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Midweekly Reality Check:
Meditations on the Mountain
An Exhortation for the Ages The Declaration of Independence is not the only world changing document published in America in the month of July. In this month in 1749, the greatest sermon ever delivered on the North American continent was published, eight years after it was preached. It was Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is the most published sermon in the English language (with 28,400 listings on Google!), after the Sermon on the Mount, and is as appropriate today as the first day it was preached. No one remembers the first delivery of that sermon, in June, 1741 at Rev. Edwards’ home church in Norththampton, Connecticut. It was no more nor less remarkable than any other of his sermons, all of which are still considered theological and philosophical masterpieces by an intellectual titan. Daniel Webster said his books, many of which began as, or consisted of, his sermons, are among “the greatest achievements of the human intellect.” Nineteenth century French philosopher, Georges Lyon, said Edwards was “superior to Locke, Newton, Descartes, and a couple of Pascals combined.”[1] The second preaching of “Sinners….” was the famous one, when Edwards was a guest pastor at Enfield, Connecticut, about 30 miles down the Connecticut River from his home, on Wednesday night, July 8, 1741. There it was “preached…at a time of great awakenings; and attended with remarkable impressions on many of the hearers.”[2] A great “awakening” work of the Holy Spirit, also called revival, was in process in America and Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, the renowned Anglican evangelist and others were finding their sermons used in a mighty way by God to convert the hearts of unbelievers in the colonies in extraordinarily visible ways. Were it to happen in the same way in churches today, those effected would probably be asked to leave for such “remarkable impressions.” George M. Marsden’s biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, the gold standard, in my view, of all the biographies of that great man, best describes the events. “Revival sermons were typically punctuated by outcries of anguish or of joy, or by convulsions, rages, seizures, and faintings…. Often it was wonderful, often terrifying.”[3] Edwards himself analyzed the whole era, from the beginning through years later when some conversions proved to be false, in his classic, The Religious Affections. “Sinners….” would never be preached in the majority of mega-churches in America today. The so-called “growth model” calls for sermons and worship services to be “seeker friendly.” Edwards would not approve. The Puritan model, of which Edwards and Whitefield were, sadly, the last world-famous icons, (with the singular exception of 19th century London preacher, C.H. Spurgeon) entailed leading a non-believing sinner to the realization of his desperate straits, his total inability to make it to heaven by his own “works,” absent the gift of God’s saving grace. As the Apostle Paul declared, “There is…no one who seeks God, ”[4] until the Holy Spirit opens ones eyes to the things of heaven[5] and draws him to the Savior,[6] through the preaching of His word.[7] Edwards used Deuteronomy 32:35 as his scripture reference—“…in due time their foot shall slide…,” emphasizing that no one knows when his next step will be his last, that all people are at all times exposed to “sudden unexpected destruction.” His first point, driven home with heart-piercing effect on his hearers, was, “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” That hot summer evening in Enfield Connecticut, Edwards striking metaphors of the peril of man’s sinful state were prime motivators for unsaved sinners to get right with God, to wit;
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow of justice is aimed directly at your heart, and the bow quivers with pent-up power. And it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, an angry God, who owes you nothing, that keeps the arrow from getting drunk on your blood. Thus all of you whose hearts have never been softened by the Holy Spirit, all of you that have not been born again, and made new creatures, and raised from the dead in sin, are in the hands of an angry God.
His point, so often misunderstood when secular historians and liberal theologians look at the Puritans, is not God’s wrath, per se, but his infinite holiness, and man’s lack of appreciation for his infinite hatred of sin. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ said, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” Modern readers tend to skim over those words as if they were some abstruse hyperbole. Edwards rightly took them quite seriously as a clear measure of God’s infinite hatred of sin. He piled graphic imagery on top of graphic imagery to drive home this critical point, summarizing with, “Oh sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in.” As Edwards made stunningly clear, God hates sin so much he sent his son to die a horrible death as an atonement for the sins of those who trust in him—an act of infinite love! He then expounded on that divine love as he began his closing invitation:
And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands calling, and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners. This is a day where many are flocking to him, and being welcomed into the kingdom of God. Many that are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were recently in the same miserable condition as you, are now in a happy state. Their hearts are filled with love for him who loved them first, and washed their sins away with his own blood, and they are rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. How awful it is to be left behind on such a day! To see so many others feasting while you are pining away and perishing. Are not your souls as precious as those already saved by faith in Jesus Christ?
Edwards was unable to finish the sermon. The “shrieks and cries” of the initially lighthearted congregation “were piercing” and drowned out his words. He stopped and asked for silence but could not be heard. The local pastor, Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, concluded with a prayer no one could hear, then he and Edwards moved among the congregation, ministering to them individually. A witness, Stephen Williams recorded, “Several souls were hopefully wrought upon that night, and oh the cheerfulness and pleasantness of their countenances.” You may read the entire sermon here. I have “modernized” it—turning ponderously long sentences into 2 or more shorter sentences, omitting no sentences or phrases—in an effort to make it more readable for a mediocre mind like mine. In the five years this sermon has been posted on my website, it has never failed to be among the top three most-visited pages over any time period, a microcosm of Edward’s impact over the last 260 years on the world of religion, philosophy and literature. And lest you think fire and brimstone was Jonathan Edwards only homiletic technique, read “The Christian Pilgrim” (also a “modernized” version) and get a more typical sense of a compassionate shepherd’s heart for his flock and his love for the “God of all comfort” (1 Corinthians 1:3). Jonathan Edwards’ ministry still lives 247 years after he died. Iain Murray, in his book, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, declares he is being read more now than he has been in over a century, and “in more countries than ever before.” God willing, such a widespread rediscovery of truth can lead to a 21st century awakening. Dear LORD, may it be so.
Endnotes:
[1] The Christian Almanac, pg 410, by George Grant and Gregory Wilbur [2] On Knowing Christ, pg. 183, by Jonathan Edwards [3] Jonathan Edwards: A Life, page 218, by George M. Marsden [4] Romans 3:11b [5] Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John3:3) [6] No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him (John 6:44). [7] So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God (John 8:47).
