that we are responsible for. What happens to us is not the determining element as much as the way we take it" .

To that we stated we accept our primary responsibil ity - that of becoming

2

real

person - paying particular attention to the kind of response we make to life, considering especially the quality and effect of our thoughts. And we quoted Tryon Edwards, who put the effect of thought in this order: "Thoughts lead on to purposes, purposes go forth to action, action forms habits, habits decide character fixes our destiny".

In that connection and not from this teenagers' manuscript but from part of a message I wrote for our church's lenten devotions this year - something I know so well is true, I want to pass it on also. Which is - the more we look into the Word of God, the more it keeps looking into us, exposing us to ourselves - to what we are - to what we

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might be - revealing the mediocrity of our thinking , understanding, and faith, but stirring us at the same time to acknowledge the potentials of that divine spark with which God created us - in His image. It arouses within us a discontent with the shallowness of our commitment to what we so easily profess to believe, making us aware of our soul's need to be humbled before the Almighty and learn to rely honestly on the cleansing, guidance, and strength available through faith in God. God didn't create us as puppets but as co-workers for life with choices and responsibilities for the further creation of ourselves. We botch the job when we think we can do it all ourselves and proceed with no awareness of the nearness of the Master at our shoulder. These days we read auto bumper stickers that say "read your Bible - it has a gift for you". What a gift! And how unfortunate if we fail or don't know how to read and accept. The Bible is no vacation time easy reading - it is a deep study. So is the meaning of life - but for those hungering and thirsting for truth, those who seek and knock, God is there to open the door and flood with light the most brilliant and most unschooled alike.

Someone has said that "study is gathering information; meditation is viewing it from all angles and relating it to our life. Study leads to conclusions; meditation to conviction. We study for serving; we meditate for living. Study alone brings forth growth of m!nd but mc<li k1tion brings forth the inner man. Meditation in the Word makes the Lord Jesus more real to us and makes us more like Him. Meditation means to think in view of doing, of being" .

Many of those students preferred the pithy challenging one-liners. Such as: "A man is only as big as the things that bother him".

"People who are all wrapped up in themselves make small packages.'' -Ben Franklin "God does not comfort us to make us comfortable but to make us comforters. "-B. Jowett "Nothing can be hostile to religion which is agreeable to justice." - Gladstone "I never wonder to see men wicked but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. "-J. Swift 109

"Associate Thoreau

reveren~ly,

and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts." Henry

"Doing the will of God, leaves me no time for disputing about His plans." G. MacDonald "Look through nature to nature's God. - Alexander Pope "Nature has perfections in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects to show she is only His image." - Pascal Life is God's gift to us - what we do with it is our gift to God. (who said?)

And some of the less epigrammatic: "As well might we expect vegetation to spring from the earth without the sunshine and dew as the Christian to unfold his grace and advance in his course without patient, persevering, ardent prayer." - J. Abbott "Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees." - Victor Hugo

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." - George Washington "Our civilization cannot survive materially unless it can be redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by becoming permeated by the spirit of Christ and by being made free and happy by the practices which spring from that spirit. No stable peace is possible as long as half the world is hungry and unhappy. " - Woodrow Wilson "Christ is the great central fact in the world's history; to Him everything looks forward and backwards. All the lines of history converge upon Him. AIJ the march of providence guided by Him . All the great purposes of God culminate in Him. The greatest and momentous fact which the history of the world records is the fact of His birth." - C.H. Spurgeon "The wise men ask 'what language did Christ speak?' They caval, argue, search and little prove. Oh, Sages, leave your Syriac and your Greek Christ spoke the universal language Love." - Ella W. Wilcox

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"One truly Christian life will do more to prove the divine origin of Christianity that many lectures. It is of greater importance to develop Christian character than to habit Christian evidence." - J.M. Gibson "Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than her common sense." - Buxton "Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something." Phillip Brooks

"Be such a man and live such a life that, if every man were such as you and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's paradise." Phillip Brooks "Character is not only written in the face, expressed in conduct and language, but is sent forth as a thought atmosphere." - Dresser "If we haven't that within us which is above us, we will soon yield to that which is around us.

