Stories for Troubling Times

I've had the occasion of reading several short stories from Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories.  Many of these stories have a theme that involves people who are dealing with having their world rocked by one or more circumstances.  As the stories unfold we learn of the characters' struggles.  As they struggle with their circumstances we gain insights about what anchors them, that is what they put their faith and hopes in.  As we enter into their lives, we begin to ask ourselves the question "What do we put our faith and hopes in?"  This past week, since we were going to Florida on a vacation, I again checked out this book of short stories, which I had not finished, not knowing whether I would have occasion to read any more of them on the trip.  I ended up reading The Displaced Person while returning on a choppy, 2-1/2 hour boat ride from Dry Tortugas to Key West, FL, figuring that reading would keep my mind off the uncomfortable journey.  So while I was being physically jostled, with some feelings of uncertainty and displacement, I entered the fictional lives of Mr. Guizac; Mr. and Mrs. Shortly, Mrs. McIntyre; and Father Flynn, the principal characters in the story.

Cliff Notes https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/o/oconnors-short-stories/summary-and-analysis/the-displaced-person provides a detailed character analysis of the short story.

Dove Foundation Movie Review (https://dove.org/review/10940-the-displaced-person/ provides an excellent family film summary and recommendation of the 2007 release of the movie on DVD.

The story is set in Georgia during the late 1940's where a Polish refugee (Mr. Guizac) is relocated by Father Flynn to work on Mrs. McIntyre's farm.  The industrious and clever Mr. Guizac, who is the obvious displaced person, becomes a threat to the other farm workers who begin to plot his downfall, until fate unexpectedly takes over.  The Displaced Person speaks to the fear of the unknown and how people react to things they don't understand.  By the time we come to the end of the story we find that all the main characters, save Father Flynn, either become displaced from this world or from their comfort zones.   

Within less than a week (March 6 - 13, 2020), we in the United States have seen our personal worlds rocked in one way or another either by COVID-19 or by the responses of our government leaders, businesses, and institutions.  Our stocks and 401(k)'s have plummeted in value, our businesses have needed to implement immediate and significant measures to help reduce the spread of the virus and to protect the company's financial health, our planned large group events have been shuddered, and we are all updating our calendars.  Today was Friday and after a particularly long and stressful week my work colleagues were reacting all over the place: 

• One was upset because they were "ordered to go home" because they had been showing signs of some virus and it would be healthful for them and us;
•  A group of them left work early and invited me to join them as they headed downstairs to the bar for drinks to try and put a happy spin on the week;
• Another magnified a tiny issue into a huge deal; and
• A client spoke of a colleague of theirs who was in misery due to MLBs suspending of Spring Training.

In all this we who venture to walk by faith in Christ can hang onto Romans 14:7-9 (So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.), Romans 8:37 ( No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.), and the many other promises of the God who provides.   

Martin Luther King's Connection to an Evangelist and Mahatma Gahandi

This book is a remembrance of the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi, written by the Christian evangelist E. Stanley Jones, was the author's first hand reflection on the nonviolent yet confrontational campaigns of Gandhi and the connections between Gandhi's strategies and the teachings of Jesus.  The book, published in 1948, was a failure in terms of sales, and considered by Jones himself as his least successful book.  A few years later a graduate of Crozier Divinity School in Rochester, New York, who had moved on to attend grad school at Boston University, came upon this book in the university library. That student was Martin Luther King.  He was deeply moved by the book and he wrote in the margin of the book "This is It!  This is the way to achieve freedom for the negro in North America." You can still see King's marginal notation in the Martin Luther King Library in Atlanta. Prior to leaving Boston University for Sweden to receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the university held a convocation in his honor.  There he met Jones's daughter and said to her "E. Stanley Jones was a very important person for me, for it was his book on Mahatma Gandhi that triggered my used of Gandhi's method of nonviolence as a weapon for our own people's freedom in the United States."  Although King had studied Gandhi's method of nonviolence for years, it was not until he read Jones's treatment of Gandhi's did he see the connection to the civil rights movement in the United States.  What appeared to be one of E. Stanley Jones's greatest failures turned out to be something greatly used by God to bring about change for good in the world.  Jones's faithfulness to follow a suggestion by the Methodist Publishing House to write a book on his remembrances of Mahatma Gandhi over time brought about good on God's earth.

Similarly, our acts of faith in the hands of God, will bear fruit, probably not immediately and possibly not in our lifetime, but God is not constrained by place and time.  So respond to God's word to you, both his written word and the Holy Spirit, and know that he will in His time bring forth fruit. 