A Cloud of Witnesses What a wonderful week it was. In a long list of fabulous fringe benefits of my job as Resident Manager of Ridge Haven Conference Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains, none ranks higher than the guests I get to know and serve in this wilderness cathedral. The Shekinah cloud that descends on this most holy high place, when God pleases, was joined this past week by a cloud of witnesses in the Old Testament tradition, described by the writer of Hebrews in Chapter 11. Ridge Haven hosted 100 God-fearing missionaries just back from the field, who, like those O. T. icons of the faith, will, unless Jesus returns first, die with no idea just how effective they have been in their call to a field white with harvest. But unlike Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Samson, David and Samuel, their names will not be preserved for future generations of mankind in God’s inerrant Word. They will live and labor in anonymity, but with the sure knowledge that they will be found in the Lamb’s Book of Life, not because they have earned it, but because the fruit they bore proved their names were therein inscribed before the foundation of the world. It was the annual summer conference held by Mission to the World (MTW), the Presbyterian Church in America’s (PCA) foreign missions agency, for missionaries back in the U.S. on home assignment. Presbyterians know heaven isn’t earned by works and God does not grade on a curve. But if you want to take the measure of your piety, if you would like to analyze your commitment and obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ, your Maker and Savior of your eternal soul, if you want to weigh your gratitude for God’s grace as you …work out your own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), spend a week with missionaries. Virtually none of them would approve of the pedestal I have put them on. They would all declare that they are broken vessels that God has chosen, for his own good pleasure, to use for his glory anyway. They confessed their weaknesses, their shortcomings and their occasional middle of the night doubts as to the validity of the call they have answered…and they prayed fervently for one another. Every year, at the end of this mountaintop week, I ask myself why I think I’m a Christian. Here I am, skating to glory in a low stress, high happiness, early retirement Garden of Eden setting, serving people no different than I, but for one thing: they have committed their lives to struggling in obscurity far, far from home, family and friends, trying to communicate their passion for Christ in a language not their own, to a people who do not want to hear it. I listened to missionary couples witness to their peers about frustration, disappointment, trials, and more tears than most of us cry in three lifetimes. I was profoundly moved by men and women who had walked away from successful careers midlife to live in a dramatically lower lifestyle, taking the message of the saving grace of Jesus Christ around the world, often with no visible results for years on end…and God only knows, if ever. And trusting in a sovereign LORD alone to draw his elect from among all the nations. Every one of them, however intense their travail, expressed a divinely derived determination to press on to their heavenward goal. Each of them manifested the call, as expounded by Reverend Randy Nabors: “God bids you to die to the world, and he bids the world to watch.” One missionary described himself as a “recovering lawyer” who had spent the last four years plowing the hard concrete of radically secular France, enduring the endless humiliation of an American living among the French in an age when historical lessons have been forgotten and political relations between our nations have never been more strained. He was literally not a credible witness in the blind eyes of the very people he wanted so passionately to reach with the good news of the Gospel. Another missionary toiling in East Berlin described the frustrations of preaching the grace of a sovereign God of infinite love to a people who have no concept, not even a frame of reference as to what God is. He was still struggling to find a starting point to reach lost souls in the very nation where Martin Luther led the great reformation that in God’s sovereignty changed the western world. Today, in East Germany, sola fida, the heart of the Reformation, is an incomprehensible concept, but His remnant still lives there in the form of American missionaries. Another young couple told of the constant fears of serving in a Muslim nation where their lives depended on keeping their real ministry low key in the extreme, and potential native converts faced the distinct possibility of violent death from their own family members if they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. I can only marvel at the commitment of my new friends. At the end of a week of worship, preaching and singing…and decompressing, these saints were thanking me for supplying, with varying degrees of success, the most elementary of guest services. God knows it is I who owe the greater gratitude for their witness that so stirred my heart, for the way they have glorified our God by dying to the world, as the world and I watch. When I had taken the last saint to the airport, I climbed to the top of Meditation Mountain—my favorite high place and the same one I had sent the best (in my view) living reformed Bible expositor/writer, Dr. Bryan Chapell, to midweek, though no missionary who heard his four powerful sermons would say he needed further inspiration. There I just sat and basked in the afterglow and meditated and gave thanks to our Mighty God for allowing me to spend a brief season in the company of his glory-bound cloud of witnesses. Midweekly Reality Check is the weekly personal meditation on the mountain of JD Wetterling, a sinner blessed beyond all deserving, serving a gracious King of Kings in the most delightful vineyard this side of the river. It is not an official house organ of or publicity vehicle for the PCA or Ridge Haven.
I Miss That Friendly Muslim Voice If I am to believe the MSM, nearly half the electorate considers me a “fundamentalist,” morally equivalent to the radical Islamic fundamentalists. I read that some of these portside worldviewers, with the same degree of moral clarity, consider me a greater enemy than the terrorist thugs that are hacking off heads and blasting innocents into oblivion. I suppose they think that because, in this anything-goes age, I believe with all my heart and soul in an exclusive metanarrative, though a quite different one than the terrorists profess. I believe that God created the world and everything in it and micromanages it down to the atomic level, that there is not an errant atom anywhere. I believe that God, in his infinite love, sent his son into the world to be born of a virgin and to live and die a horrible death as an atonement for my sins, so that I might spend an eternity of bliss with him. With a great aching heart for those who believe otherwise, my conviction is that my faith and trust in this gracious act alone, such faith also being a gift from God, is the only way one can get to heaven, and without it one spends eternity in hell. It’s the classic definition of Christianity, as opposed to the amorphous spirituality that too often passes for Christianity today. If that makes me a “fundamentalist” by liberal lights, then so be it. I have a dear Muslim friend. He’s a retired senior military officer and fighter pilot in the Afghan Air Force when his country was a Soviet client state, now living in exile in another Asian country. We connected when he bought my book, SON OF THUNDER, through Amazon and emailed me after reading it. It was friendship at first email, born of that special bond among men who have gone to war as fighter pilots in any nation in any era. Over many months we had a wonderful, enlightening cross-cultural conversation, and we swapped dozens of flying anecdotes and idiosyncrasies of Migs vs Super Sabres. We also shared stories of grandparenthood. He called his grandchildren his “life’s breath,” and I couldn’t agree more. When a little boy in my neighborhood was dying of cancer, his mother posted progress reports on a special website. He was interested in airplanes, so I emailed every fighter pilot I have ever known. They in turn notified their friends, and in that amazing geometric progression of the internet, my dying little friend’s website bulletin board was inundated with words of encouragement and prayers from caring fighter pilots around the world. None were more beautiful and heartfelt, over a period of several months, than those of my Muslim friend, and the Allah he portrayed sounded as loving and caring as the God I worship. When the heinous acts of 9/11 shocked the world, I received an email of condolence from him before the day ended. He was as outraged as any rational person anywhere. As the resultant Afghan war sped to a lightening conclusion, he was able to make a short return visit to his native land and talk with some American soldiers. He found them “pleasant chaps” with whom he also struck up an instant rapport, even though they stood in a field littered with the dead. But, alas, he confessed to me he was very pessimistic about peace on earth goodwill to men, and about the world his grandchildren would live in. I assumed it was because of his negative outlook for harmony between Muslims, Christians and Jews, our friendship notwithstanding. It may well be because he comprehended the minds and motives of the terrorists better than I do. In an effort to better understand his worldview, I accumulated a small library of books about Islam and it’s history, including two different translations of the Qur’an. As a religion, it is vastly different from Christianity. The Qur’an as I read it contradicted itself and the massive haddith, written to explain and expand Muhammad’s writings, offered no clarity to my western Judeo-Christian mind. I wonder if the average Muslim really understands his holy book any better than the average professing Christian understands the Bible, that is, hardly at all. At the heart of Islam is a scales. On judgment day Allah will tally the good and the bad deeds of a Muslim, and, with few exceptions, no one knows in advance if he will measure up. Plenty of folks who call themselves Christians think they earn their way to heaven, too, ignoring the clear biblical teaching of the doctrines of grace and faith alone as our ticket to eternity. I invited my friend to visit our home in these Blue Ridge Mountains, not nearly as high and austere as the Hindu Kush Mountains of his youth, and he replied he would like to do that. Then suddenly my emails began bouncing and I do not know if I will ever hear from him again. I will always wonder if he met with violence, if his disappearance from my radar screen had anything to do with our email conversations, which are far from private for those who know how to find them. The rabid terrorists in his country have demonstrated they neither negotiate nor differentiate between bridge builders, appeasers and ordinary infidels. They want us all dead. I pray for my friend and his family’s safety. I especially miss him in