When I embarked on this rather bold journey of discovery, I have to admit and I had some clues in my bag but I did not really know what I was taking on. I began with some of the truths that God had allowed me to witness over the years. Discoveries I had made from His Word, the Bible, were there in my bag of clues. I have known of the last two Nuggets of gold for a long time. The secret of the Glory Journey from Sinai to Paran, which I told you about in Nugget aPP 29. I have known for years of the Ultimate Paradox hidden in Hebrews Chapter 11 which adds some sense to our human struggles. Way back in 1984, I was asked a question by my good Muslim friend Shenol as I was learning his language of Turkish as a practice. for living in a villages and learning a vernacular language monolingually. That was a long time ago. It seems like yesterday but I realised this morning that was 37 years ago since Shenol and I had a significant conversation. We had been getting close and I really loved spending time with him. We talked on all sorts of topics including the walk of faith. One day he asked me to explain the Trinity. You can read our conversation at the beginning of the Nugget I wrote on The Expanding Universe. My point here is that I don’t pretend to understand the Paradoxes of God. I do know they are there and I am aware that they shed light on our pathway. But I don’t pretend to fully understand the enigma of God’s acts and God’s ways. Neither would I want to as I explained to Shenol that day 37 years ago. I want God to be bigger than what my puny mind can fathom but I trust in the process that there will shards of light that will pierce my darkness bringing enlightenment.
I began with 6 people whom I know, whose stories challenged me to write this series and find some answers to the hard questions we ask in such circumstances. I gathered those questions at the beginning of this series including that doozy of a question asked both by myself and my pastor – “Why does God heal an eighty plus year old woman and allows a 20 year old young man to die?” There have been more challenges to our faith along the way as I have explored as many angles to this enigma I have been able to. Some of those answers remain clouded in mystery. Some stories have not yet been told in full but rather just alluded to. The reason is they are too fresh to violate the families’ pain and tell their stories now. I have created slots for them in this series and will include them in the future if and when i have permission. They are challenging real life circumstances that makes you want to shout at God and ask “Why?”.
I started with six real life examples and over that time I have added many others as we have come to know of some very real, heartbreaking accounts of sickness and death that stretches the boundaries of faith-filled prayer. Stories upon which God has healed or taken loved ones, granted comfort or left us puzzled yet still shone His light on our puzzlement. What amazes me the most is that there have been times when I have caught a glimpse of God’s shekinah glory in the midst of human suffering. The Shekinah Glory is the glory of the Presence of God. When God comes close and embraces the patient or the onlooker in the midst of suffering. I saw it in Jeremiah Glassie, Kate Diprose and Bethany Wake, all of whom God chose to take. But I have seen it too in the midst of the struggles of those whose stories we have heard over the time I have been writing these Puzzling Paradox Nuggets. Some of whom continue to struggle and some of whom have come through to health and normal life again. I say normal life, but I don’t believe we return to the same point of normalcy. I think we grow a little with each step in our understanding of the sovereignty of God. The fact that He is the One Who chooses. He is the One decides one will live and another will die.
But stop and consider for a moment that all actually will die. It is just a matter of when. I can tell you I have thought a lot about that fact during this Nugget series. Firstly, because I am getting older and creakier, and have come through another operation, cataract surgery before which I was told “this was a walk in the park” by my surgeon himself. Only to realise there was panic in the theatre when something clearly had gone wrong. As at other times I put myself in God’s hands and asked Him to take over. I learned that a one-in-five-hundred chance of something happening had actually happened during the walk-in-the-park procedure. Having survived two heart attacks, one light transitory stroke and a number of other surgeries including prostate cancer, I have learned to just put myself in God’s hands. You see one day I am going to meet Him face to face. It will happen, it is just a matter of when. The same is true of you, irrespective of who you are and how old you are. The issue is being prepared to meet Him, knowing that you are in the right relationship with God and have been made right with Him to be confident that you are in His hands. If that is not the case you need to do something about it. If you need to talk to someone you can trust about these things then do so. Talk to me via the website, talk to someone you know who knows God. I have told you enough stories in this series to demonstrate the reality of God. However I do have one more true story I want to end on before I draw this series to a conclusion (in this Nugget).
The following excerpt I have clipped from Steve Saint’s book End of The Spear. I told the story of Steve’s father and the other four missionaries who lost their lives in the cause of reaching the Waodani (Auca) Indians with the Gospel of God. Here is the final story I want to leave with you in Steve Saint’s own words.