We become circumstance-conditioned and circumstance-fed and grow weak and anemic on the fare. And if we turn within for our resources we find the well dry ." - E. Stanley Jones "Reverence is born of a sense of mystery. It is a mood of the soul arising in the presence of the unexplainable. God is the supreme mystery, everywhere apparent and yet everywhere concealed . He is manifest all about us in trees and flowers, in storms and rainbows, in friends and strangers, but He is vastly more than our eyes can see or our minds can comprehend. To realize His nearness is to be on Holy ground. Pride, arrogance, self-esteem vanish at such a time. Reverence is the only appropriate mood. But reverence is more than duty; it is the innate courtesy of the soul." - Alfred Walton "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude."

- Ralph W. Emerson

"It will generally be found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among the worst and least pleasant examples."

- Dickens

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"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to lead the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours .. . .if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they belong. Now put foundations under them." - Henry Thoreau

To put some foundations under our dreams, William James tells us "make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions and live at ease upon the interest of the funds.

For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can and as carefully guard against growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatic behavior, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision - all his daily details subjects of express volitional deliberations. Full half the time of such a man goes to deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. Education is for behavior and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"Adversity, far from being a nuisance or cruelty, is one of the constituent elements of great living, to be finely used. When you and I have faced a personal calamity and have handled it well, we have always added a new dimension to our character. Let every man say to his soul: If you have had any experience with trouble, use it now. Let it carry you out beyond the barricades which too commonly shut our understanding in and make for you roads of insight into the life of the people. Translate anything you know about trouble into such constructive care for individuals and for the social welfare that somebody at least will have cause to thank God that once upon a time you yourself faced adversity so that you can understand.

When real adversity comes, a soul true to itself builds new dimensions not so much activity as receptivity - not so much new branches of effort as new roots of faith. And some people who have lived like that, simply by being what they are, have helped us more than all the busy folks who serve us with their hands - they triumphed in their troubles." - Henry E. Fosdick Throughout this Pilgrim's account, I have passed on many thoughts of others, not only from this unfinished manuscript but also those I have gleaned from my reading over

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the years and preserved in a notebook for their influence on my thinking and rethinking.

The habit started many years ago after learning how frustrating it is to try to recapture certain haunting observations, how fickle, fleeting and unreliable memory can be in fastening thoughts for further mulling. Some were challenging conceptions new to me; others helpful in crystallizing some of my ambiguities and blurred beliefs; or simply cherished for the beauty and clarity with which they expressed their thoughts.

It is a kind of collection I heartily recommend. There are those who collect coins, stamps, china cups, snuff boxes, other particular interests, which is fine and fun. I have some of my own but none is as rich and inexpensive and means as much to me as this old habit of jotting down choice thoughts of others and occasionally even some of my own. Through repeated reading and , with experience enlarging our understanding, the good of such preservations continues through us when they have become part and parcel of our own thinking and growth. It becomes difficult for very few to honestly claim much absolute originality of thought. The expression of it perhaps but thought is too elusive and afloat in the universe to be nailed down as anyone's private property - it was sparked consciously, subconsciously or superconsciously, by another's brain child, which had its forbearers as well. And all good thoughts emanate from the same generous source - God is not stingy with us if (the big if again) we are open to him and listening.

Our concern and care should be with what sort of thoughts our minds dwell on if they are trivial and superficial from morning till night, day after day, how can any depth of character be expected? Which comes first - the egg or the chicken? - the pornography or the dirty old man? Henry Thoreau said, "I think we should treat our minds as innocent children whose guardians we are - be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention."