the aftermath of the 7/7 atrocity. I want to hear a friendly Muslim voice, as I did after 9/11, tell me that the terrorists have high-jacked his religion. I want to hear a Muslim tell me that Islam is a religion of peace, that the terrorists have interpreted out of context those passages in the Qur’an that seem to support the multitude of demonic murders the world has witnessed. Global Voices Online has translated some Arabic voices of sanity among the Muslim global community that I find most helpful indeed, but they’re just regular folks like me. What is needed is for worldwide Islamic leadership to stand up as one and denounce these hate-spewing, crazed killers-in-the-name-of-Allah, followed by something akin to what conservative Presbyterians call church discipline. Their silence shouts acquiescence...or worse…to the world—plenty of them are openly cheerleading. Sheikh Dr. Zaki Badawi, of the Council of Mosques and Imams in England, has made a hopeful start with his portion of a rare joint statement issued by UK religious leaders. The BBC quotes him: “It is an evil that cannot be justified and that we utterly condemn and reject.” (Hat tip to Blogotional.) If Islam is going to survive as a religion, its adherents absolutely must rid it of the cancer that is destroying its body, or the chemotherapy of America’s military might will continue to do it for them. History has proven that, short of internal reform, it is the only efficacious antidote. Muslim terrorists simply must be made to understand that the convert ‘em or kill ‘em school of evangelism is as repugnantly unacceptable to mankind today as it was in the 7th through 16th centuries, and equally doomed to failure. Through it all, as a Christian “fundamentalist,” I know that God has determined a day when this will all end. I am grateful that he is providential, and has promised that my eternal destiny is secure, come what may. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life (John 5: 24a). The man who made this promise never coerced a single convert, and in love gave his own life for me, then rose from the dead before many witnesses. Jesus Christ alone is the world’s Peacemaker, and he will return. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
1776,
A Review Be forewarned. I wouldn't write a review of a book I did not like. I have suffered too much rejection as a writer to ever publicly cast negative aspersions on a fellow scribe’s blood, sweat and tears. I've read and raved about David McCullough’s first two Pulitzer Prize winning works—John Adams and Truman—and I think 1776 (Simon & Schuster, 2005) is a cinch for a third. It opened a month ago at the top of the nonfiction bestseller list and is still there. All of the reviews I have read have been laudatory, except for one grumpy Englishman, but I've not read a one that mentions what I consider the overriding theme of the book. This great Independence Day, 2005, rather than my usual midweekly post, seems a most appropriate time to talk about it. If he were not such a studiously neutral observer of history, McCullough might more accurately have titled his latest achievement, Providence, rather than 1776. The word appears repeatedly in this book, but it's not the author’s word. It is the word used by all the key players in America’s battle for Independence. It's used to explain the extraordinary string of miraculous events that led to their ragtag army’s victory over the greatest military force on earth. That's Providence with a capital P. Webster’s Lexicon defines it thusly: "God as prescient guide and guardian of human beings//divine care and guidance." Nelson’s Bible Dictionary supplies more detail: "The continuous activity of God in His creation by which he preserves and governs…. It is the denial of the idea that the universe is governed by chance or fate." The Westminster Confession of Faith, the foundational doctrine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and other denominations, says it best: "God…hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass" (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q.#7). Providence is not a politically correct words these days, as every author and publisher knows, and that is a sad commentary on a nation that so clearly owes its life to it. God willing, the best seller status of 1776 will lead to some changed minds—it's a case study in Providence. McCullough assiduously records history in the words of those who lived it, and the reader does not know if the author is a conservative or liberal, Christian or pagan. It is that gift that makes him such a best selling historian. He takes the writer’s axiom, "Show, don’t tell," to the highest level, which requires years of painstaking research to get the right quotes and recorded facts, as 80 pages of source notes and bibliography attest, to carry the story with a minimum of author insinuation into the narrative. Here's an effort to review his latest achievement in the same vein, with a maximum of quotes and a minimum of my own words. George Washington had misgivings about taking the job of Commander in Chief. "For such a trust, to lead an undisciplined, poorly trained and armed volunteer force of farmers and tradesmen against the best-trained, best equipped, most formidable military force on earth—and with so much riding on the outcome—was, in reality, more than any man was qualified for." (pg 50) During the first major confrontation after Bunker Hill, the siege of Boston in the spring of '76, McCullough says of Washington’s analysis of his army: "That the British were so 'blind' to…the true [sorry] state of his situation he considered nearly miraculous." (pg.79) Writing to John Reed, his secretary, a Philadelphia attorney, Washington detailed the nearly impossible situation he was in at Boston, then said, "If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it…." (pg. 79) It was "…as if the hand of the Almighty was directing things…," according to Rev. Wm. Gordon’s eyewitness account of the Battle of Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston. (pg. 82) As the battle got underway, McCullough reports, "Then, as foreseen in no one’s calculations, the elements took over….'the wind blew almost a hurricane.'" (pg. 96) Wind was a decisive factor in the age of sail-powered battleships. In this case it blew the ships out of the harbor and some aground so that they could not bombard Washington’s army atop Dorchester Heights. "Surely it is the Lord’s doings and it is marvelous in our eyes," Abigail Adams responded to the victory and the British abandonment of Boston. (pg. 105) "…like others [Washington] attributed the storm of March 5 to the intervening hand of God." (pg. 110) It became known as "…the 'miracle' of Dorchester Heights…." (pg 111) Upon arriving in New York City, the next anticipated battlefront and indefensible against the mighty British fleet, Washington wrote to a friend, "We have nothing, my dear sir, to depend upon, but the protection of a kind Providence…." (pg. 120) On the eve of the Battle of Long Island, McCullough narrates, "On the night of August 21, 1776, a terrifying storm broke over New York, a storm as vicious as any in living memory, and for those who saw omens in such unleashed fury from the elements…a night so violent seemed filled with portent." (pg 155) A few nights later, the British attack got underway. "Then miraculously the wind veered off to the north. The [British] ships…trying to gain headway [against the wind, to get close enough to fire on the colonists]...at last gave up.” (pg 175) “…the storm continued, heavy rains fell…. Yet for all the miseries it wrought, the storm was greatly to Washington's advantage." (pg. 184) Following an ignominious defeat, McCullough narrates warfare history's most spectacular retreat on Aug. 29, 1776: "Incredibly, yet again, circumstances—fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often—intervened." He then relates the unadorned facts of a troop retreat in small boats across the East River in a bizarre dense fog that approaches Moses' miraculous Red Sea crossing. The next morning, "The immediate reaction of the British was, as [British] Major Stephen Kemble recorded in his diary, one of utter astonishment. That the rebel army had silently vanished in the night under their very noses was almost inconceivable." (pg 191) By December, 1776, following defeat after defeat, McCullough writes, "What remained of Washington's army, the 'shadow army,' as [General Nathanial] Green called it, was pitiful to behold. 'But give me leave to tell you, Sir,' Greene would write to John Adams, 'that our difficulties were inconceivable to those who were not eye witnesses to them.'"(pg. 261) "By all reasonable signs, the war was over and the Americans had lost." (pg 270) As the fateful year of nearly constant retreating was ending, Washington led his tiny, "rabble in arms," to quote British General Burgoyne, across a treacherous Delaware River filled with floating ice in a snow storm on Christmas night to attack Britain's Hessian mercenaries wintering in Trenton. It was another miraculous victory and a turning point in the war. One British officer present described it as "…quite beyond comprehension." As the year ended, enlistment times were up and every exhausted, tattered—many shoeless—unpaid soldier wanted desperately to go home. Washington, never known as an impassioned orator, talked them out of it yet again. "'God Almighty,' wrote General Nathanial Green, 'inclined their hearts to listen to the proposal and they engaged anew.'" (pg 286) A few days later, in the Battle of Princeton, "The sight of Washington set an example of courage such as he had never seen, wrote one young officer afterward. 'I shall never forget what I felt…when I saw him brave all dangers of the field and his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him. Believe me, I thought not of myself.'"(pg. 289) It reminds this reviewer of another general who understood divine Providence nearly a century later. Responding to a question about his calm assurance on the battlefield, Stonewall Jackson said, "…my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me." Summarizing the year of 1776, McCullough concludes,
From the last week of August to the last week of December, the year 1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American cause had ever known—indeed, as dark a time as any in the history of the country. And suddenly, miraculously it seemed, [beginning with crossing the Delaware] that had changed because of a small band of determined men and their leader. A century later, Sir George Otto Trevelyan would write in a classic study of the American Revolution, "It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world." (pg 291)
The last paragraph of the book is an eloquent summation of the workings of Providence in the first year of the Revolutionary War, without ever using the word. McCullough lets the reader reach his own metaphysical conclusions. This reviewer finished with his conviction unchanged, but reinforced to the n'th degree: God has "foreordained whatsoever comes to pass." Buy the book. Read it. See for yourself if I have just cherry-picked the quotes to fit my worldview, then give thanks to our providential God that you were born in such a country.
