Category Archives: Learning from our past

What’s new?

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Half way through last Sunday’s sermon, a skirmish in one of the pews got everyone’s attention and stopped the pastor’s preaching.

“Someone call 911!” a man said, as he bent over the person having trouble. Several from the congregation jumped to help, and a uniformed security man entered the sanctuary speaking into his shoulder radio, “Yes, the Free Church on Douglas.”

I was sitting with my former next-door-neighbor, who’d had personal experience with 911 and had lost her husband to quick cancer shortly after we lost Nate. We both clutched.

The elderly gentleman struggling during the service was given a wheelchair ride to the parking lot where an emergency vehicle awaited, its flashing lights pushing their way through our stained glass windows. The service resumed, but Becky and I were lost in thought.

How quickly our minds race back to trauma. A soldier, newly home from a war, flinches when he hears what sounds like gunfire. An earthquake victim feels like running when a truck passes and the ground vibrates.

Trauma imprints our brains with extra oomph when it’s been life-threatening. A 911 call, death, gunfire, an earthquake – each stimulates us to act on fearful impulse. Later, when similar circumstances pop up, we react the same.

Some people organize their entire lives around an upsetting event, either by reliving it over and over or by making sure it doesn’t ever happen again. In both cases the incident dominates thought life and keeps someone stuck. Opportunities are lost, and a sad spirit dominates every day.

Is there a way to distance ourselves from past trauma when something like a 911 call yanks us back?

Yes, and God gives us the key: to set our minds on him.

If we fill our heads with his supremacy and sufficiency, other thoughts must leave. It’s easy to get mentally lost in our troubles, and immediately after Nate died, I felt that way, continually reliving his rapid decline and death, camping there for months. But calling out to God for comfort and peace slowly filled my mind with something other than Nate, and it was the Lord.

If today I was asked to hold someone’s hand as they died, even a stranger, deep sadness would cover me like a heavy blanket. But I wouldn’t stay under it for long, because I’ve become acquainted with a new mindset God has put in my head, thoughts dotted with hope and future plans because he is in them. Although I’ll never forget the details of our family trauma, I don’t live inside of it anymore.

God is our Creator, and he’s continually making all things new. When we believe that and watch for how he’s doing it in us, we won’t have to fear being pulled backwards by a 911 call but can quickly move forward into the fresh optimism he’s created.

“The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create.” (Isaiah 65:17,18)

Being Prepared

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Although I’ve never been a champion at preparation, Nate was. It’s one of myriad qualities I admired about him when we first met and is a perfect illustration of opposites attracting. For 40 years his example tutored me in how to get ready for things (which is not to say I was a quick study).

Life offers unnumbered commitments for which we ought to be prepared: the first day of school, meeting an airplane, tax day, having enough gas to get to our destination. When these predictables take us by surprise, a finger can usually be pointed at the faulty party.

But sometimes we come up short on preparation because we didn’t have a clue something was coming: a premature baby, a tornado, a traffic accident, a cancer diagnosis.

And then there’s the big one, death. Even in the case of long-term illness, when death snatches a loved one, none of us are fully prepared.

Tomorrow I’ll attend the memorial service of a 32 year old young man who died suddenly, without explanation. To be prepared for that was impossible.

Although this man’s parents stood in front of a church and dedicated him to God when he was a baby, that didn’t feel like preparation for death. When they let him go off to school “on his own” each morning, that separation was nothing compared to the separation of death.

When they prayed for him, asking God’s will to be done in his life, they were opening themselves up to whatever God chose to bring. But death? They weren’t thinking of that.

It’s an encouragement to know God sees what’s coming when we don’t. Just as parents paint the nursery before the baby arrives and load the back pack before the first school day, God the Father gently moves the pieces of our lives into position before the unexpected hits us. Within the tumult, we can’t see it. But later, usually much later, we look back and say, “Oh, that was him there… and again there.”

Our family found this to be true. Several months after Nate died, my kids and I actually drew up a list of God’s “positionings” among us before the whirlwind arrived.

Getting a glimpse of this divine preparation on our behalf doesn’t lessen anyone’s sadness while going through it, but it softens the raw reality. And when we turn around to search for God, we see how he was there throughout, and can’t help but feel his love because of it.

“Father, prepare me for whatever is next.”

“Those who cleanse themselves… will be instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.” (2 Timothy 2:21)

The Footprints We Leave

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Singer Steve Green wrote a song that speaks of the generation before us living high-road examples of faith:

Those who’ve gone before us line the way,
Cheering on the faithful, encouraging the weary,
Their lives a stirring testament to God’s sustaining grace.

I look back to my four grandparents, and although three of them had “gone” before I was born, they left footprints of lives that were “stirring testaments to God’s grace.” Each of them lived through severe hardship, yet letters we found were proof of strong relationships with the Lord.

The one grandparent I did know, my mother’s mother Signa, died when I was three. I have only a handful of memories, but she did two significant things for me. She raised my mom, and she was a faithful witness for Christ.

Signa came to America from Sweden as a young girl and married a widower whose 26 year old wife had died of pneumonia leaving him with a baby boy. Signa saw a need and stepped in to help when little Everett was 3, marrying into motherhood in 1908.

After Signa and Ed had been married 5 years, Everett died in a school yard accident, crushed by a heavy iron gate that fell off its hinges. At that time, Signa had given her husband three additional children that were ages 4, 2, and 1. A 4th and 5th child would follow. But death struck a second blow when another son died at 6 months.

Our Mom remembered standing next to her father as this baby brother died in his arms. Overcome with sorrow, Signa had left the room, unable to bear the sight of a second child passing away.

Signa struggled with asthma most of her life, necessitating leaving smoky Chicago during summer’s heat. Her husband, together with 5 other men, bought a cottage in Michigan, and as school let out, Signa left for “the country.” She took her brood of 5 and also the 6 children of a widowed relative. Without benefit of electricity or running water, Signa cared for 11 children by herself from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

When school resumed, she shipped the children home to her husband and stayed alone in Michigan until the first frost. No doubt this was a nourishing time for her, and the photo shows a worn-out but joyful Signa (on the right) enjoying a day at the beach with a friend.

Signa dealt with the stranglehold of the Great Depression, her husband’s diabetes, and eventually his terminal cancer. She was also concerned over one of her children who was epileptic, keeping her “at home” throughout her life. Signa died in her sleep at age 69, her faith in tact and her witness strong.

 

The chorus of Steve Green’s song could very well have been Signa’s prayer for the generations to follow:

Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful.
May the fire of our devotion light their way.
May the footprints that we leave
Lead them to believe
And the lives we live inspire them to obey.

Signa was quietly remarkable, and I hope she knows the footprints she left have indeed inspired us. That’s because the steps she followed were those of God.

“I’ve followed [the Lord] closely, my feet in his footprints, not once swerving from his way.” (Job 23:11)