Of Popes, Past and Future

 Jorge Mario Bergoglio has long been on my prayer list with a handful of other Christian voices, some of which I agree with, some not. But all those on the list have influence on the thinking of God’s people that could be turned to good or to ill. Satan would no doubt delight to see them fall (like Ravi Zacarias) and drag down with them the disillusioned. So I pray for steadfastness in faith, protection for families, sensitivity to the nudging of the Holy Spirit. (I pray that one especially for the one with whom I have strong political disagreement.)

Memories of Charles F. Smith

I was asked to say a few words at my father’s memorial service this past weekend along with one of his step-daughters and a fellow doctor he discipled. The following is adapted from my tribute.

 

My father was known as a Bible teacher, yet he never went to seminary. Instead, he went to bed.

He went to bed for three years with tuberculosis. In 1946 he and my mother were newly married. She came down with rheumatic fever—treatment: bedrest. He was diagnosed with TB--treatment: bedrest. They lived with my grandparents.

He was in medical school at the time. It was a routine annual chest X-ray. When they looked at the previous year’s routine annual chest X-ray, the diagnosis said “Active tuberculosis.” 

It had been filed.

In those years they didn’t have the antibiotics that we have today. The treatment for TB was bedrest. 

Dad spent three years in bed pouring over his Bible and Christian books. Mostly his Bible. The one thing I wanted from my father when he died in February at the age of 102 was his Bible from that time period. The margins are crammed with pencil notes, so tiny as to be illegible to my eyes. (I have to remind myself that he was in his twenties.) It’s not what those notes say that means so much to me; it’s what they represent—the value my father placed on Scripture. 

The important parts are not things he would need to go back and look up. (“Now, what did I put in that note? On, no! I can’t read it.”) No, the important parts took root in his heart and guided all his choices: 

·      his choice to become a medical missionary (although that never happened, in part because of health concerns); 

·      his choice to support missionaries, making his first financial commitment before he even knew what his post-med-school salary would be;

·      his choice to foster missionary kids when they came to the States for college. (One of those grown foster kids preached his memorial service.)

·      his choice to teach the college Sunday school class and pass on his enthusiasm for the Word of God and for missions to a new generation. (Some of those former college students who became missionaries spoke to me after his service.)

·      And his choice in later years to disciple men, sometimes together with their teenage sons, studying what it means to commit completely to the Lordship of Christ as a man of God.

In my teens we had the practice of family devotions after dinner. We would sing a couple hymns from the old InterVarsity hymnal (“Praise the Savior, ye who know Him/Who can tell how much we owe Him?” “Who is on the Lord’s side? Who will serve the King?”) Mom played the Allen organ Dad had bought her, and then we studied the Bible together. Dad taught me that the Truth didn’t need to be afraid of questions. It might take some time to figure out the answer, but God was not threatened by my uncertainties. He wasn’t hiding. His truth was there to find in the Bible.

In adulthood, my dad and I disagreed strongly on certain issues. Both of us started from Scripture, but we sometimes reached very different conclusions. But there was one thing we agreed on: Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and coming again, according to the Scriptures.

Thank you, Daddy.

Beth Moore's Knotted-Up Life

With the Barbie movie out, this book may be even more worth talking about than when it first came out.

In our years in South Africa, I did several Beth Moore Bible studies with the wonderful women of Grace Baptist Church, Kempton Park. I confess that I chaffed at the amount of homework (especially when Beth had us hopping all over the Bible, looking up dozens of cross references), but I loved the videos where she spoke from the heart about the issues we were studying. ​

Her conclusions were always biblical and God-honoring even if I sometimes questioned how she got that out of this particular passage. Recently reading her memoir All My Knotted-Up Life, I learned she had no formal Bible training, only a deep desire to study and learn from piles of books and commentaries. She was learning as she went along, responding to the call on her to study and teach, and blessing so many women like our little group in South Africa along the way.

Blow, Wind of God

I’m in Istanbul. My husband, Steve, has a conference in Izmir, near ancient Ephesus. As we flew in over this huge city, I kept thinking of a scene from Black Mountain, the third of my Glastonbury Grail books. My character, Old Teg o’ the Hills, arrived in Istanbul (formerly Byzantium, Constantinople) in 1541, at the height of Suleiman the Magnificent‘s rebuilding following the Muslim conquest of the capitol of the Eastern Roman Empire. The population then was about 700,000--more than Paris, Lyon and Venice combined! 

Murder in Ephesus

  ​Spunky heroine pursues an intriguing mystery in a vivid and well-drawn setting—recipe for a read I couldn't put down! The setting is late first-century Ephesus where Christians are a forbidden underground sect. Benjamin, a young scribe, is poisoned at a secret meeting where the newly copied scroll of the prophet Isaiah is about to be read. There is no shortage of suspects from his landlord to work colleagues to an obnoxious rival, but it is Bishop Apollos who confesses to the murder so that the other Christians will not come to the attention of authorities demanding worship of the emperor as a living god or death as a traitor. Sabina's father is the magistrate, and the last thing he wants is for his daughter's forbidden faith to be exposed. She teams up with Benjamin's Jewish brother to track down the clues and discover the truth. In the process we roam this ancient harbor city, entering homes, businesses, and even a pagan temple for the meeting of a Gnostic cult.

For Those Standing on the Edge

  ​“Put Christ back into Xmas,” we often hear at this time of year, as if X stood for the unknown in an equation, rather than the Greek letter chi for Χρίστος (Christos). But as Timothy Larsen points out, no one took Christ out of Christmas. Despite all the hoopla over Santa, most people are aware of the baby laid in a manger, of angels and stars and shepherds somewhere in the story, and they long for a moment of holy awe. Think of the ending to Charles Schultz’s “Charlie Brown Christmas.” Who doesn’t get goosebumps listening to Linus recite Luke 2? And modern secularists love the moment as much as believers. 

Bringing Good from Evil in Afghanistan

This summer in Vacation Bible School we reenacted Saul’s conversion. We made gray paper chains and carried them to “Damascus.” We circled the room muttering threats against those awful Christians who kept preaching that God wanted us to trust in Jesus rather than follow a list of rules.