The Declaration of Divine Providence
Thomas Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence tops the list of what he wished to be remembered for, as his personally composed epitaph reveals—his presidency did not even make the stone. The world’s longest running experiment in government by free people—229 years and counting—justifies his pride. It was a radical document, declaring up front its metaphysical foundation: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” With awesome eloquence, Jefferson was saying (by my Webster’s Lexicon), that all men are created by God and granted rights that cannot legitimately be taken away. In biblical echoes, Jefferson proclaimed these are absolute truths decreed by God and are obvious to the most casual observer. Given the woeful state of colonial militias and England’s military might in 1776, signing the Declaration seemed suicidal. Whence cometh such courage in those 56 signers? The answer is found in the last sentence. They pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” That phrase, with a capital “P,” is almost redundant in its emphasis that “God [is] the prescient guide and guardian of human affairs” (same lexicon), and our founders were willing to stake their all on him. As the late pope, John Paul II, explained, “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.” The colonial victory over the greatest military force on earth is a resounding confirmation of divine Providence, “the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules,” in John Adams’ words. David McCullough’s current bestseller, 1776, is a gripping case study in divine Providence, one of the most oft-quoted words in the book. Over two-and-a-quarter centuries after that brazen Declaration, this nation is still enjoying the fruits of our forefathers’ faith in a providential God. But these world-changing words are no longer permissible in a public forum, because they are at the pinnacle of political incorrectness—an exclusive metanarrative in an inclusive, any-god-but-God age. If the separation-of-church-and-state extremists had their way, the words would be expunged. The most popular unalienable right still touted in our culture, the pursuit of pleasure, now unhinged from our Creator by the self-absorbed, has been so debased the only proscribed pleasure is daring to denounce any pleasure. Yet George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address, had the audacity to reassert the Jeffersonian concept of God-endowed liberty for all people everywhere, not just America, vowing to back it up worldwide with America’s “considerable” influence. In perhaps the most openly Christian address he’s ever given, he said, “The moral choice [is] between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” The wannabe dictators of relativism jeered at the religious zealot who dared to call truth absolute, as if he thought he was his god’s predestined key man on earth. How dare he foist America’s unique system of government on underdeveloped humans not yet sufficiently evolved for such awesome responsibilities. They just confirmed what the president had aptly labeled their “soft bigotry of low expectations.” There was not a self-righteous peep out of these offended nihilists when JFK, in his 1961 inaugural address said, “…the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” But that was pre-left-meltdown, when they still shared some transcendental values with the right. Asian and Middle Eastern citizens have taken these self-evident, eternally right truths backed by bold American action to heart with dramatic effect. Afghanistan has held its first election ever. Millions of Iraqi citizens risked their lives to vote, then triumphantly flaunted the mark of the beast of liberty, a purple index finger, an in-your-face bull’s-eye for any terrorist with a weapon. Faiza Saleh Ambah, in the Washington Post (March 27, 2005), announced an “Arabian Spring” that produced “suffragists out on the streets in Kuwait, rare protests in Egypt,” demonstrations in Lebanon, “and reform even here in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” A multi-colored democratic revolution has swept Asia and the Middle East—purple in Iraq, orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, tulip in Kyrgyzstan, cedar in Lebanon (followed by a “remarkably free and open election for the Arab world,” as reported in the June 26 New York Times), and more are coming, driven by the force of the divinely decreed unalienable right of human liberty. Fouad Ajami, Director of the Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, (OpinionJournal, May 22, 2005), recently returned from an extended Middle East trip declaring, “To venture into the Arab world…is to travel into Bush Country.” That must be a gratifying observation for our beleaguered president, but unalienable rights and divine Providence come to this writer’s mind. Jefferson would be pleased as punch. Our praying president is keeping his charge. His rejuvenated Jeffersonian doctrine is producing results faster than even its proponents prophesied, in spite of the crescendo of left-hand animus. Undaunted, last week he sent his Secretary of State into the lions’ den to reinforce his policy of setting right a self-evident wrong —“stability at the expense of democracy.” In Cairo and Riyadh despotic ears heard Condoleezza Rice’s hard words softly spoken: “It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy” (The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2005). They know milady coos, but carries a big cudgel—they’ve seen its lightning ferocity up close. If Middle Eastern tyrants are sleeping well at night, they are dangerously out of touch with reality. This 21st century rebirth of “democratic revolution” on a global scale, based on Jefferson’s daring declaration of timeless truths, makes for an extraordinary Independence Day ’05 celebration for those who have eyes to see, with millions of newly free people celebrating “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But divine Providence can bring about reversals as well as triumphs, as the Old Testament makes clear and Lincoln reminded in his second inaugural address. The extent of our own citizenry’s incredulity and infidelity to Jefferson’s “Supreme Judge of the World,” and the resultant chasm in standards and values between left and right, with the consequent soaring incivility in political discourse, is enough to keep this grateful patriot humbly praying with his president. As our Creator told the prophet, Ezekial, whose cultural milieu was not unlike 21st century America, “…you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see, but see not…” (Ezekial 12:2a).
