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JD Wetterling’s MIDWEEKLY REALITY
CHECK
Sunrise, Sunset… Tevye fiddled on the thatched roof of his house at sunset, singing about the cycles of life and pining for worldly riches. It’s a scene from the stage play, Fiddler on the Roof, that Karen and I saw in London’s West End in 1971. The milkman in early 20th century Tsarist Russia struggled to maintain his family traditions and religion while the world around him was changing rapidly, just like a Christian father in 21st century America. Funny how some snapshots of life’s experiences are so perfectly preserved in the grey matter and float to the surface at the most opportune times. That mental image revealed itself from the archives during another one that is overwhelming me with God’s grace. This scene is a 10x10-foot tent pitched in Myakka River State Park, Florida, as I lie in a sleeping bag with my wife, 9-year-old son, and 3-year-old daughter beside me. Somewhere in the middle of the night a full moon shined right in my eye through the screen window of the tent, a Hillary (as in Sir Edmund) brand purchased from Sears for the then princely sum of $110. It woke me up. I lay there counting my blessings to the heavy breathing of my sleeping family, which was barely audible above the angry zing of a billion skeeters outside the tent, voicing their frustration at not being able to dine at the smorgasbord of warm Wetterling blood inside. This Saturday night my thirty-something son and family will be camping in that very same park…same campground…same tent! It’s a life cycle that warms my heart and an investment that is still paying dividends three decades later. My grandson, Logan, has joined the Cub Scouts, a family tradition—his father went all the way to Eagle Scout. I have a number of delightful memories of camping with my son, and I recall how sad I was when he advanced to Boy Scouts and dads could not go along on campouts…unless they were willing to be scout leaders, a civic duty outside the parameters of my personal sloth. These days not just dad but the whole family is invited along when a Cub goes camping, a wonderful idea! Logan is beside himself with anticipation. I cannot wait to hear all about it next Sunday night. We will be making a quick visit to his home near Naples after a speaking engagement at a Presbyterian Men’s Retreat at Lakewood Retreat in Brooksville, FL, on Saturday and teaching a Sunday School class at Westminster Presbyterian Church in suburban Tampa on Sunday morning. Perhaps you recall I’d rather write and speak than eat. Enroute to Florida we are stopping for a day (Thursday) at the Atlanta RV Show (danger, danger!). I am at least as excited as my grandson at the upcoming adventures of this weekend. God is so gracious to this unworthy and his family!
Confluence And we
know that for those who love God all things work together for good, This confluence of outwardly unrelated events happens with some regularity in my life, for the good of my spiritual life if not also my physical life. Actually I know it works this way in every believer's life. The Navigators Military Ministry held a conference here again at Ridge Haven this Labor Day Weekend. The vast majority of the group was young soldiers and their families. I took part in more intense conversations—peppered with “Sir”—and overheard more passionate discussion on the great commission (Matt. 28:18-20) by young men with high-and-tight haircuts, than I hear the rest of the year at Ridge Haven by men and women of any other age or hairdo. What an encouragement to this aging passionate patriot/Christian zealot! Simultaneously two disparate pieces of excellent writing presented themselves before me. The first was a periodical entitled, The Intake: Journal of the Super Sabre Society, by a newly formed group of ever more doddering former F-100 pilots, of which I am a charter member. The F-100 Super Sabre was the first plane to break the sound barrier in level flight, one of the first widow-makers in the Air Force’s expensive learning curve for pilots and aeronautical engineers of swept-wing supersonic fighter aircraft. I served in one of the last USAF F-100 squadrons—the 494th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 31st Tactical Fighter Wing, at RAF Lakenheath, England in 1971-2—long after the lessons about prevention of adverse yaw, unrecoverable flat spins and other such unpleasant esoteric events were learned at catastrophic cost. Contributing Editor and former F-100 pilot Bob Krone wrote (Summer 2007 edition) about a recent interview between Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff (an American classic about fighter pilots and astronauts—the movie was a classic, too) and a reporter on Fox TV News. Bob wrote:
He was asked, “Wouldn’t you say that one can also speak of ‘The Right Stuff’ in journalism or in the business world where everybody’s up against tough moments?” Tom Wolfe replied: “The Right Stuff is a very specific term applied to the code of military pilots who have the moxie to hang their hide over the great gulf of death, be smart enough to bring it back, then go out again tomorrow and do it all over again. People don’t know how dangerous it is just to take off in an F-series airplane. When a businessman dies it’s usually choking over a hunk of chateaubriand in a classy restaurant. The Right Stuff has no application to anyone but pilots and astronauts.”
