Dear Rolph,
I am writing this to you because I care about you very much and I wish to spare you some of the agonies that have been my lot in life. I do not pretend to have all the answers. In some ways there are more questions in my life now than ever. It is almost as if the grace of God is forcing me at long last not to jump to conclusions too soon. Turmoil accurately describes my present state of mind, though I have come to some clarity about a few things. I am a man torn between the loves of my life that seem so Heaven-sent and the disasters in my life that seem to have come straight from hell. I am presently struggling hard to make sense of it.
When virtually everything you cherish is suddenly swept away, everything that speaks God to you vanishes, and when you realize that you yourself are the reason for its disappearance and that No One has intervened to prevent it from happening, the ‘tiny hints’ that all is not lost which you are given at such moments come to mean everything to you. I will tell you of my three self-created disasters and their subsequent “hints.’”
“When I was your age, I was hopelessly self-absorbed, but God gave me Cecilia Endsrud right here at Christiania. She, so close to Jesus, drew me from death to life. Before long we both knew we were destined to become husband and wife. But I killed her, and almost killed myself, driving a motorcycle recklessly just before Christmas. I can’t describe to you the grief and remorse this plunged me into. But unknown to me she had left me a legacy, an anthem which she had written just for me, setting to music some words of Jesus that meant everything to her. She had played the music for me once on her practice organ, without singing the words, just days before her death. I found out what the words were only the next spring when at the end of their concert the Christiania Choir sang her anthem: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The anthem itself seemed to me—and to many others, I was told—to have come straight down to earth from the heavenly choir. Still recovering from my injuries I received it, in total shock, as my Cecilia’s final farewell to me from Heaven. I was at first confused by her message and didn’t catch on right away to what she was trying to tell me, but then all at once it struck me: she was telling me that I, Stephan Pearson, am that grain of wheat and that the way for me to make her very happy in Heaven was to fall into the ground right here on earth and die, and thus bear much fruit. Taking this message as my marching orders, and desperately needing to repair my guilt, I let myself go. I dove headlong into what I was told by a respected mentor was my ‘ground’ and I died. I surrendered myself completely to the worlds of science and mathematics. They had always held a powerful fascination for me, just as they do for you now. And so it was easy for me to dedicate myself heart and soul to the cause of human progress through the contributions that science was making to create a better life for people and to eradicate evil on earth. I was doing it for my Cecilia, and for Cecilia’s Jesus, in a big way, so how could I go wrong? What further motivation did I need? You can see how the message she left me in that anthem moved me beyond despair, gave me a vision I could live and die for, and set me on my way. It was my first “tiny hint,” and I clung to it for years.
The second disaster I brought upon myself was my direct involvement in the production of the atom bomb during World War II, for the noblest of patriotic motives, of course. Having to face up to the unimaginable suffering it inflicted on all those innocent people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki landed me in an inner hell I can’t begin to describe. Kay was the source of my second ‘tiny hint.’ She brought me out of my long season in hell by convincing me to change my profession and become a teacher so that I could spend my energy inspiring students to use science only to make life better for people. (It also helped that she consented to be my wife!) For some ten years I was very happy doing exactly what she had suggested here at Christiania. Then came our experience on that fateful day at your high school in Reedville which disabused me of the notion that the peacetime uses of science are any less destructive of the human person than its wartime uses are.
And, of course, my most recent self-inflicted disaster was the sudden loss of both Kay and our son. When the baby I had planted in her womb was growing, we had many times placed our hands on that baby and consecrated ourselves and the little one to God whose Goodness and Love at work in people are the only force that can turn the world around and avert disaster. This bright prospect carried us through many trials right up to the day I lost them both. I know their loss would have plunged me instantly into a black hole from which I would never have emerged, except for the third ‘tiny hint’ that blocked that plunge. Kay had regained consciousness and asked for me. When I came to her bedside, she smiled at me weakly and proudly informed me that we had a son. Then she asked me if I was happy. I lied and said through my tears, “Yes, my beloved.” Her face became the face of an angel and she said, looking me straight in the eye, “I am … very happy … too…. Jesus just….” Then her eyes slowly closed and she never opened them again until just before she died. Then she looked straight at me, smiled, and was gone.
Three beautiful promises, three crushing disillusionments, three sparks of hope.
I know there are multitudes of people the world over who have experienced similar disasters to mine. As a result, some have turned to God and some have turned away from God. As for me, I confess I am in a quandary. Sometimes the apparent meaninglessness of it all quite overwhelms me, the cruel heartlessness that can senselessly destroy the finest and best and equally senselessly allow the ugliest and worst to thrive. But then I see Cecilia and I hear her song, or I see Kay’s smile and I hear her whispered words. And in those moments I see a flicker of light in the darkness!
But is it possible, I ask myself, that this light is nothing but a mirage, a delusion?
Yet Kay and Cecilia are the least deluded people I have ever known!
And still I wonder.
This has led me directly into wrestling with a related issue which has become a fourth “hint,” so to speak. In my youth we spoke glibly about “the eradication of evil,” as if it lay in our power to achieve it with a little hard work and dedication. But it dawned on me a few weeks ago in church as we were praying the Lord’s Prayer that from the perspective Jesus gives us in this prayer, we have been terribly guilty of trivializing something He treats very seriously. By placing our whole life squarely between “Our Father who art in Heaven” and the “evil one” from whom we beg to be delivered, is Jesus giving us an indispensable key to a realistic understanding of the world we live in? If so, why are we ignoring it? Jesus presents the evil one to us in this prayer as a powerful enemy, an anti-God, bent on our destruction. And it is “the evil one,” not just “evil,” in German “von dem Boesen,” in French “du malin.” Evil is a wicked superperson, not just a bad thing; an enemy, not a character flaw. Now, Rolph, if this is so, how can we ever be on the right track if we fail to take into account the evil one’s determination to destroy the human race? We usually pray the Lord’s Prayer as if the last line did not exist. That can’t be what Jesus intends. I can see it so clearly now. By failing to take Satan and his wiles as seriously as Jesus does, I may have laid myself open to serving as his instrument for evil when I thought I was serving as God’s instrument for good. If so, it is no wonder that the actual results of my work have been so horribly different from the results I expected. I fear I played right into Satan’s hands by ignoring him. Like a rattlesnake, he kills you quickest when you don’t know he’s there. But we have no excuse. The Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ continual reminder to us that the evil one IS always there, and that the earth we live and work in is a battlefield between Our Father and the enemy, and we are either on His side by grace or on the enemy’s side by our fallen nature. Yes, Rolph, this world is by definition a battlefield.
Failing to reckon with the evil one is to court disillusionment and defeat from the very start. And I fear that I may well have spent my whole life doing just that.
All I ask of you, Rolph, is not to fall into the same trap I did. I am tempted to believe that Satan wants us to ignore him so that he can get us to give up on God. Then he has us. And I would certainly have given up on God long ago, and again in these last months, but for those two bright lights that I sometimes think He gave me just to pierce my gloom and never leave me in total darkness. Anyone who has had a Cecilia and a Kay in his life cannot ever be in total darkness. At times I have the distinct sense that my two lamps on earth have become my stars in Heaven.
Yet I must admit, I have my days when all truth seems to lie on the side of the darkness and everything else is illusion. But I always come back eventually to Cecilia’s Jesus. Somehow, He strikes me as the One, the only One, who has it all together and under control, who sees the big picture, the only One who could have put that smile on Kay’s face and those words on her lips, and the One who asks from me now nothing but my trust, and probably also my true obedience, since for years I thought I was being obedient to Him, but was not.
Your friend,
Dr. Stephan Pearson