And I wish I knew who said, "thoughts establish patterns. You can change your life by changing the character of your thoughts because, if you think anything long enough, deep enough, sincerely and honestly enough, you will tend to carry thought over into some form of expression, feeling, speech, action. Guard your thought and stay

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receptive to all the hidden resources within you. A tender heart, a sane mind, a sound body is a fine balance for the integrated life.

Persons of great heart can meet and

overcome things that persons of great intellect can never do for out of the heart proceed the issues of life."

We can stay receptive to our hidden resources if we pray in effect as E.S. Jones has - "Holy Spirit, I see what I need Thee. I need Thee, not as an occasional visitor with me but as my constant companion within me. This three-storied house of my body, mind, and soul is Thine. Take over charge. Put light and heat in every room, and let the light shine from every window - with no part dark".

In preserving the thoughts of others we need to be selective with some true kinship to the best in ourselves to understand and grow on. Not to be mere parrots squawking words trying to sound wise and missing the wisdom. And we need to keep watch too that we are stimulated but not so completely taken over by the impressive expressions of others that whatever native intelligence and creative spark we might have is overwhelmed to silence by their brilliance.

God tells us to use what light we have and more light will be given us. We are not to discount the worth of our own candle was not meant to illuminate those already in far greater brilliance than our own - our own may well serve to rekindle some flickering flame elsewhere. I have many admirable books too deep and erudite for me to easily understand and assimilate, requiring such intense concentration that too frequently my attention begins to lag far behind my comprehension and I fall asleep. Such brilliance is for the really studious, which my guess is most of us are not. Most of us are mentally lazy or we have such busy schedules we think we do well in ascribing time scant enough for a short one-paged daily devotional.

But even short daily devotionals that enlarge on Scripture an have a "sticking-tothe ribs" quality can be our best time of the day, preparing the soul to sally forth in a better frame of mind and bit by bit adding new dimensions to our character, about as unnoticeably progressive as our physical growth and our hunger and thirst steadily 114

increases for more time spent with God's word for us.

We should not make comparisons or feel apologetic that our own light is small beside others - we can take heart that their own light was once a flickering thing that never allowed its own flame to be intimidated or usurped by the brightness of another's torch.

Goethe said so wisely:

"Say nothing of yourself, either good or bad or

indifferent. Nothing good for that is vanity; nothing bad for that is affectation; nothing indifferent for that is silly. It is equally a mistake to hold one's self too high or rate one's self too cheap. " Value most of all that you are a child of God - a priceless creature for that alone.

We are His and "he don't make no junk".

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CHAPTER 15

RIGHT ABOUT FACE

"Why me, Lord?" This is the query we often hear after some personal adversity has befallen, the one of which often implying an injustice has been done, a kind of "no fair - what have I done to deserve this?" Or it is a guilty conscience confrontation.

While the question itself seems improper and unbecoming a Christian, still the Bible recognizes its existence in frail human nature by devoting the entire Book of Job to debating and settling the matter and it is a good mental and spiritual conditioner and equipped for any of life's unpredictable big or little misfortunes - a good lesson in learning how true it is that "All things work together for good to them that love God." Romans 8-28 My good fortune in one recent so-called misfortune was in being conditioned and equipped and assured that in loving God good may be worked out of whatever the circumstances. The more baffling and haunting question for me is why everyone doesn't know this -- why are there so many shut off from knowing and experiencing this truth?

The only answers I get is that life is eternal and makes its sure judgements - and that we as God's children make poor excuses as co-workers with Him. The longer I live with that misnomer 'misfortune ' , the more gratefol I am for God's good providence in it as well as in all else. In the large overall way I was prepared in case but not expecting. And the unexpected suddenly brought my life up short with an abrupt 'right-about-face' command regarding the never-ending ever increasing activities so busily occupying all my days. Activities that serve a good purpose that from the very beginning I know were prompted, steadily sustained and prospered by God's Holy Spirit at work in me. I believed in what I was happily and deeply immersed in; loved what I was doing and particularly the many wonderful people who were involved in it with me.

