Yearly Archives: 2013

Spirit-filled Ancestors

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All of us have heard testimonies of people with difficult pasts who’ve somehow, against all odds, turned their lives around. They might have had a history of dreadful choices or even a rap sheet a mile long, but for many of them the turnaround came after connecting with Christ.

As often as not, their testimonies include a statement like this: “My grandmother prayed for me for decades, and God finally answered.”

If we could piece together our family trees for many generations back, all of us would probably find that God’s representatives had been placed in strategic places all along, to pray for their families. Some even prayed for “those yet unborn,” which would include us.

My sister has done an excellent job as our “Family Historian,” keeping memorabilia safe and well categorized in labeled storage bins. She’s amassed everything from diplomas and photographs to wedding gowns, jewelry, infant-wear, and letters.

Ancestor albums

Several years ago a family friend, Sally, offered to go through Mary’s bins and condense everything into two 9” x 12” albums, one for Dad’s side of the family and one for Mom’s. She scanned or photographed everything so that even bulky items morphed into crisp, flat notebook pages. She also typed up old hand-written letters, some over 100 years old, to place alongside originals, which in some cases included translations from other languages.

Sally also added official census records rewritten from hard-to-read official documents to legible charts. These pages take account of birth dates and all known addresses, emigration and immigration dates, occupations, marriages, children’s birth and death dates, causes of death where known, burial locations, and an all-inclusive family tree.

Recently I’ve spent time with my distant relatives via these two family albums, going on a hunt for God-sightings through the 5 generations represented. And what I learned is God establishes his Spirit somewhere in every family tree.

Youthful Carl Johansson

For example, my paternal grandfather (Carl Johan Johansson) came to America in 1886 as a 19 year old laborer with a homemade wooden box of tools, and he brought Jesus Christ with him. By the end of his 68 years, he’d married, fathered four children, had become a building contractor and finally the vice president of a Chicago bank. He died 10 years before I was born, so we never met, except through these albums.

Taking in the details of his life, which of course include my own father’s 1899 birth, has been a satisfying exercise that’s made me grateful for God’s involvement in this “old world” family, my family. Sally’s charted numbers have told a non-numerical story of personal lows and highs similar to the lives of today’s families. And God is in the details.

Older Carl Johansson (Johnson)

But most importantly, when Carl Johannson’s death date had been written into the record books, God’s Spirit lived on within him.

(Tomorrow: the life he lived)

“Remember your Creator… before the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:7)

Ready and Waiting

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In the New Testament when children joyfully referred to Jesus as the Messiah, the religious rulers of the day were incensed that he didn’t stop them. Instead he did just the opposite: “Don’t you read your Bibles?” he said. “From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise.” He was telling them, “These youngsters get me, and you don’t.” (Matthew 21:16)

How did those children become that devoted to Jesus? They were so sure about honoring him that they went against powerful local authorities without blinking an eye. How do we cultivate such certain faith in ourselves and in our children?

Hmmm...

Last night I received an email from our firstborn, Nelson, with some interesting thoughts about “signing on” with Jesus as Lord of our lives. He wrote about our natural reluctance to cooperate when the Lord directs us to move in his direction. Then, when we’re finally ready to comply, we do so only “little by little.” What Nelson said next gave me a new way to think about that, not from a human perspective but from the Lord’s.

Some of us, reluctant to step toward God, say, “But I’m still waiting on him,” and Scripture definitely encourages that kind of waiting. It’s possible, though, that when we say we’re “waiting on him,” it’s just a ploy to procrastinate on making a difficult change he’s already asked us to make.

Nelson wrote, “Funny how we sometimes get that mixed around, saying that we are ‘waiting on God.’ I think he’s waiting on us much more of the time, ready to bless us and move us to the next thing. God is ready. We are not.”

His words rolled around in my head for a long time, statements that were well-put and truthful.

In thinking about the scriptural children honoring Jesus with their words, we Christian parents think of our own children and how important it is to us that they one day choose to follow Jesus. We spend unnumbered hours praying to that end, and we take them to church, grill them on Bible memory verses, pay for Christian summer camps, and do our best to live Christian-ly in front of them. But sometimes children choose a different path anyway.

Though that saddens us, we should never despair. As Nelson wrote, all of us can be slow to walk in God’s ways. The good news is that he is always ready, whenever any of us steps even slightly in his direction. He is thoroughly prepared to bless us, and we’ll never have to stand waiting on him once we’ve come to the point of willing surrender. He’s already there, waiting on us… and our children. He wants all of us to come, and he looks forward to hearing “words of praise from our lips.”

None of it, however, happens on our timetables or through the circumstances we dictate. As Nelson wrote, “God often works in ways we don’t expect.” But one thing we know for sure: he is always ready and waiting for us.

“Honor the Messiah as Lord in your hearts.” (1 Peter 3:15)

With or Without Vision

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One of the lastThis is one of the last pictures taken of Nate and me before we learned about his deadly diagnosis. I’m thankful for it, since it represents life before terminal cancer. Key word: represents, and an inaccurate representation at that. His life already did include cancer, and as I look at the picture today, I see it there.

Nate’s smile is not his own. Though he’s doing his best, his face can’t hide his physical pain. I didn’t notice it at the time, but today, in hindsight, I see it. Even his posture tells of something unusual going on by the stiff way he’s putting his arm around me, something that had always been easy.

I remember that picture-taking moment well. Relatives from North Carolina were visiting, and we’d just finished a lavish brunch at my sister and brother-in-law’s home. Even during the meal, Nate had had to get out of his chair and stand behind it to “take a break” from the back stress of sitting. “It feels better if I stand,” he had said. But a backache isn’t cancer, and we’d already known about that. After all, he was already scheduled for corrective spine surgery.

But hindsight is 20/20, and because I now know what we were about to learn then, I look at the picture and see it coming. But on picture-taking day, we were still blissfully ignorant of that life and death crisis, which in a sense left us standing in a place of blessing.

But what about the pictures that are being taken now, during these days? Not knowing what’s ahead, when I smile for a camera do I acknowledge that I’m currently standing in a place of blessing? Am I appreciating that I’m not in a life and death crisis today?

God has ongoing 20/20 vision both in hindsight and foresight. He sees the complete lifeline of everybody at all times rather than looking at each of us one way this year and another way the next. He has no regrets about what he has allowed to happen to each of us and can’t think of a single change he might have made to how he’s acted in the past. He doesn’t want to redo any decision he’s made and never thinks, “I wish I’d done such-and-such back then.”

In other words, he’s the complete opposite of us.

I’ll never have 20/20 vision toward the future like God does, but I can learn a few things through my 20/20 vision backwards. And what I’ve learned today from studying this picture is how important it is to acknowledge, in the here and now, that I’m standing in a place of blessing.

“Always be zealous for the fear of the Lord. There is surely a future hope for you.” (Proverbs 23:17-18)