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.

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! 

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. 

Rent Hearth Stones

​​I’m a book person. I have a tendency to get behind in the magazines I want to read. Christianity Today is at the top of my list because it grapples with faith in a real-world context. Recently I ran across the December 2018 issue I seem to have missed in a pile (although I did recognize some articles I had read on-line at the time.) From the opening “Editor’s Note” it lamented this awful year. After 2020, I was hard pressed to come up with what had been so bad about 2018. I had to look it up—hurricanes, forest fires, school shootings, international atrocities and violence. Yeah, pretty bad stuff. And even when Coronavirus is over, bad things will continue to happen.

 

Are We Truly Free and Brave?

 ​Among the many things changed by Covid has been my involvement in a choral group that included many music teachers from surrounding communities. We rehearsed weekly in one of the high schools. Last spring as we prepared for our concert the school closed the building to outside personnel like us. Within a week school closed period. In the beginning we had hopes of rescheduling our concert for maybe June. Then September or October. My music still hangs in a bag on a hook ready to grab as I go out the door to rehearsal.

This song is not from last spring’s planned program. It is from an earlier concert, but the text by American abolitionist, James Russel Lowell (1819-1891), has stuck with me. In recent days its meaning seems all the more powerful.

Praying Together for the Elections

 

We are in the midst of this election season, and I am concerned as I suspect you are. The angry rhetoric on TV raises my blood pressure; the name calling and accusations on both sides break my heart. I’m conflicted by brothers and sisters in the faith who see things differently from how I see them. Consequently, I am making a list of things we all (Democrats, Republicans and independents) can pray for at this time. 

To the Class of 2019

​​I’ve been teaching Sunday school to fourth through sixth graders for seven years now. The first kids I taught are graduating from high school this spring. Perhaps they won’t be thrust out into the world this week as they leave the auditorium, but by fall they will be more or less “on their own.”

​It’s a pretty scary world between #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and threats of economic collapse from trade wars and the fear of war in the Middle East. My kids come from sheltered homes with loving parents and a supportive community. What will they make of that broader world?
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When Research Hits Home

My current WIP (work in progress) is about anger with God from the standpoint of a Bethlehem woman who loses her child in Herod’s massacre of the innocents. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about first-century Palestine, and having fun tracking down connections and the impact of the historical context on my characters. I am also on the lookout for books that deal with my theme. The first one I turned to was Philip Yancy’s Disappointment with God.

It’s a book worth multiple readings.

Christmas Bells

 

​​I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
 
I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
 
Christmas joy. That’s what this time of year is about, isn’t it?

Strangers in our Midst

The community choir I sing with had our Christmas concert yesterday. We filled a local Catholic church to the brim twice over on a snowless Sunday afternoon. Most of the music was unique arrangements of traditional carols like this pulsing version of "O Come, All Ye Faithful". Some was totally new like "Let There be Light" by an friend of my youth, Craig Courtney.

A piece that has especially stuck with me was this Scottish carol, "What Strangers are These?" The first two verses are typically Christmas, the babe in the manger, shepherds and magi, adoring their King, Jesus the Savior. It is the third verse that haunts me.
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A King Worth Serving

 

I fell in love with King Arthur and the Matter of Britain (the whole cycle of stories that come out of that legend) in high school when we read Idylls of the King. The language of Tennyson, the mystery of a baby hidden away to be later revealed as the rightful ruler, the promise of his return in the hour of Britain’s greatest need all tugged at my imagination and made me desire more than anything that it be true.

Praying through Messiah

Last December I was in New Haven, Connecticut, and attended a Messiah sing-along with the Yale concert choir and orchestra in their marvellous chapel. This fall I joined a local choral group to perform Handel’s Messiah with another regional choir and a small local orchestra. Even though I drove nearly an hour each way for rehearsals and an hour and a half for one of the concerts, it was worth it. We gave three performances, well supported by the small-town communities. 

Yahweh, Show Your Power!

In Valerie Comer’s fantasy novel Majai's Fury reviewed here, Shanh, the Jonah-inspired character sent from his legalistically god-fearing culture to invite a sinful city to believe, calls on his god to protect him. “Azhvah, show your power!” and he does, often in miraculous ways. But then, as with the God of the Bible, there are times when he seems not to. He leaves his followers to suffer while he brings Shahn out of his strict legalism into true relationship.

There are so many times when I have no idea how to pray. 

Gollum and Me

The first DVD my husband and I ever bought was The Lord of the Rings extended version, boxed set. I listen to the audio-book at least once a year (usually starting with The Hobbit and moving on through the trilogy). I have the soundtrack music to all three films on my ipod. The other day at the ice rink “Gollum’s Song” from the ending of the second movie, The Two Towers, came on. You may remember that Andy Serkis, the actor who voiced Gollum, won awards for his role that became far more than a voice-over of a computer-generated character.

Interrupted

The phone rings at 5 AM. It’s my brother-in-law. I look vaguely around my office over the garage where I have been sleeping due to the family reunion and try to figure out why he is telephoning me from the house. Only he isn’t in the house. He’s in a town 45 minutes away. He’s telling me my husband has had a heart attack and they just sent him by helicopter to the Cities. “By the time you get there, he should be coming out of the procedure.”

Thoughts on My Father

My dad is coming up to his eighty-ninth birthday in September. I was recently going through old photo albums with him looking for pictures of the house where he was born for a blog about life in the Midwest. He was a cutie! He reminded me of my brother when he was small, and I know my dad would consider that to be the greatest compliment.

Alpha and Omega

 

Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Together they are also a title for Jesus Christ, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Growing out of the names and attributes of God featured in Honey from the Comb, Alpha and Omega lists more than two hundred biblical titles for God accompanied by photographs of the world he created. The book is intended for personal meditation. An index in the back gives Scripture references for each title although many are used multiple times in the Bible. 

Honey from the Comb; A Guide to Focused Prayer Using Scripture

Pandemic. Economic disaster. Social injustice. Fighting in the streets. Not to mention personal struggles with relationships, health problems and feelings of failure and inadequacy.

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