Mildred and Abe Eborall were our guests for a late breakfast at our home when suddenly I had a sensation in one of my eyes and it seemed that Fourth of July fireworks were exploding and creating flashes of light. I knew that something was amiss and that 116

I shouldn't indicate that it was nothing. I felt certain that it was just a temporary thing but, with urging I called my eye doctor. He directed me to the hospital emergency immediately where he would join me. There I learned that I had a retinal artery occlusion with the flow of blood blocked in the main artery to the eye. I was given no assurance of the sight ever returning. But, of course, I've known by now that miracles do happen and, while on a device to supply more oxygen to the blood vessels, I prayed that the blockage would give way. I kept remembering how often God had answered my urgent prayers before in the affirmative. But this time the thought superseding all the importuning was "if it be Thy will", leaving His answer for me in question, something I could not be sure of. I did mean a willingness to trust His will - whatever it was to be I had faith that He does know bestand, when the answer was either "no" or "not yet" there was only one small moment of wordless slight confusion and adjustment before complete and ready acceptance. More than that, it quickly grew to a matter-of-fact contentment, wanting then only guidance to realize what my part should be and how to carry out whatever its purpose, working out the good intended in it.

The adjustment period passed quickly. I had something to learn about a different depth of perception. But very soon I was again pouring coffee into the cup instead of on the counter; I was getting over the tendency to want to extend my hand out to the left a little as an antenna for making progress through a crowd, chuckling to myself for saying "excuse me" to blank walls I'd bumped into; and, with my head like a swivel, regaining my confidence in driving again. It did take a little getting used to.

My sweet sister Bunny was more distressed than I and empathetically for a full day covered her left eye to see how it would be while she made her way around home and the golf course at Sun City, California. I appreciated the concern of family and friends and when I had to respond to sympathetic solicitude my honest answer was "I feel great." and I was not trying to affect a "stout fella" pose. I'm happy and my disposition is nicer. I'm more appreciative than ever of a husband who is more loving and protective than ever and more fun. This year's valentine was especially tender. He had Peanuts

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saying for him "Valentine, you've really been kind, considerate and just plain wonderful to me lately" and added on the inside of the card, "are you up to something?." Mine to him said, "Have I told you lately that I love you?" and inside the card a sly, sleepy angel adds, "I know I told somebody."

When it became plain to me that some of the activities of my life were going to be changed around a bit, the Lord was also making that easy for me, going ahead to solve some of the problems in His own inimitable way. I had been wanting for two years to find someone else to head up an organization that I had founded - Cancer Community Charities (The Three Cs) for which I felt now that I was some Kind of 'Mother hen" and which had grown so large with such wide ranging programs that tying them together, coordinating all the schedules and getting out quarterly newsletters to some thousands of members had all become such a demanding full time volunteer's job that the time required frightened off prospective successors, however, interested, capable and dedicated they might be. Many exceptional women were wonderfully and imaginatively fulfilling particular assignments and I have them to thank for making me as head look good. But all emphatically declined the "quarterback" position.

The doctor's order that I ease up the pace meant first of all the end of two days a week involvement with one of our major activities -- the three cancer charity bowling leagues. They got along just fine without me much as I missed them. More help and delegation of responsibilities followed as well as changes in time consuming tasks -- not only for my good but also for the health of the organization. Activities increased and with more help the health of the organization improved. We had to find an easier way of operating, provide more assurance of stability, growth and continuity for our own locally funded, locally based organization. It had become too good an idea, too many depending on us for financial assistance and other types of help we were providing. We had to make sure it was firmly rooted.

When our membership had been only a few hundred women in the bowling, bridge, and golf leagues, we managed but clumsily to conduct our affairs from our

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homes. But with the development of the "do-your--own-thing" league such an unhandy arrangement was quickly inadequate. It had become a little like the man hunting a bear.

