Getting to Know GW (5): Odd Providence

George Washington was a man who benefited enormously from the death of people he loved. That is an odd sentence, but undoubtedly true. Without the death of his father, elder brother, elder brother's wife and children, and Martha's daughter from her first marriage there is simply no way that Washington becomes the man we know him to be. 

What the death of each provided was not some psychic boost, of course, but financial. Washington was only born into marginal privilege. He was ambitious and dedicated and a workhorse, but there is only so much one can do without means, especially in as rigorously hierarchical a world as colonial Virginia. It was the untimely deaths of each of the people above that gave Washington the means to lead the life of a gentleman planter, inherit Mount Vernon and turn it into the now famous landmark, dress in the highest fashion, and ultimately earn a seat on the Continental Congress that eventually catapulted him to the commanding generalship of the Continental Army.

In one of those odd turns of providence, then, it was the suffering he endured and the deaths of those he loved that paved the way for Washington to become General Washington and then President Washington. What was painful for a season catapulted him to his ultimate calling. 

This world is a strange place.

Getting to Know GW (2)

(This post is part of a series about our first president that I am writing as I work through Ron Chernow's epic one volume biography of the man. If you find yourself like me, knowing next to nothing about Washington and his life then I invite you to read on.)

I remember as a kid some legend of Washington as almost impervious to bullets. I remember some story of an Indian chief instructing his warriors to take aim at Washington and somehow missing. It is the kind of story that smacks of myth-making, a piece of just-too-goodedness. It is also true.

I wrote last time of Washington's disastrous defeat at Fort Necessity, in what was to come to be the first real skirmish of the French and Indian War. Washington was a part of another devastating defeat in that conflict in the summer of 1755. Washington was under the command of General Edward Braddock. Braddock would be a member of a growing list of British military that underestimated the difficulties of waging war in America.

French and Indian forces met the British at what became known as the Battle of the Monongahela. The British, who outnumbered the French by 2 to 1, were absolutely routed. By the evening of the ninth of July, the British forces were in full retreat back up the road they had just built. Braddock would die from wounds sustained in battle during the retreat.

Braddock had been injured early in the battle and Washington had taken over default command, riding the length and breadth of the British lines and trying to rally his men. Of the 300 British casualties, over 100 were officers. The opposing forces trained their guns on Washington. Upon retreat he noticed four bullet holes in his coat and had two horses he had been riding shot out from underneath him.

Fifteen years later he met one of the chiefs who had been fighting with the French at Monongahela. He told Washington that he had specifically ordered his warriors to fire directly at Washington, to no effect. The chief had concluded that some great spirit had protected Washington and would guide him to momentous things in the future.

At the very least, this story ought to train the skeptic in each of us to quiet it down a bit. Sometimes things happen that are too good to be true.

Cheerful Conservatism

It should come as no surprise to people who know me or have read this blog that I am a religious conservative. That can be a tough label to wear proudly as a twenty-something (for another three months!) in our culture. My team has taken a thrashing lately, politically and culturally, and it seems as if an era in American culture--that of the cultural and political dominance of Christianity--is passing. I am not writing about this to wring my hands or declare the falling of the sky, but to point towards what I believe to be a better way to be aliens and strangers in this world.

Some people my age that I talk to are hopeful about the passing of Christianity as the default civil religion of the United States. They think it will spur the church to enhanced creativity and that belief will actually mean something now. In other words, to be a Christian it will not be possible, for the most part, to be a Sunday Christian and live the rest of the week precisely like the rest of the world. I understand this impulse and thought largely the same way for a long time. And then I had kids. Having kids removes this lazy disposition as you realize that your kids will now have to grow up in a world largely opposed to what they are taught at home. The passing of Christendom is not something to treat glibly as if there are no associated costs. It is going to entail harsh realities for those committed to living out a Biblical morality in the public square. We might tire of the excesses of civic religion Christianity, but it has built us a pretty nice place to live. And it is an edifice we tear down to our own destruction, or so it seems to me.

That being said, there is no need to be sour about this. As a Christian, I have read Matthew 24 and St. John's Revelation. I know stuff gets bad. This isn't Utopia, which, as anyone knows who has read Thomas More's fictional account of the place, kind of sucks anyway, and of course means "no place." God is not surprised by what is happening here. He is not up in heaven going, "They're legalizing what down there!?!!?" He is in control whether America is a comfortable place to be a conservative Christian or whether we are blacklisted and persecuted. 

That control gives me hope. I believe that the world is governed by the holy-love of the Trinitarian God. I believe he is sovereign over that creation. I believe every atom in our universe is sustained by the Word of his power down to this moment, that every mote of dust I can see through the sunlight coming in my window as I type dances at his command. I believe that one day the Son will return and make all things new and every tear will be wiped from our eyes. 

You know what that makes me? Happy. Very, very happy. Because just as the above paragraph is true for me, it is also true for the persecuted Christians in India and Eritrea and Iran. My circumstances do not change the reality of God's providential control of the world, of the fact that he works out everything for the good of those who are called to his purposes.

Therefore, the face I want to present to the world is not one of despair over circumstances. I don't want to hold tight-fistedly to some notion of a bygone era when everything was right and, like the children of Lake Woebegone, everyone was above average. I don't want to resent and see myself as opposed to the people on the other side of the aisle, the people I have been commanded by my Savior to love as he does. That is a tall order as anyone who has tried to put it into practice (and here I speak theoretically, as I never have) can attest. But it is our calling. 

