God is Bigger

Several days ago we got a message tipping us off to a devotional written by Mary Sue Rosenberg and published in Upper Room. It is very well written and worth your time to read it. It is titled "God is Bigger".  http://devotional.upperroom.org/blog/2013/08/rosenberger081713.

Mary Sue was a colleague of ours in Vietnam in 1967 working as a nurse at the Evangelical hospital in Nha Trang during her service as a volunteer with the Church of the Brethren. Her devotional  includes a story from her experience there, which she calls a "life changing experience".  She, as well as many of us, had such life changing experiences during our time in Vietnam.

What we always remember about Mary Sue is that she accompanied us during Judy's labor and delivery of our first son, Bret - I remember it as a tense few days that ended in a great and happy relief. This joyful event of ours happened just before a very difficult time for Mary Sue; within a few days she received news that her father was seriously ill and she needed to make haste to travel home.  At the same time as the staff of the hospital (mostly Mennonites) got news of Mary Sue's father, they were told of the death of a dear friend and fellow worker, Karl Kaufman, who had worked with them at the hospital. He had just left Vietnam after serving as a Mennonite volunteer for three years and planned to buy a motorcycle in Singapore and travel overland to Europe.  Before he even was out of Singapore he had a tragic accident and died in that city.

Mary Sue refers to the book she later wrote which was a compilation of her journal entries during her time in Vietnam.  One of her last journal entries was about Bret's birth... her last was about Karl's death.....

September 14, 1967

"Another week come and gone and where to? It has been a busy one for us. Judy Aaker, the wife of our VNCS (Vietnam Christian Service) program director had her first baby here yesterday.  She had come from Saigon about two weeks ago to wait.  Then last Sunday evening she began to have some contractions which continued through Monday and Tuesday.  Tuesday night they got hard so the three of us - she, her husband and I - sat up all night timing them. Still no baby.  So, on two hours of sleep, I went back to work.  Finally, at 4:30 pm Wednesday, a seven pound, seven ounce boy appeared on the scene.  Everyone was relieved that things went well."

Indeed, this was another life changing experience for us and we have always been thankful to Mary Sue and the other nurses for their accompaniment during that time. 

Mary Sue left Vietnam in a hurry and she never came back.  In the last page of her book she wrote this: 
(Those of us who have gone through culture shock and reverse culture shock will identify with this)

In one  short week's time I have been uprooted from one home and returned to another.  Culture shock, in a milder form, assails me again.  It will decrease, I am sure, as it did in Vietnam when I get caught up in the daily life of the culture and in working with people again.  For then I will be reminded over and over, not of differences, but of similarities.

And for you, my friends, I pray that you may be as richly blessed in your place of service- whether home, shop, here or far away- as I was in those past eighteen months in Vietnam.

To which I say AMEN!

                          Mary Sue at the hospital in Nha Trang in 1967

                                                                          Karl

Constructing a coffins for a patient who died without family present

Election of a Presiding Bishop

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has elected a new Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton.  The first woman elected to this position. 

The following link should take you to an interview with her by Time Magazine.  I found her comments of interest about being "religious not spiritual", rather than the other way around as we usually hear it.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/08/18/meet-the-woman-who-will-lead-evangelical-lutherans-religious-but-not-spiritual/?goback=%2Egde_147936_member_266915780#%21

Anonymous passages through one another's lives.

 This morning we listened to a piece on National Public Radio about an exhibit of photographs from conflicts in 28 countries that is now on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  These are pictures of war.

What grabbed my attention was the comments of one the photographers.  Here is a bit of that story:

"The more you've seen of death and inhumanity, the more it turns you into someone who really can't stand the sight of war," says photojournalist David Burnett who took this picture.

You can't take your eyes off the beautiful young soldier with the chiseled cheeks and dirty clothes in a photograph taken in Vietnam in 1971. Resting for a moment, the man sits on the broken track of an armored personnel carrier he's repairing. With long, soiled fingers he holds a clipping from some weekly livestock report. He stares into space.

He almost has what they used to call the thousand-yard stare," Burnett says. "He's thinking. I don't know what he's thinking. He's reading a letter from home and it's just a picture that kind of captures him in this moment of pondering what the rest of his life was like when he wasn't being a combat soldier."

Burnett didn't get the soldier's name, or age, or hometown, and he regrets that.

"Every time I walk into a diner now and I'll see a couple of Vietnam vets sitting around talking I'll just wonder, could this be the guy from my picture? I would love to be able to find him before one of us passes away," he says.

David Burnett/Contact Press Images

Now here is a phrase that got my attention: "Burnett and the young tank repairman made an anonymous passage through one another's lives. And yet that soldier haunts the photographer".

Why I need to stay involved with the needs of the world

I am a volunteer with the wood bank, a ministry of the Episcopal church in nearby Dillon, Montana. The wood bank was started some years ago when Father Harry Neeley retired from parish ministry as an Episcopal priest. Harry is now about 80 years old and works almost full time gathering fire wood, stock piling and delivering  large quantities of it to needy people in the surrounding area - mostly disabled, elderly and unemployed.  This fire wood keeps these families warm during the long Montana winter and saves them lots of money on their fuel bills.  We have a branch of the wood bank here in our town of Sheridan. 

 

Harry one of the most humble and holy men I know - his heart is with the poor and he lives his faith in action on their behalf every day.   If he reads this he won't like it that I said that about him! But I did not sit down primarily to write a piece about the wood bank or to make known the virtues of either the wood bank or Father Neeley, even though this program does deserve all the good publicity it gets.