Coming out of a year of grief and loss, you start to think that you can’t take much more bad news or heartache. Then, the global pandemic hits and you realize that circumstances don’t discriminate. Neither does disease.
Economic uncertainty. Sickness and death. Anxiety and worry. Pep talks. Information overload. Daily government announcements. Eroded freedoms (even short-term). Parks closed. Societal trauma.
These are times beyond description. And here we sit – or serve on the front lines – trying to make sense of it all.
I go back to my own words of the past two weeks – Stay Calm. Do the Next Right Thing.
And today, I add one more. This week’s call is to Remember.
Remember. Remember. Remember.
On my daily walks this week on our country, dirt road, I have remembered the great cloud of witnesses surrounding me – members of my own family now gone to God’s glory, but nonetheless surrounding me with their testimonies of God’s faithfulness in their living and in their dying.
- My father’s father Peter, fleeing Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution in the 1920s and taking his young family to a new country, settling in Winkler, Manitoba. Protected by the workers in his plough factory, Grandpa’s life was spared twice, before he fled to Canada with only the clothes on his back. He went from earthly riches to poverty almost instantly, but he carried the riches of heaven into a new country, planting seeds of godly faith for generations to come. A man of fervent prayer, he picked up hope every day, and left a legacy of faith, that I still taste 100 years later. By faith, like Moses, Grandpa endured “as seeing Him who is invisible”. (See Hebrews 11:27)
- My mother’s grandmother, sent off to Siberia during the same revolution. She went with her daughter – my great aunt – and her children. She was an artist. She died in Siberia saving the lives of generations to come. Starvation took her as she gave her food – what little she had – to save her daughter and grandchildren. “For greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” (See John 15:13)
- The voices of the elderly Russian Mennonite men and women who gathered in the church of my youth to pray. And they could pray. They saw suffering. They saw death – felt loss and grief – beyond my own imagination, as they watched mothers and sisters raped, father’s dragged away and killed during the Revolutionary years in Russia. Yet, in their prayers, I heard something that made me hungry for what they knew and what they discovered. God is faithful. Again and again and again. They had passed through their own Red Sea experiences, “as if by dry land” (See Hebrews 11:29) and continued to call on God, in praise, in adoration and petition.
- And on my husband David’s side of the family. His grandfather who stood for justice, for mercy, and walked humbly with His God during World War II. (See Micah 6:8) While my own father fought to liberate Holland from Nazi Germany, David’s grandfather fought and worked in the Dutch Resistance – sought after, pursued, but kept safe to plant the seeds of hope into the generations to come, all in the midst of suffering, starvation, and war.
And while Hebrews 11 in the Holy Scriptures has a list of faith-filled men and women of God, I have my own great cloud of witnesses who speak to me of God’s love, goodness, faithfulness, and grace, “of whom the world was not worthy”. (See Hebrews 11:38)
And so I remember. And this remembering of the faithfulness of God, brings me peace in the midst of this storm of uncertainty, eroded freedoms, and windy paths ahead.
I thank God in this season, every time I remember them, for their faithfulness in the good news of Jesus Christ from the moment of their birth, even until now. (See Philippians 1:3-5)