To be filled with joy. To live as exiles. To work for the good of those around us. To love our God. If this ship is going down (and the jury is still out on that one) I don't want to be clinging to the railing screaming against the unfairness of it all. I want to sing "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

Praying With Owen

Every night after we have finished getting Owen ready for bed I hold him and both mom and I sing a song to him and then I pray before we put him into bed. The songs are generally some old hymn. I used to think that he probably wasn’t retaining much of what we sang to him, but then one night I stopped while singing a line from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and he finished it for me. Since then I like to pause in my singing to hear him chime in. And then we pray.

It is interesting praying with a two year old because he has no idea about who or what God is except that which we have given him through the stories we read him, the songs we sing him, and the way we pray when we tuck him at night. It is a sobering thought. And given how much he picks up on the words we use and the way we use them, it really means that I can’t just do this by rote unless I want him to think that is what prayer is. (Cute sidenote: whenever he hurts himself Clara has taught him to pray for God to heal his pain. So he will bonk his head and come up to me crying “God heal it.” God may heal it, but daddy still has to kiss it.)

We always pray and thank God for everything good he has given us and ask him to help us acknowledge all of the blessings that we routinely overlook. We ask him to bless Ellie and help us figure her out and help her to grow up big and strong; we thank him for mommy and how hard she works for us and how patient she is with Owen and Ellie and how much she loves us; we thank him for daddy’s job and ask him that he would guide daddy on what we should do in the future.

But the crux of my prayer is when I pray for him. I want him to know what my desires are for his life. What I consider to be important to his future and his happiness. I begin by thanking God profusely for the chance to be the father of this little boy, for what a joy and grace he is to me, and just how fun it is to play with him and read with him and eat popcorn and watch football with him. And then I pray that God would save him and pour out his grace upon Owen’s life and that my boy would grow up to give glory to God and treasure God in all things. When I pray for his character I pray that God would make him strong and humble (he used to laugh whenever I said the word humble and repeat it), someone who is soft-hearted but firm in his convictions, someone who lives a life of love for the people around him, and lays his life down for his friends and gives them life by his sacrifice.

I pray other things on other nights, but those are the things that are always there. That is what I want for my son. That is my vision for his life. And as I have prayed those things night after night for the past several months, it has become clear to me that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I don’t mean this in a self-centered way. I very much am praying for Owen at night. What I do mean is that in order for these prayers to come true I need to model a lot of this stuff for my son. If I want him to be strong and humble, then I need to show him what a strong and humble man looks like. If I want him to have a soft-heart but firm convictions I need to orient my life in the same way. That is what I mean when I say that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I am asking that God would make me that way so I can show it to him, not because it will save him, but that God may use my example to call Owen from darkness into light and from death to life.

Parenting is hard regardless of how you do it; praying those types of prayers for your kids only ups the ante as far as I am concerned. I am the most influential person in my son’s life and the question I confront every day is how I will use that influence. And by God’s grace it will be doing my part to help my requests to God become the reality of my son’s life.

Of All the Places I Thought I Would Never Live. . .

The great Kansas rectangle does its work again. And we return this weekend to the Sunflower State. I had taken a temporary job in July in Tulsa working under the same parent company umbrella of my dad's company in Colorado. I had hopes of turning my two month Okie exile into a career in Colorado, but alas those hopes were dashed (for the time being) upon the rocks of practicality. Colorado is still the long-term goal and realizable, but the company (and myself in my better moments) think it would be great if I could learn the business and get some solid experience apart from the supervision of my dad. Even the owner's son when at my age he decided to come aboard began in the company at the parts counter in Commerce City, Colorado before moving his way into operations in the headquarters at Wichita. The plan, then, is to spend a few years working hard for the company in Kansas--I am going to train for about two months in Wichita before moving on to a new location in that great World City, Salina. In all seriousness, it is a wonderful opportunity and a tremendous blessing. 

One quick story. I found out only yesterday that Wichita for two months was a go. I had been hoping for a break in between Tulsa and whatever was next, accustomed as I became through graduate school with regular and lengthy vacations. But yesterday I found Wichita was on and I was to start there Tuesday after the holiday weekend. This deflated my vacation prospects, but I took that in stride. It was good to grow up, good to not have a break in income, etc. But it also meant that I had to find a place to live in Wichita, preferably furnished lest I be forced to move our stuff twice in two months, starting in six days. This was considerably more stressful. 

I spent the bulk of the afternoon yesterday trying to find something and came up almost entirely empty. Deals that looked good were not good and everything that would accommodate our needs was well over $2,000 per month. When I got home I was stressed out and feeling sorry for myself. My wife, levelheaded as she is most of the time, suggested a website we have used in the past to find vacation rentals. Destination hotspot that it is, Wichita has three such homes available. Two were vastly more expensive than I could afford. The other was booked until the middle of September. 

I decided to call anyway, figuring we could live out of suitcases for 10 days if we needed to. Less than an hour after I requested more information, the owner of the home called me back. That morning the maid who cleans this property informed her that the man who had been renting was no longer there. She emailed him and he responded that he had in fact moved out. The owner told him that if she could find someone to take over she would stop charging him. And then she got my email. She called me to size me up and it turns out she has gone to church for years with the owner of the company and knows him and his family well. She gave us a discounted rate and we can move in this weekend. My hours of depression and melancholy dissipated and I was happy for the opportunity to move for this company, believing again that this was the right decision for our future. You can choose to believe that this is coincidence, or you can choose to believe it to be Providence. For my part, I pick the latter.

Off we go.