Deo volente, divine Providence will lead our
radically secular citizens, who deny the “Judge,” deride his followers, and
denigrate their fellow man in the Middle East, to open their eyes and see
Jefferson’s self-evident verities, and their priceless value to our
self-interest…both as a nation and as eternal souls made in our Creator’s
image. Dear LORD, may they see and know the truth, and may it set them free (John 8:32). Postscript: I urge you to read, "Natan Sharansky Makes the Case for Democracy," at Albert Mohler's Commentary for a more detailed discussion of this 21st century "democratic revolution." Then read the book! jdw
Recessional
Redux? Take care lest you forget the LORD your God…(Deut. 8:11a) It’s highly unlikely there will be a Fourth of July parade anywhere in America to match the one Victoria had. She wrote in her diary, “No one ever…has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those 6 miles of streets….” The Diamond Jubilee Parade of Queen Victoria, on June 22, 1897, was in celebration of her record-breaking 60-year reign over Great Britain. She rode in a gilded landau pulled by six cream-colored horses in the center of a long line of colorfully dressed soldiers from throughout the Empire, mounted and on foot, in perfect ranks, marching before hundreds of thousands of viewers. The Thames was a forest of tall masts as ships from around the world lay at anchor. Eleven colonial prime ministers and dozens of potentates of every color and costume made up the Queen’s entourage. No one does pomp and circumstance better than the Brits. I witnessed from the curb a garden variety Queen’s birthday parade for Queen Elizabeth in 1971, and “thrilling” is not a hyperbolic adjective to describe it—I think it was the same gilded landau Victoria rode in…and probably the same equine family tree. Unbeknownst to most of the celebrants, the Diamond Jubilee parade was a turning point in world history. The signs of trouble were evident, but only for those who had eyes to see. The economy was just coming off an economic decline that had brought an abrupt end to an extended economic boom. Britain had few allies and most countries disliked the greatest nation on earth. Britannia ruled the seas, but two upstart nations—Germany and the US—were building warships at a feverish pace in an era when a naval fleet was the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Living standards had risen dramatically, but intense economic competition threatened from foreign nations who could produce goods and services cheaper. Just over a century later, Great Britain is a shadow of its adjective. The most popular poet in the world in 1897, Rudyard Kipling, was hounded for months to write an appropriate ode for Victoria’s celebration, but he hated to compose on demand. Two years earlier, he had refused the title of Poet Laureate for that reason. But compose it he finally did and, boy, did he rain on Victoria’s parade. His was a lonely voice fearing England’s never-setting sun was at its historic apogee. Even the title of his poem had portentous allusions—Recessional, with its intimations of the end. It began,
God of our fathers, known of old— With a hundred years of hindsight Kipling appears to have had the prophetic perspicacity of Isaiah for his homeland. His rhymes have equally ominous implications for the great nation England spawned in North America. Sir Rudyard warned, “we loose wild tongues that have not Thee in awe.” The God of our American forefathers is not only not held in awe by many in America, he’s considered a malicious fiction by those wild tongues who aggressively seek to ban his name from all public discourse. Kipling pled God's mercy “For frantic boast and foolish word” of “heathen heart[s]” who put all their trust in human effort. In 21st century America, heathens boast in their high-fashion atheism, personal ambition is the highest form of motivation, and self-trust is the only arbiter of truth. Kipling declared, “far called, our navies melt away.” The Royal Navy was not nearly as short-handed and over-extended as America’s far-called Navy is today. The man whom Teddy Roosevelt considered a guiding light, and who inspired Winston Churchill to flights of eloquence, spoke a poetic truth that was alien then…and alien now in America. Today's most powerful nation on earth, in the midst of another turning point in world history, appears to many to be imbued with the same hubris as the motherland at her peak 108 years ago. The parallels with late 19th century Britain are disquieting. Kipling, the prescient poet, is now remembered for his children’s stories, if he is remembered at all, and the Lord God of Hosts that our president prays to has long been forgotten, if he was ever known, by vast numbers of citizens. But the poet’s impassioned prayer for England in 1897 is no less apt for America this July 4, 2005:
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, MY HERO
When
I was a boy in my father’s house… Dad’s been gone for 22 years now, but the passage of time has only intensified my love for him and gratitude for the worldview he bequeathed me. Lord knows I miss him. He tilled Illinois soil all his allotted days, first with horses and then with tractors. I was the oldest of two sons he taught how to milk a cow, plow a straight furrow and many other agrarian arts which we practiced far more than we cared to. Around the breakfast table he instructed all four of his offspring in the straight and narrow way of life as he read from the Bible. In my worldly wanderings those God-fearing, heartland roots that grew from the seed he planted and tended have served me exceedingly well. No greater love hath any Dad. To this day, when I smell cheap cigar smoke, I catch myself looking around for him. In my mind's eye I see him sitting on the metal seat of a steel-wheeled corn planter, leather reins in leathered hands and jaw clamped on a cigar, staring at the north end of two southbound draft horses named Jeff and Jerry. I never had the nerve to ask, but I’m pretty sure the latter horse was my namesake. Dad bought Emerson cigars by the box for six cents apiece and got more mileage out of them than any man I know. He lit one end with a wooden match, drawn smartly across the back thigh of his bib overalls, and chewed on the other, working his way toward the middle from both ends. On some occasions he worked from back to front only, never lighting the cigar but making it last all day. Often he’d forget to drag on it and the fire would go out. It was in my experimental years at the university that I came to appreciate the courage required to suck on a dead cigar. When rainy days precluded fieldwork, I rode to town with Dad in a '51 Chevy pick-up. With the windows rolled up cigar smoke filled the cab. I don’t recall what I thought was in that village of 800 souls that was worth a five-mile ride in a mobile smokehouse. And I’ve never understand why rolled up dead tobacco leaves smell so good in the box and so awful on fire. Cigars are high fashion now, but I never got addicted and for that I'm also grateful to Dad. On Sundays he left the cigar resting on a beam above the back porch (it was rarely allowed in the house, alive or dead) and drove the family to church. While Mom’s angelic soprano voice rang out from the choir loft Dad shepherded four small squirming sinners in a hard oak pew. As Psalm 100:1 directs, he, too, made a joyful though dissonant noise unto the Lord with his uninhibited monotone. In pre-TV days—prior to age ten—I often spent evenings lying on the linoleum floor drawing pictures behind Dad’s overstuffed rocker as he read his Prairie Farmer, Capper’s Weekly and other farm magazines. The same floor lamp that illumined Dad’s reading shined on my artwork. My pencil sketches of magazine pictures or portraits were sufficiently recognizable to prompt my parents to spend scarce cash on special drawing paper and pencils. It was an investment that bore no visible fruit past adolescence, but was a key part of that pearl of great price Dad bestowed upon my soul—that sense of well-being, of security, of contentment at the end of the day as a boy on the floor behind Dad’s easy chair. I recall no conversation. Dad was never big on extended conversation with his offspring—that was Mom’s department. He was just there and he loved me and I knew it and that was enough. Dear God, may my children say the same of me. Add Mother to that scene, standing at her ironing board in the middle of the room, humming hymns as she worked, and it was, in Cotton Mather’s words, “a family well-ordered”…but it sounds like a fairy tale today. Such domestic tranquility is a rare thing in this twenty-first century world of fatherless families, mindless TV sitcoms and non-stop activity outside the home. The culture is the worse for it. Dad was a recycler because it was economically mandatory, not because it was environmentally fashionable. In the unheated “back room” off the kitchen, where he changed into and out of his work clothes and boots, there was a row of wooden cigar boxes for loose change, receipts, nuts, bolts, flat washers, lock washers and assorted nails--stuff that came out of his overall pockets before they went into the laundry. An old rusty horse tank just outside the barn door held baling wire that had been removed from hay bales