Author Dale Aukerman,
a long-time friend, was diagnosed with
cancer well over two years ago. He was told there was no hope for
a cure, and he was given only a few months to live. In his own life
he has experienced the paradox of strength being given in our
frailty and weakness. He recently wrote:
God has worked the gracious miracle of extending my life. A
great many have been praying for me. We give praise to God,
who has heard the prayers and given a gracious measure of
healing…There remains a problematic aspect. Many have
prayed fervently that I be completely healed of the cancer. Some
persons have told me they felt an assurance that such healing
would be given. I’m doing remarkably well, but the tumor in the
left lung, though shrunken, is still one and one-half inches
across. Though the grave threat continues, what stands out for
us is answered prayer and prolonged life. I struggle with this issue of full healing, not mainly on my own account, but because
healing prayed for but not given looms as a central puzzle for
Christians.
A friend expressed to me one type of approach. She promised me: if I would have one hundred percent faith that God was
going to heal me, that would most certainly come about. In this
sort of view, complete healing has not been given me because of
a lack of faith.
But if Dale or anyone had complete certainty that God will heal us
or perform any other miracle we ask of him, then we would be
totally filled with our own hopes and not open to God’s will for us.
It is another paradox: on the one hand we must have complete faith
in what God can do for us, but on the other we must remain open
for his will in our lives. And who are we to say that a suffering
person lacks sufficient faith?
The Book of Job tells the story of a man who struggles to accept
suffering. God and Satan are in conflict concerning human faith.
Satan ridicules the faith of the righteous Job, saying he would only
remain true in good times. God decides to prove Satan wrong by
allowing him to put Job to the test. As readers, we understand the
cosmic significance of what is happening, but Job does not. His
riches are taken away, his children die, and he is afflicted with
“loathsome sores and boils from the sole of his foot to the crown
of his head.” Job must respond without understanding, in simple
trust.
Job is not a silent martyr. He cries out with all his mind and
strength for meaning, and rebels against the senselessness of his
situation. But in his heart, he hangs on to his faith and refuses to
curse God.
The story has a larger significance. Each human being in all of
history must decide for or against belief – belief in God despite all
the absurdity of human suffering. And the overarching conflict between good and evil is decided by the choices we make. The story
ends with God giving Job back doubly what was taken away. It is a
picture of the kingdom of God, when all suffering will be rewarded,
all contradictions resolved, and we will finally understand. The
book leaves many questions unanswered, but it reaffirms the sense
that our struggles and suffering are not unnoticed by God – and
certainly not meaningless.
Even if we have found some measure of faith, there will still
be spiritually dry times. Then we have to persist in prayer, knowing
that every believer goes through times of darkness and times of
light in his or her prayer life.
One evening, when Jesus wanted to spend some time alone in
prayer, he sent his disciples out on the lake. Later he appeared,
walking across the water toward them. The disciples were fearful
at first, thinking it a ghost, but Jesus reassured them, and invited
Peter to walk to him on the water. Peter began, but soon became
afraid and began to sink. Jesus immediately reached out his hand,
caught him, and chided him for his lack of faith.
Even the strongest person goes through moments when he or she
loses faith. Then one has to “walk on the water.” And Jesus said
that faith even as small as a mustard seed is sufficient. He understands our weakness. He was once one of us.
So much depends on how we approach God. Are we trusting, expectant, childlike? The so-called “mentally retarded” are wonderfully graced with freedom from many, if not all, of the obstacles I
have mentioned in this chapter. They are free from the bondage of
the intellect, and in their childlikeness and purity of heart they do
not know hypocrisy, envy, or pride. Their faith stands firm and unshakable in the face of seeming impossibilities.
Lois Ann, a neighbor whose daughter Louisa had Down Syndrome, remembers how, when her congregation was working
through a crisis, Louisa obtained a complete list of all members.
Sitting by the window with it, she slowly read each person’s name
aloud, glancing up to the sky after each one. It took her several
days.