He caught one around the neck but he couldn't let go. Our accumulations of operating necessities and much donated craft materials were crowding us out of home space and finding available workroom space any place was a constant headache. I took the mounting pressures first to The Holy Spirit before the pesky questions "Where can we go?", "How can we swing it?" would go to our board for its decisions. They were scarcely expressed when the answer seemed to fall in our laps. A chance remark to a friend one day and the next day we had a place of our own at a very affordable price. Beautiful help came from many sources for refrigerator and kitchen and office equipment, storage cabinets with the help a mill's donated lumber and the volunteer labor of the North Idaho's College carpentry class, rugs and curtains made it attractive with sufficient work tables and chairs for crafts and demonstrations, all to make our headquarters our delight, every day a joy.

The happy bustle of getting our place in order was so engrossing that I was seldom aware of missing the sight of my left eye -- but daily more sure the inner eye was in better focus with cleaner insight. Luke 16:8 tells us "if thine eye be single, thy whole body also is full of sight."

Neither was I noticing too much that instead of tapering off my activities, as my doctor and good sense suggested, I was ever deeper and deeper more involved. Because I knew so certainly that all our good fortune had God's special blessings from the very beginning I could wait willingly and expectantly for that right person to come along -one who would also know from whom all good things flow -- and she arrived.

During the twenty years of our efforts and satisfying successes my mind was constantly reverting to that one clear moment of decision and direction when I recognized God's nod and His promise to be with me.

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CHAPTER 16

This

A CHANGE IN TENSE AND TENSION

account of mine has been mainly telling of unforgettable times in the past

when I knew for certain that God's hand and saving grace were guiding my life - the certainty ever more positive with the confirming passage of time and the continuing piling up of more phenomenal concrete evidence of the Lord's might and reality - all of which have quickened this impelling struggle with words to assess further meanings behind such baffling uniquely personal dealings with me for my spiritual growth over the years. Ever since that time so long ago when the child of me responded so simply and sincerely to Christ's invitation "come to me" . Now, suddenly, past, present, and future have converged for a single picture of a whole integrated lifetime for ultimate reckonings and some stark considerations.

Where am I at this point with this great desire of my heart to pass on whatever I have come to know of God's caring from first hand experiences, which I want so to count for His Glory, my own gratitude, and hopefully to speak to someone else's faltering faith in Him? By continually squandering whatever is mine of time I've foolishly felt was unlimited in this here and now, or any God given talents or potentials, have I been a self deluded idiot all these years with dreams that can not be putting up forever with procrastinations and wishful thinking? Will an impervious Father Time catch up with me before I'm ready, totally unmoved by any excuses I might extend for the aching void I must present?

When my stroke, so quiet and sudden, struck I was taken by surprise at the Grim Reaper's reality and I had my opportunity then to test my previously declared views of death against the actuality of it as a very near thing. Those views held up consistently enough after a moment or two that is when all thought and feeling seemed suspended, just waiting for reality to come to terms with such a sudden physical change taking place in me. The astonishment was most real - death was what happened to others - at least it shouldn't happen to me until I was more ready. The rapturous awe in my sister Evalina's 120

face as she relinquished her earthly presence came almost immediately to mind and I felt a tingling of excited wonderment and eagerness but that was as quickly dashed by rock bottom dread of becoming another pathetic victim of this often cruel disease, of losing the ability to communicate and function normally. Most of all, how does an extremely active and independent person suddenly adjust to becoming a burden on someone she loves? My "no - no - not yet, Lord" was immediate and urgent and the two fundamental reasons for the fierceness of the resistance were the unthinkable possibility of leaving my husband and the deeper shameful regret of leaving behind still unfinished my eight year's attempt to record some of God's faithful providence in my own life I had so prayerfully intended would join all other voices attesting to His Glory. Was God now going to surprise me with plans of His own I hadn't counted on? Had His patience run out?