I think it was a pretty presumptuous question from a reporter who apparently did not read the book, but with my forty years of hindsight and God-given sanctification/enlightenment in His providence, I no longer share Wolfe’s eloquent hyperbole—I know “the stuff” was not of my own manufacturing. I also vividly recall, when “the stuff” was not sufficient, the Super Sabre responded in ways that had nothing to do with my adrenaline drenched inputs…or in spite of them. The Apostle Peter drew his sword and was ready to take on the world in Jesus’ presence in the Garden the night he was betrayed (John 18:10), then a few hours later was a craven coward in the presence of a peasant girl who fingered him as one of Jesus’ followers (John 18:25-27). Then again, 51 days later, on Pentecost, he was a courageous preacher who delivered one of the most efficacious altar calls in history (Acts 2:14-41). By the grace of God I am what I am…, as Paul told the Corinthians (I Cor. 15:10). I also think Wolfe applied the term to far too small a segment of the warrior class. Robert Kaplan makes that plain in an insightful think-piece for The Atlantic Monthly (August 24, 2007) entitled “Rereading Vietnam,” that also profoundly moved me this weekend. A better title might have been “Rejudging Vietnam.” I happen to personally know some of the warriors Kaplan wrote about—Medal of Honor winner Bud Day and the Vietnam era Misty pilots (F-100 pilots)—and I am so grateful that at least one highbrow, highly regarded liberal establishment periodical is finally seeing the light about the debt America owes its warriors in the modern era’s “unpopular wars.” Yes, it would be too much to expect such a secular source to declare that courage in the chaos of combat is a God-given gift to an undeserving nation, but one day we will all understand, we will all be sophisticated theologians (John 16:8), some eternally grateful, some eternally sorry (Matt. 25:31-34). The soldiers—military laborers—here at Ridge Haven this Labor Day Weekend, many of them Army Rangers, are of that “Right” warrior class, and their courage is simultaneously directed toward another, greater war, the one between good and evil, witnessing to God’s truth in a hostile culture that worships such absurdities as atheism, diversity and politically correctness. By grace it extends to a willingness to die for a citizenry, a significant segment of which, in their self-absorbed rush to judgment, holds them in contempt, both for their career field and their faith. It is indeed the Right Stuff from the Right Source, the source of all truth and the only Judge that matters. It was a my great blessing to serve them.
Attitude
Back to Basics:
The Blue Ridge Parkway is a 460-mile-long national park. We lollygagged along a third of it and never got out of North Carolina. The creation of the Parkway, a government program to employ starving men back in the Great Depression days of the 1930’s, may be the best government program ever, a magnificently beautiful legacy to the citizenry of the land of the free for those heirs who spend their time racing the rats down the streets of its crowded cities. We stayed in four different campgrounds on or near the Parkway, explored as many more for future reference, and hiked a few miles of trails nearly every day. “Back to basics” is a relative term that Daniel Boone, a sojourner in those parts, would scoff at. I lit the campfire with a butane lighter, made the coffee on a two-burner propane camp stove on the concrete picnic table provided, dwelt in a palatial two-room 10x16-foot tent—nap room and screen room (unneeded, praise God) by day, and bedroom and bathroom by night. I blew up the air mattress with a battery-powered air compressor, lit and cooled the place (rarely needed) with a ceiling mounted light/fan. And this one would have blown Daniel’s mind: a cleverly disguised inside porta-potty that eliminates the skeeter bites of nighttime getups, a critical codger issue. The last time I took a bath in a bucket was in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, in a simulated POW compound, in a box in which I could not quite stand up in…nor lay down in, enroute to the war zone of Southeast Asia 39 years ago. And I wasn’t grilling New York Strips over the campfire back then either. God is so gracious. My bride and I absorbed His Word at the dawn of every day while simultaneously glorying in the visual feast of His creation—a wonderful worldly-care blocker. I don’t recall a vacation this long or so thoroughly decompressing in my life—a great mistake, I confess. There is only one negative to this lifestyle. When making of one of my mandatory getups off the floor in the middle of a moonless, starless night in the woods, the interior of a tent is dark as the inside of a cow, a treacherous balancing act for a codger. But an investment matching the new truck can eliminate that, along with the bath in the bucket… and North Carolina’s biggest RV dealer just happened to be along our route home….
