Being David's Dad by Ash

Ash and Katrina discover God’s goodness and grace in unexpected ways.

The year 2017 was supposed to be our year of stability. For the first time since 2012, we would live in the same home, with the same daily routines and responsibilities as the previous year, without any major life transitions. Sure, we had given birth to a new child at the end of 2016, but he was our fourth in five years, so we chalked that up as standard. Little did we know that our first year with David would be anything but standard.

About two months after his birth in Indonesia, my wife, Katrina, noticed that David was not as active and responsive as our first three kids had been. David was soon diagnosed with hydrocephalus. That means that he had too much cerebral spinal fluid in his head. The pressure builds up and causes problems for his brain and other important things. Katrina and three-month-old David flew to Singapore for his first brain surgery to help him drain the fluid properly in February. By late April he needed another operation. Patients are most likely to have problems in the first six months following each operation. Having seen what that was like, we decided we needed to be closer to a hospital and family during that time. As soon as David was able to fly, we packed up our home and said goodbye to our friends in Indonesia and moved to California. In June, David was hospitalized again, this time for a dangerous infection. During that week, a team of neurologists diagnosed what we thought was frequent stretching as seizure activity. Multiple doctors also confirmed that any vision David may have is not useful to him. In September, David had two more brain surgeries. His first birthday was November 17 and he has yet to make it three months without a hospitalization.

Through all of this God has been so gracious to us. He has given us access to some of the best doctors in the world, all of whom admit freely that they cannot predict much of anything about David’s future. They cannot tell us if David will ever be able to walk, talk or see. This has led us to lean even more on our God who knows all things, can do all things and loves us and David more than we can imagine. We knew that David was a gift to us from God (Psalm 127:3) before we learned about his hydrocephalus. That has not changed. We also know that God does not give us bad gifts (Luke 11:7-11).

God is teaching us that the same faith and perspective that strengthened us before this tragedy will give us the strength we need to face this journey. He has challenged and taught us about prayer—do we pray out of selfish desire or out of a desire to see him glorified? We would love to see David healed completely and we know that God is capable of healing him today. But we also know that he is not obligated to do so.

A few weeks before Easter, while we were still in Indonesia, I was asked to preach at one of the churches we serve there. I was led to preach on John 11—Jesus raising Lazarus. It is a rich passage filled with powerful emotions and statements, not only from Jesus but also from his friends. It has continued to speak to my heart through the highs and lows of this year. There are times when I feel like Martha and Mary and want to ask Jesus how he could allow this to happen. In those moments I am comforted by Jesus’ message throughout the chapter that he knew what was best for his friends; and that he would be revealed and glorified through it. I am also reminded that our hope is not ultimately tied to this life. Yes, Jesus raised Lazarus to life, but eventually Lazarus died again. The miracle of Lazarus’ resurrection points us forward to Jesus’ own death and resurrection, by which he defeated sin, death and the grave, and through which we receive eternal life. Our hope is not in an easy, pain free life in this world here and now, but in the ultimate resurrection of all who believe in him.

That eternal perspective can also be seen in Paul’s response to persecution and suffering in his own life. While our situation doesn’t directly compare to Paul’s, we still glean from his focus on eternity in the midst of it. In 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 he says, So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

The specifics of our situation may be different, but the principle still stands true. It is hard to see our child go through so much pain and to struggle so much with basic life skills. It is hard to live each day not knowing when or if he will need another emergency surgery. It is hard to be separated from the people we love and with whom we serve for the sake of the gospel in Indonesia, without knowing when or if we can return to our home there. We do not know what God has planned for our family. Whatever it is, he does not promise us that it will be easy. In fact, he promises both difficulty in life and peace in his victory (John 16:33). Ultimately, living our lives for his glory is worth far more than whatever hardships we face (1 Peter 1:3-9).

So, while we continue to pray for miraculous healing for David, we pray first and foremost that David will know Jesus, the giver of eternal life that will be free of pain and suffering, and will make him known to others. We pray that God will use David’s life in whatever way will bring him the most glory. We pray that we will glorify God in how we raise and care for David and his sisters. We pray that he will continue to lead and direct our whole family, and that he will give us strength for the journey—wherever it leads. As we come to the end of a tumultuous 2017, we look forward to a new year filled with uncertainty and hope. A teammate of ours in Indonesia is fond of saying, “I may not know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.” Amen!

My Rutted Road by Nancy Tally

Indeed, the road of my life is not the only road with its ruts. Every time I listen to someone else’s story it is evident that all our roads are rutted somewhere along the way. I believe I would be amazed and surprised—be it pleasantly though—to hear a story where someone’s road of life was all smooth and even.

Ruts give us character. Our responses to them refine and define who we are and even can change the direction in which we are traveling. Ruts can be messy as we slide our way through the muck and goo of life, sometimes stuck spinning our tires, sometimes out of control. Other times the ruts are dried out, hard and unyielding. We bump and bounce around, with every sense jarred; the ruts trap us in their track.