All I had ever heard and known of the abundance of God 's mercy and grace was over-shadowed in seeing myself now identified in Christ's parable of the ten bridesmaids who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. His exact arrival time could not be specified but was eagerly anticipated by all ten. Five of them wisely prepared for the day and made sure their lamps were shiny, the oil vessels well filled. I was suddenly one of the five foolish ones who, while they too were forewarned, let other things occupy attention that should have gone to the needs of their lamps. I shared their consternation, despair and shame, groping in the dark outside the locked door of the groom's chambers.

No way could I fault God in any of it and it was only with a shamed and heavy heart that I could finally acquiesce to the wisdom and fairness of God, willing to lay down my dream at His feet if that was His wish. That free-will offering rested squarely on the assurance

that God's greatest concern is for His children's beings, not what they

themselves determine to do for him. The assurance also that God is constant and my absolute certainty - how and what He will work out in me each day being the only uncertainty. Which is as it should be - the stuff of faith - and which makes for the ever closer walk hand in hand. What ever befalls, blessings or trails, can be met with the faith in God that Job, after all his deep troubles and debatings, declared "even though He slay 121

me, yet will I trust Him".

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Whether my long struggle to express what God's actions in my life have meant to me would ever see the light of day in print or make much difference to anyone anyway - much as I hope and pray and believe that it may truly count for the Lord somewhere sometime with someone finally responding to His "come unto Me, learn of Me and be whole" - the real importance to me has been God's presence in the effort. If I can at the end have his "well done, good and faithful servant," that would be the utmost that I could desire above all else. God, being who He is, will melt, molt, fill, and use us according to His eternal plan for mankind's redemption.

As John Milton has written: "God doth not need Either man' work or His own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke; they serve Him best; His state Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest.

They also serve who only stand and wait."

At the onset of my effort were my ardent prayers for His guidance and light. He has answered in countless unexpected ways -- sometimes with silence that said plainly "stand and wait" -- or "think harder, you already know the answer -- act on it."

Sometimes He has planted questions in my mind that would not go away until dealt with - often a reoccuning personal resentment and forgiveness problem. Praise be to The Lord!

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CHAPTER 17

RESURRECTION MADE PLAIN TO ME (An Easter Sunrise Service - a mountain top experience in every sense of the word.)

If you have read "A Suggestion" you are aware that Ellen did not write this final

chapter. She left no notes about it that I could find. What happened that day was important to both of us. I do not have my wife's literary talent but I am furnishing the following account.

We were living in a tiny apartment in Nampa while my banking knowledge was being augmented in an agricultural area. Fulton Gale and his wife Bonny were special friends and they invited us to spend most of Easter Sunday as their guests and we had accepted. Early that morning I drove Ellen in our car to the Gale's home where the four of us got into the Gale's car and Fulton drove us toward the Snake River and Lizard Butte. Our plan was to be among the first to arrive and to locate ourselves close to the top of the hill. It didn't work out that way -- a great many other people had the same idea and were ahead of us. Our car was parked about halfway up the rise. It was dark and we waited for the dawn. The first rays of the sun dispelled the ground fog that covered Lizard Butte and other adjacent hills. The sky had a slightly tinted rosy look. There were a few clouds. There was little wind. At the sunrise the entire surroundings were quiet -no motors running -- no people jabbering. I was reminded of a classroom after the teacher with her finger on her lips had instructed her class to "ssshhh".

As the light increased we noted that the top of the hill did resemble -- if you weren't too critical -- a lizard at rest. There was a cross. The program started. There were prayers, singing and other music, a recounting of the First Easter, some testimony, a sermon, a final prayer and dismissal. We waited until most of those in attendance had left and automobile traffic had unsnarled. Back in Nampa we enjoyed the sumptuous breakfast Bonny had prepared.

Conversation before, at, and after breakfast was sparse, polite and interesting.

There was however one central theme -- the ceremony at Lizard Butte. Each one of us 124

at breakfast that morning mentioned in his or her own words that they knew when believers gathered that The Lord was there with them but that morning they were more aware of His closeness.