At a church I visited this past summer there was concern for an
expectant mother; it appeared that the baby she was carrying was
developing abnormally. The parents shared their fears with the pastor and asked for intercession, and at the next service, prayers were
said for the baby and mother. At an appointment the following
week, to everyone’s utter amazement, the baby was found to be
perfect in every way. The doctors were astonished. Later the
mother wrote:
It was a real answer to our prayers. But what meant the most to
me was that when we spoke about it at church, I noticed how
Lisa – a young woman with Down Syndrome – was blowing her
nose and wiping her eyes, and I realized how much she was carrying our need. Honestly, I don’t know if God always hears my
prayers – there is so much in me each day that stands in his way –
but I know for sure that he hears Lisa’s. I’ve had to think that I
may never know how much we owe to the prayers of someone
like her.
Conditions were primitive
and rough in the backwoods of Paraguay, where I grew up in the 1940s, and the harshness of daily life
had an effect not only on many adults, but also on us children, who
reacted to their callousness with disrespect and mockery. Nothing
was sacred, despite the efforts some parents made to instill respect
in their children, and we were often cruelly insensitive to the peculiarities and afflictions of other people.
Anybody can be mean, but in the culture of today, meanspiritedness has become a way of life. Violence, promiscuity, arrogance, snideness, and indifference mark modern culture. At the
bottom of it all is a cynicism that not only corrodes individual relationships; it destroys our relationship with God. If one were to describe our time with one word, that word would have to be irreverence.
What, then, is reverence?
It is the spiritual side of respect. It is nothing pious, soft, or
sweet. Reverence is wonder at what God has created; it is man’s
standing in awe of what God has made. He is the creator of life in
all its rich and varied forms – exquisite flowers and magnificent
trees, tiny insects and colorful birds, creatures on the land and in
the sea.
There is no doubt that life has an immensely high value, both
human life and the life of animals and plants; yes, even the life
of stars and stones. I am convinced that not only animals have an
emotional life-feeling; I am convinced that plants, too, have a
life-feeling. It is unthinkable that the beauty of plants and their
swaying in the wind, the moving upward and downward of the
sap in their stems could exist without any life-feeling. And I believe more: I believe that astronomical organisms, like the stars
and the earth, have a life-feeling. In a fiery star like our sun with
its flaming protuberances and its deepening solar spots there is
no doubt a living soul; one could even speak of a breathing process.
Eberhard Arnold
Reverence is our natural, unspoiled response to the marvels of
God’s creation. We experience it when we witness the birth of a
baby, the power of a storm and the glory of a rainbow, and often
when we are sitting at the bedside of a person who is dying. Reverence is the movement of our hearts that comes to us through a
piece of music or writing, through a work of art in painting or
sculpture, when these are born from the creative spirit God gives
to his children. It can be spoken, or it can simply be felt.
Without reverence, God is pushed aside, and our lower nature
comes to the fore, our bitter, cynical self-will. Then we forget that
all life is sacred. Then we are not far from accepting abortion and
capital punishment, euthanasia and assisted suicide as acceptable
ways to deal with seemingly unbearable or insoluble problems.
I believe every person
begins life with an inborn sense of reverence. But this must be nurtured and protected. It can grow, or it
can be crushed. I don’t believe it can ever be completely lost in anyone, although it certainly may be dulled. It may take years to win it
back again if a person has lived with an attitude of irreverence for
a long time; many people have told me this. Cynicism, once established, is hard to eradicate, for by its very definition it mocks the
essence of what is true and good in life – the spark of God in each
person, the eternal that is in every soul.
Reverence as a spiritual concept may be foreign to some people,
and yet it is a crucial dimension to all our relationships, including
our relationship to God. Without it one cannot pray.
Last year my wife received the following letter from Anneta, a
nurse we know who volunteered for several months at a hospital in
rural Haiti. Anneta’s thoughts shed light on the significance of reverence – and on the unredeemed rawness of life where it has been
snuffed out.
