Yesterday we ended the long process of selling our home by signing it over to the new owners and getting all our stuff out. There was so much hard work for so many weeks that we haven’t had time to stop and think about it. But we plan today, as we travel to El Paso, to take some time sharing what we remember about our home of the past ten years.
And we will give thanks.
Since we are packing our stuff to move to Slovakia, we have to go through lots of memorabilia in order to figure out what to keep and what to throw away. I get distracted sometimes by what I discover. For example, consider the drawing of Francis Schaeffer I did in 1984 when I discovered the Schaeffers, their writings, and their lives. I found many journal entries about the Schaeffers from those months before Nicholas (our first child) was born. And I was particularly taken by the drama and romance of their lives recorded by Edith in The Tapestry.
As you can tell from some of my recent blog entries, I’ve been reading more Schaeffer lately. One theme that has gripped me is expressed by Francis in these comments from The God Who Is There:
The world has a right to look upon us and make a judgment…. The final apologetic, along with the rational, logical defense and presentation, is what the world sees in the individual Christian and in our corporate relationships together…. What the world cannot explain away will be a substantial, corporate exhibition of the logical conclusions of Christianity.
What Francis states as a proposition, Edith describes in their story, as she says in her introduction to L’Abri:
The story which follows is one in which the author has attempted to show the reality of the fact that God exists, and that He is the One who has, time after time, answered prayer in the midst of well-nigh impossible circumstances to bring about something out of nothing.
Their lives together demonstrated in remarkable ways that “God is there, and he is not silent.” And of course I wonder what my life demonstrates about God, and how I can live in such a way that others will be certain that I live in the presence of God.
How then will you live?
Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty, my memory,
my understanding and my whole will.
All that I am and all that I possess you have given me:
I surrender it all to you to be disposed of according to your will.
Give me only your love and your grace;
with these I will be rich enough, and will desire nothing more.
Here’s another gem from Francis Schaeffer, which I record as a note to myself:
The problem which confronts us as we approach modern man today is not how we are to change Christian teaching in order to make it more palatable, for to do that would mean throwing away any chance of giving the real answer to the man in despair; rather, it is the problem of how to communicate the gospel so that it is understood.
The God Who Is There, section four, chapter three
We held out as long as we could, but today we bought our first cell phone. I hope it isn’t some sort of apocalyptic sign….
But we were victims of circumstances: since we are moving out of our house and will live out of a suitcase between now and when we leave for Slovakia, we had to have a temporary phone.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
After demonstrating that the Christian has a real reason to fight evil, while modern relativistic man does not, Francis Schaeffer ends his chapter with this:
But the Christian also needs to be challenged at this point. The fact that he alone has a sufficient standard by which to fight evil, does not mean that he will so fight. The Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative. But too often, instead of being the radical, standing against the shifting sands of relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo. If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in himself, then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong—including man’s inhumanity to man.
[from The God Who Is There, section 3, chapter 4]
If you decide not to subside and become a real radical, where will you engage the battle? What evil would you fight?