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Later we drove to Emmett to see -- and smell -- the cherry blossoms. Back in Nampa we went inside to a small eating room in a drive-in for hamburgers and milk shakes. We returned to Nampa and the Gale's home for a bridge game. In a short time we were all tired and Ellen and I said our thank you' s for a perfect day and hurried home to bed and collapsed.

I have told you this was an important day and not just a social get together. It was. The year was 1949 and I was forty-one years old and had not chosen a church home. I had sampled theology at many churches and that included summer school, and youth meetings. I guessed that I was a Christian but on a scale of one-to-ten I certainly would be close to the bottom if I appeared on the scale anywhere. Ellen never nagged me about my church absence. She went frequently alone or with friends and neighbors. She prayed that I would make a proper decision. At times she did indicate that I expected to find a church that would fit me like a tailor made suit. Easter Sunday in 1949 as a result of my Sunrise experience at Lizard Butte I decided that I would belong to a church and I would change to conform. Ellen knew of my decision. Later that year in Sandpoint Ellen and I both became members of First Presbyterian Church she by transfer, I by affirmation.

"The Lord is good and greatly to be praised. "

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The Promised Prayers Gracious Father - until I bring every thought to the obedience of Thy Kingdom, and every relationship under its way, I am hanging at loose ends, and life lacks total meaning and hence purpose and power. Help me to complete discipline to Thy Kingdom. Amen ESJ (In all instances the initials ESJ stands for E. Stanley Jones).

Oh God, alone I am a dead wire but attached to Thee I am throbbing with energy and glowing with light. Make my connection with Thee sure, so that I shall not be periodically going dead and lightness.

Many I "maintain the spiritual glow" because I've maintained the connection. In Jesus' Name - Amen. ESJ My Father, I see that I need all the techniques I can master but in the ultimate analysis my surest technique is that which gives me alignment to Thy purposes and to Thy plans. I cannot be anything but frustrated if I am at cross purposes with the universe. So I would be right with Thee in order to be right with myself. In Jesus' Name - Amen. ESJ Oh God, I begin to see that I must love Thee with an intellectual love as well as an emotional love. Awaken my brain cells to activity and to acuteness so that I may be the sharpest instrument I can be. Save me from intellectual laziness and help me to think Thy thoughts after Thee.

Amen. ESJ Oh God, how can I thank Thee enough for constituting me within so I can take Thee, as naturally as the lungs take air? Thou and my soul have been estranged but they are not strangers; we have been separated but are not separate. Thou art my life, my breath, my being, my all . I thank Thee. Amen. ESJ Gracious Father, lovingly into Thy hands I place my affairs, knowing that only that which is my highest good shall come to me. But now that I have placed them in Thy hands, Thou and I shall work them out together. We begin the great cooperation. Amen. ESJ Oh God, in this delicate, difficult but delightful business of getting along with people, give me skill and insight and patience - infinite patience. Thou art patient with me in spite of my blunderings - help me to be patient with others for they too have to put up with me. Amen. ESJ

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Gracious Father, Thou has paid attention to the minute fashioning of the lowliest cell with handiwork, hast Thou no plan for me and my life?

Thou hast! Help me to find that plan, to pay the price of working out that plan and to make it the adventure of my life. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

ESJ My gracious and redeeming God, I have been blocking Thy power in my life by my tense fears and withholdings. Let me this day be as relaxed and as receptive as a little child. Then life shall become play and my hardest tasks simply joy. Spontaneity will bubble in every act and thought as I go on my relaxed and happy way. I thank Thee - Amen.

ESJ Oh Christ, I hang all my worries on Thy Cross. Compared to that Cross, what have I ever borne? An, even if I should bear such a cross, I know that out of it shall come to me what came to Thee - a resurrection!