The name of a certain hospital came up this morning, and I started reminiscing about my trips there some forty years ago. The following tale was—in view of my entire life—a very small rut but interesting none the less.

As a new bride, I was cleaning the apartment my husband had lived in for a few years before we were married.

He usually had his clothes dry cleaned, but he never threw out the plastic bags from the cleaners or the hangers. There were closets literally stuffed full of empty plastic bags and hangers. I grew up in a household with siblings ten to twelve years younger than I, and it had been drilled into me that this was intolerably dangerous. I soon set about the task of ridding the apartment of these potential child killers.

I would grab handfuls of plastic bags, yank them free and dutifully tie them in knots before depositing them in the garbage. The hangers would rear backwards till the plastic gave way on the front edges; then shoot forward like bullets from the force of my pull

This would have been no problem in a standard closet.

However, these closets were two rows deep. As I stepped into the closet to “de-plastic” the back row, I notice a bag I had missed in the front row. Yes I did. I grabbed it, and when I yanked the hanger, it predictably flew back then shot forward—straight into my eyeball.

There I stood, slightly bent at the waist and both hands tightly clasped over my eye and SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS! Roland, my husband of just a couple weeks came running. But I would not let go of my eye for him to see what had happened. I had no intention of removing my hands from that eye and my howls were the only verbal explanation he was receiving. The intensity of the pain was truly blinding.

Roland eventually managed to pry my hands off my eye, but I could only tolerate to open it for a split second. That was long enough for him to decide. We were off to the nearest emergency room.

I was still holding my hands over the eye when we got there. When I heard the nurse ask what happened, I took my hands down for a second to show her.

“What happened?” the nurse asked more vehemently. Roland started to answer and was immediately silenced. They wanted to hear it from me And on second thought they were going to take me to another room to tell them. No, he couldn’t come. He could stay right where he was.

I saw a police officer hovering in the background and understanding dawned. They thought he hit me. Of course, a twenty-something white female accompanied by a thirty- something black male, what other explanation could there be? They were giving me the security of not being pressured or influenced at all by his presence as I told my story.

I thought that they are never going to believe this.

I noticed a second police officer listened in as I told my story to the nurse who, was turning a sickly pale shade of green.

Staring at my eye she said she thought she was going to be sick. I asked why she was so upset. You see, I had not yet seen how my eye looked.

Fortunately, the nurse had no problem believing my story. She reported that she had cleaned her closets earlier that morning and did the very same thing I did—grabbing the plastic bags on her hangers and pulling as the hangers went flying back and then forward. So. there she sat repeating,

 “I’m never going to do it again. I’m never going to do it again!”

While I had a big blood red contusion on the outer white area of my eyeball and one of the most glorious shiners you could ever behold. there was no permanent damage and only the slightest tiniest abrasion on the white (now bulging red) area of my eyeball. It was one of those things that looked and felt way worse than it was. I must admit it was humorous—for me at least—to walk into church the next morning and watch Roland fend off all the “what did you do to her?” accusations.

But why share this now with all of you? This fall, I was studying the Women’s Bible Study lesson on Psalm 9 and the second part of verse one says, “I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.”

But what had I just done that morning? I recounted this same story and other more atrocious things experienced at the same hospital. I focused only on the problems. Why hadn’t I, in my reminiscing, focus on what God had done for me?

He had spared me from losing my eye. One, I had closed the eye fast enough so that the major cut was on the lid and not on the eye. Two, it was on the outer white not on the iris or pupil. The doctors were clear about the difference these things made in the lack of having permanent damage. Three, it did not happen the day before when I was home alone. Roland was there to care for me. Four, the nurse, because she had just taken the plastics off her own hangers that morning, understood the truth of my words as well as their warning to her. God had been there in both the timing and in what had even happened to the nurse on duty.

Making this particular rut nothing more than a pebble in my road because I was hedged about with protection.

In the last few months I have been learning to view my past ruts differently. I am learning that even now years and decades later, I am not trapped in the ruts of my past responses. I have come to call God Abba and to look forward to talking to him. If you know me, you know I did not always view him as a kind and loving Abba but as a ruthless and cruel father to be avoided.

I have known God for fifty-five years, but many of those years were spent loudly and angrily challenging him about why would he ever identify himself as a man much less a father. And that speaks to the problems that arose from one of the biggest ruts in my road. However, I am learning that God indeed has loved me ever since I was very young. I see him working in my life and on my behalf before I even knew him. And he is showing me how a father should love—and that sets me free.

But those are stories to tell in other months, for other times. For now remember that when you know the truth, the truth will set you free, especially from unyielding ruts.

On the Road to Thanksgiving by Lorraine Triggs

He’s traveling with stage 4 cancer this year.

Not his first choice of traveling companion I’m sure

Neither is rebellious children or unemployment.

No one sets a place for

bleak prognosis

fear

anxiety.

Doors slam on

loneliness

unfaithfulness

hopelessness

Still they crowd the road on the way

to Thanksgiving.