After delivering twelve babies into this world as of today, I ponder the significance of these births to my life, the life of the children, and to God.
Me:
God has placed me here now and is allowing me to participate in his creation. So often during labor and delivery, fear
twists my stomach instead of wonder and joy. So many things can
and often do go wrong. Afterwards I mostly just feel relief that it
went okay, or heaviness when it didn’t. My shallowness of faith
prevents me from rejoicing in the majesty of God’s creation and
his plan for each soul. My helplessness is often so evident. I believe I am here now for God to show me that I am nothing, how
in the past year I have placed myself in the way of God’s working
and selfishly took things into my own hands. Lord, I pray that
Haiti teaches me complete surrender of
all
life to you. Forgive my
arrogance and prepare me for your use.
The babies:
I often wonder what life holds for you,
petit
–
the tough, sad faces of your mothers, the blatant absence of
your fathers, the grueling hard work, and the terrible fear. Yet
each single life is created by God for a purpose.
And God:
The ones you send for a few minutes or hours or
days – my inmost depth wonders at the meaning of these small
lives – they are like spoken words of yours, and those stillborn
just your thoughts. I think of my own culture and of the anguish
of my friend Paula in America over her stillborn baby, and her
tears and weeping months later at the grave. And here in Haiti
the dry eyes and quietness, the immediate resumption of life
when a baby dies. After nine months – the lack of attachment.
Do they lose so many that they can’t afford to grieve? I feel a
small corner of your power and mystery, yet I am not sufficiently
in tune with you to understand it all. My soul marvels in reverence for you and I pray for depth in you.
The following month Anneta wrote again:
I went over to maternity, where another nurse and I delivered a
little baby girl who was missing her skull bones. She only had a
face; the rest of her head was missing. Her brain was exposed,
open. We have had her mother in the ward for a long time and
had done an ultrasound, so we were expecting the baby to have
problems, but it was still a very shaking experience. She never
seemed to breathe, but her little heart beat for twenty minutes.
Hundreds of people crowded in to look at the “creature” or
“frog” as they called her. I chased them out, but most of them
came right back in, and my heart was aching too much to enforce it…
I picked up the little one, holding her disfigured premature
body until the heart stopped, then laid her down, covering her
head with a latex glove to protect her from mockery…I was overwhelmed and couldn’t stop crying, although it was not out of
grief that I cried – more out of a strange, painful joy. I felt as if I
had been drawn closer to heaven.
Some days are extremely difficult, and I rely on prayer hourly
to get me through. I am so privileged to be here with these
people and to be allowed to experience pain, birth, and death
with them. One night last week I delivered a little boy from a
mother with polyhydramnios. He was very premature, and his
abdomen was swollen and hard. I tried resuscitating him, but it
soon became clear that this child would not live long.
His heart beat very slowly, and I wrapped him in blankets
and took him over to his mother. She looked at me with big,
tear-filled eyes and nodded quietly. A crowd of onlookers surrounded us, and I asked if any of them wanted to hold the little
one. All smiled and politely declined, so I held him tight. The
families here will never touch or take the body of a stillborn
child, or even of a deformed newborn, unless they think it will
live. Of course, I can never judge how someone else deals with
life and death; these people have taught me so much. Perhaps it
is just their way of coping.
As I stand there in the stench of a pool of amniotic fluid and
blood, a single dim light bulb barely holding back the edges of
night, lizards and flies around our feet, the soul of that little
baby reaches out to mine, melting the past, present, future of
worries and the weary struggle of life into undiluted pureness of
awe. I grasp him close as his heartbeat slows and fades away. My
eyes are filled with tears, my heart both torn and stretched.
I put the little one down and go to find a cardboard box
from the pharmacy – one just the right size so that no part of his
body is bent, which is important to the family. Andres, the janitor, will take him away tomorrow.