through the winter as the cows were fed. A Midwestern family farm in the fifties could not function with out baling wire and its multitudinous manifestations. Dad could fix more things with a pair of pliers and baling wire than I can with a whole toolbox full of mechanically marvelous tools. The lower pant leg pocket of his overalls always contained a pair of pliers. Out in the shop a wooden keg held bent nails removed from old boards, awaiting straightening on rainy days. The coal shed held corncobs for kindling in a separate bin. And of course recycled livestock bedding from the barn made the corn, the tomaters and the taters grow, the logistics of which was my all-time least favorite job on the farm. Pain was an everyday part of Dad’s adult life. He was a passenger in an auto accident in his college days. Though he was the only one who could walk away from it, he suffered from a bad back the rest of his life. He wore a brace from his neck to the base of his tailbone and made weekly visits to the local chiropractor. With all the hard physical labor of farming in those days it was a high price to pay for a career he loved. He paid the same price to show his boys how much he loved them and to encourage their love of sports. Brother John and I would beg him to bat us flies on summer evenings when he came in from work exhausted. He could hit the ball so high and far it seemed like it took forever for it to come down as we danced around in the pasture beneath it with our gloves over our heads. Every swing of the bat produced a yelp of pain, but we never felt sorry for him. We thought all dads sounded like that when they hit the ball. And I am sure when he watched us play our Pony League games that he thought it was all worthwhile. While Dad loved most sports he was a world-class football fanatic, and he was in his glory when my brother and I played halfback and quarterback on the same high school team. He and Mom never missed a game, home or away, regardless of the state of the corn harvest. As a non-verbal communicator, high praise from Dad was silence, but it was golden silence—I could feel the vibes. When he disagreed with my play calling, or if we lost the game, he always found his voice, and would be waiting up for me, no matter how late I stayed out after the game. The fact that he played in the interior line at the University of Iowa, back when real men still didn’t wear helmets did not hinder his quarterbacking critique. Playing well enough to please Dad, and avoid that late night criticism, was my goal. I succeeded more often than I failed. Dad was an avid fisherman and hunter and that, too, rubbed off on his sons. Sometimes we fished from the banks of the Mississippi River with cane poles and earthworms for bait, dug up from behind the barn where the recycled lumber pile kept the soil cool and moist. We munched on Velveeta cheese and Saltine cracker sandwiches as we anxiously waited for the bobber to disappear into the muddy water. Anxiety turned to boredom in a hurry if the catfish weren’t biting. Only a mature died-in-the-wool fisherman can stare at a bobber that floats undisturbed all day and still call it fun. Other times we took our old outboard motor-driven boat and set out yards of trotlines with hundreds of hooks in the Mississippi River just before dark, then motored down river to Uncle Ed’s hunting and fishing cabin on Big Island. Uncle Ed fixed us a feast and the men talked long into the night while the cousins played at the dock and in the woods till the “skeeters” drove us inside. If the anticipation of the fish catch in the morning was not sufficient to preclude sleep, the zing of skeeters, the chorus of katydids and the million voice Mississippi River frog chorus, complete with the glorious bullfrog bass section made sleep impossible. At first light in the eastern sky we shoved off to run the lines—that is haul in the trotlines and our catch. Both putting out the lines and bringing them in and taking fish off the hooks were a spectator sport for small boys, who were segregated for their own safety in the bow of the boat. Hundreds of hooks and yards of line and jumping catfish thumping an irregular cadence on the wooden hull in a small moving boat was a dangerous sport only the men could indulge in. But my Dad made it look easy from my perch, and in all my worldly wanderings, predawn on a placid Mississippi River on a summer morning has been the gold standard for measuring tranquility. My fondest memory of life on the river with Father was not so tranquil. It was an October dawn enroute to our duck blind in that same old wooden boat, as old as the ark, laboriously driven by a 25-horsepower Evinrude outboard. The cold penetrated all the layers of clothes, inducing an involuntary reciprocal motion in my lower jaw and turning my cheeks to parchment. Overhead, V's of Mallards raced us down the river. A gray forest of denuded elms, oaks and willows huddled at the riverbanks and on scattered islands. The eastern sky was an abstract painting of broad orange and yellow and white horizontal brush strokes by the Divine Artist on a powder blue canvas. In the stern, Dad clutched the steering arm of the outboard with the ever-present dead cigar angled out of a grinning, ruddy face. His eyes sparkled below devilish eyebrows as the frigid rushing air drove tears back toward the flapping ear tabs of his hunter's cap. Baby brother, with his red nose dripping and a brown stocking cap pulled down to his pupils, sat shivering in the bow, facing aft. He was drawn into the fetal position by an arctic bow spray of muddy water. If he was enjoying himself it was not apparent. The roar of the outboard made conversation impossible, but none was necessary—Dad was big on silence. It just couldn't get any better than that. Perhaps you have to be a duck hunter to understand. On a late winter morning in ’81, having spent ninety-nine percent of his life within twenty miles of the farmhouse where he was born, Dad stepped out the back door of the house and into eternity. I think he was with the Lord before his face hit the snowdrift. One measure of a man in rural western Illinois is the number of people that attend his wake. Some folks in Henderson County think Dad holds the record. One glad morning, when my race is run, I’ll join him in glory…and if cigars are allowed in heaven, they’ll be the sweetest incense.
It’s Not Hard to Be Easy June 14, 2005
…my
yoke is easy, and my burden is light. In a guest column in The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com entitled, “It’s Hard to Be Easy” (June 3, 2005—free, registration required), the author asserts, “There is no real escape.” He paraphrases some obscure source that even Google doesn’t know: “…simplification remains slippery and elusive; the simple life [is] a myth.” Perhaps we should cut the writer some slack, given his profession and his domicile, with all its adverse effects on his worldview—he’s the publisher of the New York Law School Law Review. There’s a moving company truck driver in Tampa, Florida, my former home, who shares that Big Apple barrister’s view, which shows the insidious, pervasive nature of the malady in our post-modern culture. They’re both mistaken. That Tampa trucker has probably decided I died young, out of sheer boredom, and that is the reason he’s not heard from me. When he eased his truck into the tight driveway of our new home, the gatekeeper’s cottage at Ridge Haven, he was green around the gills. His response to my greeting was, “I don’t think this is the end of the world, but I’m pretty sure I can see it from here.” When he and two helpers had stacked all our greatly-pared-down worldly possessions (a critical prerequisite to the simple life) in the most modest home we have ever lived in, he handed me his business card and said, “Give me a call when you’re ready to come back.” That was four years ago and I was 57. I’d spent my life as a fighter pilot, with 268 combat mission in Vietnam, a corporate executive, entrepreneur and financial advisor for a major Wall Street firm whose home office fell down on 9-11-01, shortly after I fled to the mountains. I’d raced the rats down Wall Street, La Salle Street, Threadneedle Street, the Champs Elysées, the rue de Genève and Pennsylvania Avenue. Many of my weekends were spent impatiently waiting for Monday morning so I could challenge the world again. It was not an insignificant lifestyle change—even my wife was skeptical I could hack all this retrograde tranquility. But today I’m just skating to glory in these Delectable Mountains, even further from returning to the Slough of Despond, aka Tampa Bay, than I was then…and I’m still not old enough to collect social security. The first simplifying thing I did was move into a house I don’t own. One could argue that simplification alone is enough for the easy life. In my case it goes with my part-time job as Resident Manager of Ridge Haven. That’s a grandiose title for the after-hours go-to-guy, who then radios someone or writes up a work order if serious work is required. The second simplifying thing I did was ditch the cell phone. It didn’t work very well in these here hills and hollers anyway. That was not only simplifying, it was liberating! Thirdly, I muted the TV audio and covered the top 90% of the screen in my office with cardboard, whereupon