(This blog post was entirely summarized from the forward of Victorious Living a daily devotional written by E. Stanley Jones and most recently published by Abingdon Press in 2015.)

Thy Kingdom Come on Earth - I

“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,
your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven."

(Matthew 6:9-10)

I participated in a discussion on Friday night with a colleague at a social gathering concerning how do we, the people of God, reach outside the comfortable church worlds we live in to those who are needy in this world.  Although he comes from a Catholic tradition and I a Protestant tradition, we both agreed that this is vital.  As we talked on, I realized that Corinne and I have helped a couple of needy women who have entered our circle in the last 10 years.  In both cases, I honestly felt that our financial, emotional and spiritual support made a difference in their lives. And I know that they both feel God's love for them.

At the worship service we attended today, the person leading the prayer time prayed the unusual prayer "Lord, help us to ponder the question "How do we make the invisible kingdom visible on earth?" So during this coming week one of my general prayers will be to seek opportunities to make God's invisible kingdom visible on earth.

Squeezed between these two events, we spent a good deal of Saturday remembering the life of Don Bergmann, the founder of Bergmann, at a memorial service and also reconnecting with his children and meeting their grandchildren at a reception that followed.  Remembering Don's life and my interactions with him and how they almost always lifted my spirits, was an uplifting kingdom-like experience.  I remembered when Don had his first surgery for some brain disorder, I gathered some of by colleagues together and we prayed together for Don in one of our conference rooms. He came through the surgery well and was back to work before long.  

So, I will have a full week of work this week, where there will be some opportunities to share in and experience the making of God's kingdom visible to those on earth.  Will my heart be prepared?  Will my spiritual eyesight be keen?  Will I be willing to take the necessary risks to be an avenue for kingdom of God coming into the world this week? 

Remembering Don Bergmann

I must have been one of several people hired twice by Don Bergmann.  First for Erdman & Anthony, and then for Bergmann Associates.   Even before he first hired me, he had worked for several years with my father who also worked for Erdman & Anthony.  They carpooled weekdays to work at Erdman & Anthony.  Even while I was in high school and then when I was in my college years, Don would be either checking in with me on what I was doing, and I recall at one point him visiting me and my father at our home.  My parents and Don and Barbara lived in Chili probably less than a mile apart.  Don’s interest in me and what I was doing in my younger years made a big and positive impression on me.

When I completed my engineering studies at Clarkson in 1977, the employment market was still pretty dismal, but I had offers from Erdmann & Anthony and with Harza Engineering Company.  Although the allure of joining an international water resources engineering company was pretty strong, so was Don’s enthusiasm, so I joined Erdmann & Anthony, which at the time was in a pretty strong growth mode and had some good projects going on.

One of Don’s many firsts was somehow winning a section of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Improvement Project, this between Harold Yard and New Rochelle, NY. One day he calls me over and spends about 30 minutes orienting me to the track realignment work that was needed to increase the travel speeds on the corridor.  We didn't have a track engineer, but I was about to become one.  He gave me a very brief explanation of spiral curve geometry (which I knew nothing about) and pointed me to the highway designers if I needed to find out more.  If he had any inclination that I was clueless, he sure didn’t show it. So here I was at 24 or 25 years of age, in charge of realigning 17 miles of track (some on bridge and some on viaduct) with dozens of spiral curves to improve the operating speed, and hardly knowing where to begin.  But it was those kind of experiences with Don that formed how I would approach other projects that I started work on that I knew little about.  One day we were on site, walking the track alignment, which took us to the viaduct that includes the iconic Hell Gate Arch Bridge over the East River.  Don, being a structural engineer, was particularly interested the bridge, so we entered one of the west towers, climbed up the staircase inside tower, and opened the door that was just above the top chord of the arch.  I am scared to death of heights but each of us walked out onto the upper chord a short distance while the other of us took a photo.  Walking out into that uncomfortable spot was what working for Don Bergmann was like.  Once I got over the fears, challenging myself became a way of life for me. 

Don was one of those unique people who went against the typical grain.  For most people “seeing is believing”.  For Don, and those he inspired, “believing is seeing”.  He constantly put me and others in those places that were uncomfortable for us, but with enthusiasm and inspiration alone, helped us to believe in ourselves.  I've seen first hand a rewarding and joyous career because I learned from Don to believe in myself.

Joy to the World and What it Means

No more let sins and sorrows grow.  Nor thorns infest the ground:

He comes to make His blessings flow

Far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found,

far as the curse is found.