Unwanted guests who want to be wanted

If only for moment by a band of pilgrims

Not weighed down by light afflictions

On the wide road

On their way home

to Thanksgiving.

My Road to Russia by Wil Triggs

I was in fifth grade when my trumpet teacher took it upon herself to teach me music appreciation and theory in addition to trumpet. She sent me home each week with records to listen to and then we would talk about them at my next trumpet lesson. After she took me through weeks of studying and listening to composers for each of the periods of classical music, she told me that I seemed to be drawn to a lot of Russian composers. The more I listened to, the more records she would pull out and loan to me. “If you like that, listen to this,” she’d say week after week. And it really became an auditory sort of revelation of sound—Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,  Rachmaninoff, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Prokofief, Stravinsky, Khabalevsky.

In my junior high art class, the teacher dumped clippings of buildings and places from around the world onto a table and told us to each pick one up and paint it with watercolors. I chose an exotic building with lots of colors and shapes. Is it real? I wondered.

The teacher explained in his outgoing art-teacherish way that there was a terror to go with the beauty in the photo I chose. I didn’t know what that building was or where it came from. Of course, it turned out to be a real structure in Russia. The legend was that the Czar had the architect blinded after he finished so that he could never duplicate his work. I was fascinated and a little aghast. What kind of a place was this?

Then, in college, I took a class that focused on Dostoevsky. There I was, back in Russia again, this time exploring the world through the eyes of Raskolnikov, Sonya, Porfiry, Mitya, Ivan, Alyosha, Zosima and so many others. Dostoevsky became a giant of a writer to me, as I read through many of his works and marveled at the insights into humanity, faith, suffering and some kind of redemption. This was a land far-removed from the England of Charles Dickens or the America of John Steinbeck. Not better, but very much different. It was a people familiar with sorrow and suffering.

In all of these experiences, never did I think that I would ever go there.

But I did end up working to advocate and pray for Christians in labor camps and a psychiatric hospital during what turned out to be the last years of the Soviet Union. And while doing my work, the organization I worked for sent me there. It was to help me see and do a better job of writing, and also to take some Bibles and books with me to the churches starving for them. This later grew into full-time missionary service, but that’s another story.

One place I went to on that first visit was Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). A Soviet-approved tourist destination was the Tikhvin Cemetary—the burial place of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Of course, I had to go. When I got there, I found that I was not the only one to go to his grave. Others went also, reverently and with a sense of awe.

And Dostoevsky was not the only one. I wandered and stopped beside others where people stood and figured out the names in my newly acquired Cyrillic alphabet—Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky. I knew these names and recalled their music. Walking by them all, in the shadow of the Orthodox monastery, I returned to Dostoevsky’s grave before heading out.

Even as the official tour guides took us to many cultural and historic landmarks and lectured us on history and culture from the Marxist-Leninist perspective, we did carve out free time. It was then that we purposely sought out church. Leningrad was also where I met and prayed with Christians who loved Jesus in ways that seemed normal to a Sunday school teacher like me but was reckless in the Soviet context. And just a few weeks later, some would be arrested and sent to psychiatric hospitals/labor camps for teaching minors about Christianity. And even later on, one recanted to a degree and later got back into ministry, another served out his term and was released from prison, later still emigrating to the United Kingdom. 

The suffering and sorrow expressed with such intensity in the arts of the country were nothing compared with the mostly unseen regular people living out their lives and practicing their faith no matter what.

My prayer and advocacy for Russia has grown now to include so many other places and people of the world—a partial list from a recent prayer time includes Algeria, Central African Republic, China, Eritrea, Indonesia, India, Iran, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Vietnam and North Korea.

I’m learning and forgetting and learning anew that God answers prayers along the way—prayers that free people, topple empires, convert persecutors and give freedom to share the good news in more open ways that may seem impossible. Things that seem far away aren’t far away at all where Jesus is concerned. You could read about a far-off land and years later find yourself standing in the very place you read about.

My first time in Russia was an eye–opener. More than that, it was a heart–opener, forget the heart—it laid bare my soul. I came face to face with God preparing me for his work in ways no human could imagine. And I started to learn that even more beautiful than art or literature or music is the suffering of God’s people and the amazing gift we have to stand with them in prayer and advocacy.

Reformation Thoughts on Wittenberg by Dr. Gregg Quiggle

Writes Gregg, "Wittenberg, where Luther lived, is special place for me. The town is so small and yet it shook Rome to its core. Luther’s home is the former Augustinian monastery. You can go into the the room where he and his family gathered for meals and students pumped him with questions. It was there I came to understand the magnitude of his wife’s, Katarina, contribution to the Reformation. The altar in the small town church that so clearly shows Luther’s understanding of the gospel. On the outside of the church is a judensau, an awful antisemitic image from the 13th century reminds me of the Church’s failures. And then the Castle Church where Luther is buried and where he nailed the 95 theses. That town captures Luther and the Reformation, the glorious Gospel of God as well as the human capacity for sin."