I tape my latest favorite words of wisdom—usually biblical references—from a slew of books I read these days. The bottom 10% of the screen reveals the stock ticker. The vicissitudes of the stock market are as tolerable as the weather, now that the only investments I tend are my own. Two years after I got to this wilderness cathedral I threw my blood pressure meds away. On the issue of TV, I had a head start to simplicity. I’d been abstaining for a decade, except for the evening news, when the transgressions of WJC and OJ began sharing the same news slot, curing me of even that. I’m still a news junkie most days, but I get it on my timetable my way, via the internet, except for The Wall Street Journal, which I read online as well as in hardcopy, a thirty-five-year habit I’ve never felt compelled to break. It has the most Christian-friendly editorial page of any secular newspaper in the world. Twisted tightly, it has the added benefit of making great fire starter, indoors or out. Which leads to fourthly: A crackling hardwood fire is superior to a single malt neat. It’s simple, easy, free (with no adverse effects on the balance of payments) and the fuel unlimited in this near-rainforest, and when I wake up in the morning my head feels as good as it’s going to feel all day…that is, fantastic. I had an even longer head start on this brand of abstinence, but my beloved boondocks lifestyle removes all sense of deprivation. It’s easy. I get high on sunshine, intoxicated sniffing wildflowers, and entranced by the sound of falling rain in the deep woods. An alarm clock has never rung in this cottage, nor has a salesman ever knocked on the door. If I needed “a gallon of milk at four in the morning” (fat chance), the dining hall kitchen in the conference center has a walk-in cooler and freezer and I have a key to every door in the place. Fifthly through eighthly, there are no traffic jams, no rail strikes, no commute and the nest is blissfully empty. A big ninthly, daily exercise on hiking trails through the most botanically diverse, spectacularly beautiful wilderness in the world works no end of wonderful tonics for body and soul. At day’s end there’s the hushed percussion of a waterfall down the mountain accompanying an avian choir that serenades me on the back porch. There’s not a symphony in the world that can soothe the soul like the Blue Ridge wood thrush evensong. Tenthly, it’s not a Waldenite hermit’s life. Over 7,000 guests visit this 400-bed facility every year, and few come once and never return. That makes every week of the year a reunion week as old friends return and we schmooze over fine meals in the dining hall—yes, that’s part of the job too, but someone’s got to do it. Presbyterians have been called the “Frozen Chosen” by some irreverent theological wits, but I find them all sweetness and light when they escape to the mountains for a few days. And we are ecumenical in whom we will accept as guests. Lastly and most importantly, I’m not doing this “work” for the dollars. The joy of servanthood purely for spiritual rewards has been a revelation to this reforming money grubber. My fellow staffers, the rest of whom do work hard fulltime, say the rewards are out of this world. I would tell that New York lawyer, “Pro bono work for the King of Kings is as easy as it gets this side of the river…no, not the Hudson.” Paraphrasing my favorite 19th century preacher, C. H. Spurgeon, for those who delight in the Lord (Psalm 37:4), piety is pleasure, hope is happiness, duty is delight. My life is simple without being Spartan, my greatest pleasures and passions require zero capital outlays and leave no guilty aftertaste, and a smiling “Thank you” from a guest for the simplest services rendered makes for more happiness than I’ve ever experienced. And I have loads of time in an inspirational setting to scratch this writing itch. Simple. Easy. Indeed. Around here they call that grace. I couldn’t agree more. It abounds for this unworthy. It’s the rarified air I breathe, and it’s but a shadow of what is to come. [Jesus said] ‘Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’ (Matthew 11:28-30).
A MIRACLE OVER A
SHAU: June 8, 2005
Come
and listen, all you who fear God; I was blessed to have been born into a godly heartland farm family with three siblings and a saintly mother who taught me all the important lessons in life. We never missed a Sunday in church, even on the rare occasions when the family took a modest vacation—small farmers were not rich folks, at least in the way the world measures rich. When I went off to the Vietnam War I was well grounded in the Bible and Luther’s Catechism—head knowledge—but I was a pretty poor witness to God’s grace. In spite of a miraculous healing at age 15, in answer to my fervent prayer, I was so busy being the world’s greatest fighter pilot I had no time for Bible reading and less time for chapel. But God changed all of that on a sunny Sunday morning in the summer of ’68. I was a brand new fighter pilot in my first job out of college, flying the wing position in a two-ship flight of F-100 strike fighters, armed to the teeth with the weapons of war. It was a magnificent morning to be airborne. The sun was still low in a bright blue sky above the deep blue and green stained glass of the South China Sea. A meandering tan ribbon of sandy beach marked the border of the lush green jungle of South Vietnam. Fire and brimstone were not apparent in that spectacular scenery from our cruising altitude of 14,000 feet, but the equivalent was there. It lurked just over the horizon to the northwest, loaded in the barrels of ten big Communist anti-aircraft guns awaiting our arrival. “Gung-ho” did not adequately describe my mind-set. I was living my dream, a dream I had worked very hard to achieve. By sheer brute force will-power I had finished number one in my class in Pilot Training class 68-A, and Top Gun in my F-100 fighter pilot class 68-FR, and I was sure I was one of the best, and on that summer Sunday morning I was right where I wanted to be—a farm boy half a world from home helping a small nation of peasant farmers defend themselves against communist aggression. As a twenty-four-year-old passionate patriotic and brand new fighter pilot I couldn’t wait to get to the Vietnam War. To this day I believe the cause was just—the strategy was another matter. That beautiful Sabbath morning I was sure I could never live long enough to grow tired of dancing the wild blue in a supersonic angel. But, then, I had yet to see antiaircraft bullets fired at my face. We arrived over the A Shau (“ah-shouw,” rhymes with cow) Valley, a narrow, bucolic little valley still bathed in morning shadows, in the rugged mountains of northwest South Vietnam. Another flight of two F-100's was attacking a target high on the western ridgeline. The Forward Air Controller (the “FAC”), flying a small spotter plane no bigger than a Piper Cub, was directing the strike. We watched one of the F-100's dive on the target and drop his bombs. The target was shooting back. I could see the geysers of tracers from several 37mm anti-aircraft guns and the black puffs of their flak bursts. All the butterflies from all the football games I'd ever played began to congregate in my gut. Just as the F-100 was pulling out of its dive, one of the North Vietnamese guns found its mark. The plane rolled upside down and dove straight into the ground. At the sight of an enormous fireball, and no parachute, there was a violent spasm in my solar plexus and I tasted my bile-soaked breakfast. There was stunned silence on the radio, but I could hear my pulse thumping double-time in my ears. My tongue felt like an oversized cud of sawdust in a mouth as dry as the Mojave. I reached for my water flask in a leg pocket of my g-suit and struggled to release my oxygen mask to drink. I was hyperventilating so badly I choked on the water. Finally the FAC stated the obvious. “Well, I guess there's no need to call in search and rescue on this one. Sorry about your wingman, Panther One-Zero Flight. I'll file a report from this end.” “Roger,” said the Panther Flight leader. The self-confidence in his earlier radio voice had given way to the tones of a whipped pup. The FAC then directed us to attack those guns. I thought I was hearing my own funeral sermon. There was never a more appropriate time for a prayer to God for His protection, but I recall no such plea. The young man who had prayed so fervently to God for a miracle just nine years earlier, and received that miracle, was now so scared he could not even think straight, let alone pray to God for survival. I don't believe my conscious brain was functioning; it was paralyzed with fear. My right hand felt as if it had five thumbs as I fumbled with the armament switches. As we circled over the target, out of range of the guns, their flak bursts formed a broken deck of dark clouds below us. We would have to pass through that airspace as we attacked the guns. This was before the era of self-guided bombs dropped from a much safer high altitude. Our dive-bombing required we go nose-to-nose with those guns, well within their lethal range, like dive-bombing duelists. My flight leader, a salty veteran of two wars, peeled out of our circular orbit, rolled belly up to the morning sun, and pointed his nose toward the target