These words were written by Isaac Watts, the famous English hymn writer and composed by George Frederick Handel.  The first two stanzas lead us into joyful, thankful worship.  This third stanza speaks to the purpose of the Savior's coming.  It takes us back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve's disobedience separated them and us from all the blessings of fellowship with God.  It speaks of the growth of sins and sorrows.  The thorns infesting the ground must be speaking of how man's work would be made more difficult because of Adam and Eve's sin.  So our world both then and today, apart from the Savior's coming, is afflicted with the growth of sins and sorrows, and our work is made more difficult by sin's grip.  Even nature is engulfed in sin's grip.  This certainly describes the world we live in today.  Sin's curse is spread thick over all humanity and even of nature.  Although the great work of tracking down and destroying the curse actually ends at the cross, the Savior's coming begins at Bethlehem, where Jesus is born into the world.

The Savior's coming changes the game.  He comes to make his blessings flow in no limited fashion but to everywhere the curse is found.  The blessings that come with the Savior's birth are meant to chase down and overtake the sins and sorrows of this world in as powerful a manner as those sins and sorrows were first released into this world.  So the questions for me are will I believe that the blessings of God's coming are big enough to replace the evidences of the curse in my own life, and the lives of all the people I know no matter what the evidences of that curse are in their lives?  

No One is Beyond the Redemptive Reach of Jesus

My wife and I were inspired by many scenes from the Sight & Sound Theater https:www.sight-sound.com production of Jesus in Lancaster, PA in summer 2018.  However, the scene I most remember was Jesus' encounter with the Demoniac covered in Luke 8:26-39.  This occurred right after Jesus demonstrated his authority over the potentially destructive effects of the nature, calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee.  In the production he and the disciples were sailing through a dismal fog when they approach the shore of the Geresenes.  The story of this troubled man was remarkably displayed on stage and his pain and suffering were obvious.  Jesus is not at all intimidated by the man, his condition, or by the demons that possessed him.  By the end of the story he's entirely transformed by Jesus' redemptive work, such that he was found to be clothed and in his right mind.  Although the man begs Jesus to leave with him and his disciples on the boat, Jesus instead commands him to return home and tell his family what God had done for him.  How would I have reacted to the demoniac in this story?  How do I react to people I come into contact with who are not entirely well mentally?  Answer: not well.  This story reminds us to put before Jesus the very people who we would rule out as being beyond the reach of anyone's help, and not just those with mental illness.  But that is not the case with Jesus.  There's no situation that's daunting to him.  So let's take that most troubled person we can think of, or that person who's in a situation that appears to be the most hopeless, and place them in the hands of Jesus to seek healing for them.     

There's a sad subplot to this story involving the residents of this community.  They were so troubled by the upset caused by the healing of this troubled man that they asked Jesus to leave!  So the Savior, who heals and restores the most troubled person in their little village upsets them so much that they ask him to leave.  They are so used to the troubled condition of this man, so resigned to the permanency of his condition, so stuck in their own ongoing lack of compassion and faith that he could be healed that their little world is tipped upside down and they can't take the healing Jesus brought.  My hope is that we would never be satisfied with the things that are plainly out of kilter.  Sadly, apart from the hope we have in Jesus we become far too apathetic.  So let's remember to place our hope in the redemptive hands of Jesus.

The Self-Made End up Broken But Jesus Saves

My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,

the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns, 

broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Jer. 2:13

Early in Jeremiah's message to Judah, he speaks these words, on behalf of God to God's  wayward people.  These words speak to mankind's nature, because the people of Judah, like us, were decendants of Adam and Eve.  People need water, for sure, but so many questions follow from this verse.  Why would people who could partake of a spring of living water choose to forsake such a gift?  Why would someone prefer stagnant water over flowing water?  Why would someone take the time to build a cistern and then improperly build it properly so it fails to hold water?

Sadly there must be something about the human condition that causes us to turn our backs on the spring of living water, which comes from God the Father and his son Jesus.   But we cannot leave it at that because whatever the living water represents, we seek that water to survive.  So then we attempt to meet those basic needs with our own ability, with disastrous consequences.

The story doesn't end there, however, because Jesus, by giving believers the Holy Spirit causes them to become vessels of living water.  Through Jesus' work and his gift of the Holy Spirit, we are delivered from digging out our own failing cisterns to holding the living water we crave, to becoming vessels from which living water flows.

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

John 4:37 - 38