Several years later, I was down in the jungle helping some friends make a feature-length documentary of the Waodani story. A good friend of mine, Steven Curtis Chapman, was with us to make a music video for a song he had written about our life story. Just after he arrived, we were sitting in the cooking house next to the longhouse with thatched walls that extended from a high peak to the ground behind us. Kimo was sitting next to us, trying to carry on a conversation with our film director’s brother, Dave. But then, while Steve Chapman and I were conversing and Dave and Kimo were trying to carry on a conversation in sign language, we suddenly heard orchestral music coming from the longhouse behind us. I was surprised, because we have no electricity there, and no one had played any music during the two weeks we had been there. Steve noticed my puzzled look. “It sounds like the CD of the original sound track for the documentary,” he told me, explaining that a member of the film team who had just arrived with him had brought a portable CD player and had let him listen to the new sound track. Mystery solved. Kimo and Dave seemed oblivious. Then, without warning, Kimo jerked dramatically as he reflexively turned his head to try to see through the thatched wall behind him. He listened for a minute and then looked intently at me and said, “Manamai iñindabopa”—Just like that I understood (or heard) it. The verb he used can mean either “understood” or “heard.” Steve lifted his eyebrows and gave me a look that said, “What was that all about?” I had no idea. Something had obviously startled Kimo, but he went back to trying to communicate with Dave as if nothing had happened. So I let it go as one more little unexplainable incident that didn’t translate between cultures. But then, a minute later, Kimo jerked violently around again when the same theme in the same cut played again. He repeated the same intent look he had just given me and said, “Your father and the other foreigners dying, that is what I heard.”
I suddenly understood. Less than a half hour before, I had again been talking with Kimo about the foreigners he had seen floating above the trees after killing my dad and the others. When he said, “Just like that I heard it,” he was referring to our conversation earlier. I called in to whoever was playing the music and asked them to hold the place on the recording. Then I asked Kimo if he wanted to hear it again. He agreed enthusiastically, and Steve, Dave, and I accompanied him into the dark interior of the longhouse. Unfortunately, it was so dark that the friend who was operating the CD player could not see which piece had been playing. So I sat down in a hammock to listen while the other guys tried to find the cut again. Finally, they just started playing the brand-new recording from the beginning. Kimo had developed a taste for classical music listening to the BBC on a shortwave radio my mom had given him years earlier. He just sat and contentedly listened as one piece after another played. Then, on cut number 6, Steve, the musician in the hut, said, “I think this is the one he reacted to.” Sure enough, Kimo sat bolt upright and started giving me a long narrative about what he was hearing. “Your father and the other foreigners who came here to give us God’s carvings, being speared and dying, this is what I heard.” He went on, “Hearing this and seeing the foreigners chanting, I knew that we had done badly, badly.” When he paused, I asked who the foreigners were that he saw chanting. Kimo responded, “I thought they were evil spirits, and I was afraid.” My mind was in a whirl. Kimo had clearly said, “While your father and the other foreigners were dying, this is what I heard.” He’d said “dying,” not “dead.” What he was listening to was orchestral music with no voices. The Waodani have no musical instruments other than hollow bamboo tubes, which the men sometimes play when they dance, that sound like someone blowing into a Coke bottle. No wonder no one could give me a good description of what they had heard. They didn’t have the necessary terms to describe it. It wasn’t really chanting. The “foreigners” they had heard were singing a melody. And they were backed by orchestral music.
I also believe that the best explanation for what the Waodani saw is that they were angels. And if Kimo saw them and heard them singing and as a result decided that the killing coup was a bad thing, then I believe that maybe my dad and Jim and Ed and Pete and Roger heard it too. If the spirits convinced Kimo that what he had done was bad when everything in his culture said it was good, then I believe those five brave men could have understood the same message to mean that they were not dying in vain. What happened to them that day, and what happens to you and me today and tomorrow, is all part of an epic story that God has been writing since the beginning of time. What I have related here on these pages is not my story. It is just one infinitesimal chapter in the great story of man and his quest for God and God’s quest for man. This is part of God’s story. For reasons beyond my comprehension, this part of the story has captured people’s imaginations and has inspired many to trust God to write their stories too. It gives me great comfort to think that the precious fathers that Steve, Mike, Matt, Beth, Jerome, Valerie, Kathy, Phil, and I longed to know and have missed so much knew that God had a purpose in His Palm Beach script. Others—including Beth Youderian Kachikis, Marilou McCully, my mom, Aunt Rachel, Nenkiwi, Gikita, Nampa, Akawo, and our precious Stephenie—now all know what the true purpose of life really is. The rest of us will certainly know very soon.
Steve Saint
I kept this story until the end of this series of Nuggets on A Puzzling Paradox. I feel it is a fitting way to end the series. Not by giving you incontrovertible proof of God’s existence nor by answering definitively why God allows some to die while healing others. But rather to leave you with Steve Saint’s account of what the Waodani heard when the five missionaries were dying and his concluding comment that “Now all know what the true purpose of life really is. The rest of us will certainly know very soon.”
God planned something better for us. He wanted to make us perfect. Of course, he wanted those great people (those three lists of people in Hebrews 11, including the Unnamed Failures) to be made perfect too, but not before we could all enjoy that blessing together. [ERV]Hebrews 11:40