in a forty-five degree dive angle. There was a steely, torqued-jaw tone to his voice as he called in over the radio. Five seconds later, I moved the control stick over against my left knee and rolled in from a different direction. My leader was barely visible among the black clouds of flak. The target, on the other hand, was clear from my angle—two circular anti-aircraft gun sites, with five guns in each, staggered on opposite sides of the snaking dirt road on the ridgeline. The guns in one of those sites rotated around toward me, and I was looking right down the gun barrels as I rocketed toward the ground. The circle of muzzle flashes sparkled away on the ground and in the same instant I was surrounded by tracers and flak bursts. My face and bullets the size of plums were closing on one another at over 1000 miles per hour. I was sure every breath would be my last. From somewhere in my system Amazing Grace, manifested in the form of copious quantities of adrenaline, was being injected, allowing my hands and feet to function in spite of a brain shut down by fright. In desperation, I punched the bomb release button just to unload my bombs and escape from that fire hose spewing lead death. I was neither aiming nor watching the instruments. I pulled the control stick hard against the backstop in an effort to recover from the dive, a ham-fisted flying technique that caused me to black out from the excessive G-forces. When my vision returned I was mercifully headed back upward. The operator's manual says the wings of an F-100 will fold up around your ears if you put over seven G's of stress on them. That is seven times the force of gravity. The gauge on my instrument panel read NINE. Then I noticed the bombs had not come off the airplane. I had messed up the switch settings. The first gross error was the reason the second gross error did not destroy the airplane and me with it. The weight of the unreleased bombs—and perhaps a couple of heavy angels—kept the wings from folding up. Then I committed the most outrageously suicidal act of all. Rather than explain to my flight leader that I had made a bad mistake, rather than take that badly overstressed piece of machinery straight home and gingerly put it on the ground, I said nothing and continued to attack the target. In the span of a heartbeat I decided I’d rather die than admit that I had made such a stupid mistake. Some Top Gun…. Some humble born again Christian…. And I never gave it another thought the rest of the mission. It was an out-of-body experience. I felt like my mind and eyes had departed the cockpit, retreating to a safe place where they could watch a slow motion movie of my plane as we attacked the target like two mad hornets. On the next dive-bombing pass I managed, by God’s grace alone, to recover my composure and acquitted myself admirably for the rest of the attack without my over-stressed airplane disintegrating. When our bombs were gone we strafed the target with our 20mm guns until there were no more flak bursts in that Sunday morning sky. I moved into loose formation on my leader's left wing and we dove for the valley floor to have a closer look at the fruits of our labor. Coming up the valley right on the deck, we pulled up into a climbing turn and popped over the ridgeline just above the treetops. The devastation was complete. The gun sites were a smoldering junkyard of twisted gun barrels, scrap iron, bomb craters and crimson human carnage. The FAC reported an estimated 50 enemy soldiers “killed by air.” KBA was the air combat scoring system in that grisly game of blasting souls into eternity. It sounds grotesque, nearly four decades after the fact, but that flight home was just plain thrilling. The mid-day cumulus clouds had formed over the central highlands of South Vietnam. We played follow the leader like two larks flying through a forest of towering, puffy white clouds—in and out and up and down and over and around. The effects of the adrenaline had not even begun to wear off, and in a single-seat fighter no one else hears the whoops and hollers of ecstasy. The images of slaughter at A Shau, the terror of imminent doom that had paralyzed me, and the realization that by all odds I ought to be dead, were overwhelmed by the sheer rapture that comes from having been shot at and missed. We parked the planes at the refueling area of the flight line and my crew chief and I inspected my airplane for battle damage. My flight suit was drenched and my flying boots squished like flooded waders, not from the tropical sun, as I walked around the plane. Incredibly, there were no bullet holes, but the rivets that held the aluminum skin on the underside of the wings were all popped and hanging down a half-inch. The big steel main spar that held the wings onto the fuselage had rivers of hairline cracks in it. The crew chief looked at me and his eyes told me what I already knew: There was no earthly explanation for why I wasn’t splattered all over the A Shau Valley. Walking became exceedingly difficult and with the adrenaline now worn off I fought a new battle—a severe case of the shakes. I sat down unceremoniously on the grimy tarmac in the shade of the wing, put on my sunglasses to hide my deer-in-the-headlights stare, and gazed at the mountains on the horizon. My crew chief remained silent as I pondered God’s mercy. When I was 5 years old riding with my dad in a horse-drawn wagon, he’d get off to open gates and hand me the four leather reins and I would drive those big draft horses thru the gate. Little did I know then that the strange sounds emanating from father’s mouth were controlling the horses, not proud me, in spite of my feeling of power and control with those reins in my hands. This time my heavenly Father had been controlling that swept-wing Pegasus—the evidence was overwhelming. The Apostle Paul told the Ephesians, It is by grace you have been saved….(Eph. 2:8). It was by grace that I was saved that Sunday morning, and I owed God everything. That was as clear to me as those popped rivets hanging down over my head. I have a cross to commemorate that sanctifying Sunday morning at A Shau—a Distinguished Flying Cross. That's a misnomer. It was the opposite of distinguished flying. The citation mentions “bravery,” but that is incorrect also. My terrified reaction under baptismal fire was sufficient to kill myself, but for the grace of God—his favor through Christ to an undeserving but now thoroughly humbled young fighter pilot. Thirty-seven years later I am still learning lessons from that Sunday morning, and the more I learn the more I am in awe of my Lord. My DFC has hung in a frame on my office wall for years now. It's a humbling daily reminder that God saved my life on that Sunday morning in the summer of ’68. But greater by far, it reminds me of the most heroic act in the history of the world, the innocent death of Christ on a cross to save my eternal soul.
Friends and Angels June 1, 2005
And
the Lord sent an angel....
Among all the personal blessings beyond my deserving, high on the list of
my favorites this side of heaven are wonderful friends. Her call sign is
Angel, assigned to her in her younger days when she flew Lear jets under
contract for the US Navy. Recently, at a time of life when most of us
are kicking back and enjoying the fruits of our labors (or skating to
glory at a Presbyterian mountain retreat...), she decided she
wanted to be a jet helicopter pilot after having spent her life flying
fixed wing aircraft. It would have been much easier to learn to fly
helicopt Her arrival was announced by the faint whup-whup-whup of wings traveling faster than fuselage (not an alarming occurrence if you’re flying a helo) echoing through the mountains of my beloved Blue Ridge. I stood in the middle of the landing zone, Ridge Haven’s well-worn soccer field, surrounded by 50-foot high trees, scanning the sky. I had emailed the GPS coordinates a few days earlier, making navigation into a tiny clearing in the vast Appalachians a piece of cake.
From out of the north at about a 1000 feet over my head I spied “Awesome,”
Angel's brand new
Bell 407, a dark silhouette
against a spectacularly blue CAVU sky. I waved both arms as if I were a
downed pilot in enemy territory, and Awesome banked to the left in a
descending turn, disappearing behind the
trees.
She re-emerged at the edge of our clearing just above the tree tops and landed,
light as wren on a twig, in the grass 30 yards in front of me. For t
She
was there for a brief visit and to take us up to get some aerial
photographs of our Wilderness Cathedral. The weather could not have been
more accommodating. Even the famous blue haze of the Blue Ridge was
providentially absent, and a thousand shades of new green had just been
washed clean a few days before. Never doubt the efficacy of Ridge
Haven's prayer
God’s
view of Ridge Haven is truly beautiful, but the lush forest
didn’t reveal much of Ridge Haven among the trees—only
a couple of angles revealed a hint of what
All
too soon Awesome glided over the treetops and floated onto the turf. Our
angelic levitation over suburban heaven was over. With grateful goodbyes
and a God-bless-you-all and a verbal hug from an angel, we stepped
out of the helo
Angel and Friends
All other photos by Karen Wetterling
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