By His
Grace
It’s a mountain man’s Cadillac, and it cost more than the only Cadillac I
It happened this way. We get lots of RV visitors at Ridge Haven. Many of them belong to SOWERS, a wonderful organization of RV’ers who work at non-profits around the country in return for free RV hookups. There are a handful of similar organizations, and some folks just do it on their own, like our favorite RV servant/saints—Cliff and Barbara Mudge, retired farmers. Our tent campground is named Mudgeville in honor of all their hard work as unto the Lord there. These saints put the lie to Emerson’s observation that travel is a fool’s paradise. Sowers always ask us to lead them in daily devotions at the start of their abbreviated work day, so 2-3 of us rotate in that divine duty, often in their RV’s. Thus I see the inside of a lot of RV’s…and now you can figure out the rest of this story. We decided a travel trailer, versus fifth wheel or motorhome, would fit our “needs” best, and they require something bigger that an S-10 to tow them, if you want one big enough for two people to turn around in. Well, truck marketing is all about meeting ego needs. The vast majority of new trucks that roll off a dealer’s lot in these mountains is a gargantuan 4-wheel-drive, four-door, “crew cab” with as many extra’s as the dealer’s finance man will allow, and they can pull more than the John Deere I learned to drive on back in the last century, and they cost more than my first house. I see many of them parked in front of western North Carolina houses or singlewides that appear to cost less than the truck. I get off-road a bit as a Resident Manager of Ridge Haven, but in a mostly sane manner and have never gotten stuck in my 4 cylinder 2WD S-10, and snow is minimal in these here southern slopes of the Appalachians, so I have never found a need for the expensive, gas-economy-killing gears required for 4WD. I had to drive 65 miles down into the foothills of South Carolina to find a dealer with a new no-frills-work-truck with 2-wheel-drive. I researched the used truck market but quickly learned that basic work trucks get used for…uh…actual work, and get driven till the crankshaft quits cranking. Though I’ve bought very few vehicles in my life, I long ago learned that model-year-end is the season when dealers deal most agreeably for new vehicles, especially after a gas-price-induced bad season for gas hogs like this past one. And the “instant depreciation” of owning last year’s model is a non-economic issue if your drive them long enough. After some preliminary email and phone conversation we walked into the dealership with fear and trepidation, steeled for a high pressure pitch, and met a low key Christian young man who made it almost joyful to write a big check for a depreciating asset. On the way home I stopped at the truck accessory store, ordered a cap for the bed, and made one impulse buy over which I agonized not one second—a $30 stainless steel plate for the front license plate holder that says, “By His Grace.” That says it all. Just as that truck requires continual copious quantities of gas to keep going, so do I require continual copious quantities of grace through Christ in whom I live and move and have my being.
As you read this we’re breaking it in on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the next
couple of weeks, stopping at every overlook and every tent campground, and
hiking every trail
Reign of Grace My bride and I sat on a rocky ledge at 6000 feet, our feet dangling over the edge, above the tree line and just below the brow of Black Balsam Knob. We were celebrating the end of the summer harvest season at Ridge Haven, 2/3 of a mile below and 7 miles south, as the falcon flies, of our semi-private picnic spot. Our famous Appalachian blue was particularly opaque. The twelve ridgelines/four states view was limited to two ridges and a portion of Transylvania County from our granite perch in a “bald” of wildflowers in two shades of yellow atop broadleaf greenery. Air traffic was heavy and noisy, from basso profundo buzz to a high whine as all kinds of air freight carriers lugged loads of pollen from feast to feast. We co-existed famously with our not always friendly fellow creatures. Give a bee a field of wildflowers and a human cannot provoke him to sting. Perhaps it is because his leg sacs are so full he cannot squat to apply his stinger…or perhaps he is just too happy to be provoked in his field of dreams. In all my years of marveling at nature up close, I’ve never seen a mid-air collision of God’s flying creatures. Even the silent butterflies, likewise enjoying the yellow smorgasbord, never collide with other air traffic in spite of their seemingly erratic flight paths. I wonder what kind of radar God gives these creatures. Their pinhead-sized (or smaller) brains are better than human ones in that regard. And how do the bees fly, violating all the rules of aerodynamics taught in engineering schools? And whence cometh the strength to flap their wings so fast they sound like a propeller? It’s simple in reality: With my new heart and eyes to see (John 3:3), my Creator is gloriously self-evident in endless details of His magnificent creation. Any other explanation is a lie. I lay back and stared straight up at blue sky thru tall grass. What a worshipful perspective for a temporarily earthbound mortal enroute to a heavenly home. Blindingly white ragged clouds tumbled and swirled in all directions in the mountain air currents and eddies. The sun peeked out from behind churning cumulus billows and steamed the sweat off my T-shirt. High overhead a buzzard glided upward in tight circles inside a thermal. I could barely make him out, though he was probably counting my chin whiskers and trying to judge, from the aroma of my T-shirt, how long before I’d be lunch. I sat back up and met the caress of a cooling zephyr just above the tall grass. A mile away, from ten to two o’clock low, the silver ribbon of the Blue Ridge Parkway snaked thru the variously vertical greenery of our near-rainforest. Closer in, hikers with half-legs emerged from the evergreen tree line and meandered up the knee-deep mountainside trails worn by years of foot traffic and gully-washing rains. The occasional distant shrieks of happy school children on guided nature hikes were the only other human sounds aside from the superlative-laced conversation of us two lovers on the ledge. Superlatives in spite of dozens of Kodak moments in these mountains in the last six years. It wasn’t just from the visual stimulus. There is a soul-deep sense of the nearness of God in such a setting, as mysterious and overpowering as the Triune God Himself, that only the elect can know, invoking a humble adoration that saves all the superlatives for the King of Kings, whose love and mercies are new every morning (Lam. 3:22-3). This past summer I concluded my summer camper teaching with the admonition, “Don’t ever quit being amazed at grace!” When God’s reign of grace allows one to live in a wilderness cathedral like this, no effort is needed to comply. |