Nothing can make me afraid - I have the key in my hand - the key of life, Thy Cross. With that I can unlock anything. I thank Thee - Amen. ESJ Oh God, my Father, I know that good will brings harmony and peace and effectiveness, and that ill will makes for His harmony , upset, and ineffectiveness - it lays a paralyzing had on soul and body. Then save me from any clinging resentments. Help me to pull them up by the roots.

Amen. ESJ Our Father God, we come to Thee as foolish children - children who try to live against Thy ways and end only in hurting ourselves.

Forgive us. And give us sense - just plain sense so we may see Thy laws are our life. In Jesus' Name, Amen. ESJ My Father, Thou hast made it impossible for me to hurt or harm myself without Thy protest. The penalties attached to evil are not signs of Thy wrath but of Thy love - Thy redeeming love. Help me to work with that love - not against it. Amen. ESJ

Oh God, I know Thou art open to me. I will not perish when I can receive Thee. Now renounced and receptive, I come to Thee. Take my emptiness and make it into Thy fullness; my foolishness and make it into Thy wisdom; my paralysis and make it into Thy power; myself and make it into Thee. For I hunger and thirst after Thee. I really do. Amen. ESJ

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Oh God, in Thee I cannot be defeated nor fail for I am now under a living mind and a living will, and the future is open. I haven't much to offer but what I have is Thine. Heighten these powers, so that I shall be a continuous surprise, even to myself. Amen. ESJ Oh Christ, Thou Creator of living thought in dead brains; Thou giver of life, I ask Thee to enter into me and to stimulate and quicken every fiber and nerve cell that I too may become creative. Amen. ESJ Oh God, I dare not gaze on myself even in Thee. But I do gaze on Thee and find myself. In Thee I gaze and grow - in myself I cultivate and deteriorate. So now my eye is getting in focus. I begin to understand what Thou didst mean - "if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light" . My whole body is full of light. Thank Thee, Father.

Amen. ESJ Oh God, we who are afraid to be led by Thee become led by things and surroundings. Our religion becomes second hand and vague, instead of first hand and vivid. We want to regain the sense of being led, the sense that we are in direct contact and that life has first hand meaning. In Jesus' Name, Amen. ESJ Oh God, watch over my spirit and keep me sound there. For, if I sag in spirit, all life sags with it. If my spirit holds up, everything holds up with it. Then help me to live within with abundance, so that it will not matter much what happens on the outside. Into Thy hands I commend my spirit this day - keep it sound and sweet and gay, in spite of. Amen. ESJ Oh Thou, whom no name can tell, whom all our thoughts cannot fully comprehend - we rejoice in all Thy goodness .... we thank Thee for our body, this handful of dust so curiously and wonderfully framed together. We bless Thee for this sparkle of Thy fire that we call our soul, which enchants the dust into thoughtful human life and blesses us with so rich a gift. We thank Thee for the varied powers Thou has given us here on earth. We bless Thee for the varied powers Thou hast given us here on earth. We bless Thee for the far-reaching mind, which puts all things underneath our feet, rides on the winds and the waters, and tames the lighting into useful service... .we thank Thee for this conscience, whereby face to face we commune with Thine everlasting justice. We thank Thee for the Strength of will which can overpower the weakness of mortal flesh, face danger and endure hardship and in all things acquit us like men .... we

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thank Thee for this religious sense, whereby we know Thee and amid the world of things that perish, lay fast hold on Thyself, who alone art steadfast, without beginning of days or ends of years forever and ever still the same. We thank Thee that amid all the darkness of time, amid joys that deceive us and pleasures that cheat, amid the transgressions we commit, we can still lift up our hands to Thee and draw near to Thee with our hearts and Thou blesses us with more that a father's and mother's never ending love. Amen (Theodore Parker) Dear Father, if some things I do not ask in my cup of blessings be, I would have m(y spirit filled the more careful not to serve Thee much, but to please Thee perfectly. Amen (A.L. Waring)

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