I heard yesterday that a friend of a friend was killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Cyd had been kidnapped by the Taliban a couple of weeks ago. The day after her kidnapping the Muslim women of Kandahar staged a protest. Such a public show of disapproval is almost unheard of in a Muslim country. It made the major wire services.

Cyd was a friend of two of our staff, Bob Allums and Carol Smith. They had worked at a Christian book store chain years ago. Carol told me this morning that Cyd had never gotten married because she had wanted to be a missionary.

Cyd is a true martyr for the gospel. After I immersed myself for three months in Jesus’ life during the sabbatical in ’91, I understood why martyrdom was so prized by the early church. The shock of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection imprinted in the early church a whole new way of living and dying. They wanted to be joined with Christ in his death and resurrection. Martyrdom was the closest thing to being Jesus that you could come up with. You can see this emerging in the New Testament in the book of Revelation, and of course in Acts as well.

We have a series of letters written about 105 AD from an early Christian bishop named Clement. He wrote them to different churches as he traveled from Syria to Rome. In his letter to the church at Rome he pleads with them not to intercede for him with the Roman government. He wants to die for Jesus. He believes that the witness of his dying will be more effective than the witness of his life. The early church longed for martyrdom the way American Christianity longs for retirement and vacations.

This is not ascetism. This is not weird. It is normal Christianity. It is a small step from the Pauline mindset in Colossians 1:24 (“I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in Christ’s affliction”) to literally dying for Jesus. Paul spent his whole life in little deaths, so a final actual death was a prize. It was the gold watch of Christianity.

What does this mean? Jesus’ death for the Afghanistan church was a once for all death. It is finished. Jesus said so himself. But now for Afghanistan to know Christ we have to die. The same is true with my marriage. Jesus’ death for Jill is once for all. My death is now an ongoing death for Jill so that she will know Jesus. So dying and resurrection is the central experience of the Christian life. Philippians 2 makes that clear. So much in Paul’s epistles sparkle when you see this.

Last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, our second daughter Ashley went to the doctor with shortness of breath and pain in her chest. The doctor took an X-ray to check for pnemonia and sent her home. By 11:00 the pain was becoming unbearable and Ashley drove herself to the ER. They discovered that she had three blood clots in her pulmonary artery. She spent the next two days in intensive care and is planning on getting out today.

As hard as it was, we are so thankful that God spared her life. It made for a very special thanksgiving for us. We were already planning to go to Lancaster county for a family get together so we took Ashley and Dave’s three kids with us, aged 0, 3, and 5.

Here’s Max Frearson, Layne Frearson, and Claire Sneed all sleeping together at Willow Valley, south of Lancaster City.

Here’s most of the kids, inlaws and grandkids.

We visited Natasha Miller’s (Andrew Miller’s fiance) farm. After a hay ride, Max and I went up to check out the tractor.

Here are Max and I on the hay ride.

Here’s little Jack Frearson, 4 weeks old. Jill was up at night feeding him.

If you have a minute, follow this link to see a YouTube video of my daughter Kim on her job. Jill and I are so proud of her. She has worked now at this kennel for 4 1/2 years. She is pretty disabled and has learned a ton about hard work. She has to have an aide with her.

I took this video in the early spring when I was subbing for an aide. My son Andrew edited the video and added music to it. The orignal video was pretty scary according to Andrew. He told Jill this week, “Don’t ever let Dad train an aide.” At one point, the black lab in the video took off. The camera goes blank as I’m trying to rescue Kim who is tied in with the dogs.

Walking with Kim

John and Pam at their wedding reception. When annouced at the recepton, they came out air guitaring to U2’s “Desire”.

John and Emily hanging out together at the rehersal dinner. Emily has expressed her fear to me that she might not get another boy friend! I told her not to worry, I’d be beating them away with a baseball bat.

My mom Rose Marie Miller is on the right. Jill’s mom Jane Hebden is on the left. Kim is in the background looking tense. The rehersal, in her mind, has gone on long enough. With autism, anything new is tough. Rose Marie delayed her return to London to see two of her grandsons get married, John Miller and my sister Ruth’s son, Jason Correnti.

John and I together. He is a wonderful son.

Jill and Pam together at the wedding reception. Aren’t they lovely?

Here are our four grandkids. It was the most beautiful wedding I’d ever been too. The setting, looking out over the Susquehanna River was stunning. John and Pam’s light hearted spirit was wonderful. In this photo below, Ellie is in the front and Max is in the background. Claire is on the left and Layne is on the right. They were in charge of passing out programs. Jill overheard a conversation between the two of them just before the wedding started.
Layne, “I don’t think we have an important job.”
Claire, “Yes, its important.”
Layne, “But we aren’t walking down the aisle.”

We now, by God’s grace, have a fifth grandchild… as of a week ago. Ashley had a son, “Jack Frearson”.

Jill, Kim, Emily, and Nicole (Kim’s friend) and I went to Joni and Friends Camp this summer. I was the camp “pastor” for the weak. I used several of the Person of Jesus lessons from Unit 5, The Passion to talk about how Jesus deals with Sadness in his life. Then I took a lesson from Unit 4, and talked about Jesus’ joy. I closed with the PrayerLife material on how God weaves stories into our lives through suffering. It was a delight to be there that week. A touch of heaven.

Since I was the camp “pastor” it was appropriate that I get dunked. The water was as cold as it looks. Kim kept missing the target when she was throwing the ball so she came up and hit it with her hand.

Here we are helping one of the campers get out of her wheelchair to go down the water slide.

I just read a review in Time Magazine by Christopher Hitchens (author of “God is Not Great”) on the new book “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light”. It is a mean spirited review, although I am thankful for his honesty. By actually criticizing Mother Theresa and religion he is dignifying it by not marginalizing it.

Here are some reflections on Mother Teresa’s struggle with doubt.

I admire her determined commitment to Jesus even though she didn’t feel his presence for forty years. The doubts began just a few months after she’d started the Sisters of Mercy in 1958 and stayed with her, unabated, until her death. It is a testimony to her pure, raw faith. I also commend her for sharing these doubts with spiritual advisors. That is, she didn’t try to fight the battle on her own.

But I am struck by how badly she and her mentors handled her doubts. As I share my concerns, please keep in mind that I have been and continue to be a great admirer of her life. She was, without question, one of the great witnesses to Jesus in the 20th century, the Roman Catholic counter part to Billy Graham. I love her raw courage at Harvard where after receiving a sustained standing ovation she said to our country’s current and future elites, “Give me your babies. Don’t abort them.” Few have the faith not to live in the presence of and bow to our cultural elites. I praise God for her life and witness to the gospel.

1. Romanticism. Mother Teresa and her mentors handled her doubts at a purely emotional level. Oprah and Rousseau (18th century romantic) would be pleased. What do I mean? She doesn’t think about the doubts. She just tries to suppress them or get rid of them. When she doubts God’s existence, she doesn’t do battle at a rational level. This is the lingering influence of an early Romantic tendency in Medieval Church piety that strongly emphasized the affective, feeling side of knowing Jesus but neglected the rational side. The rational side was taken up by Medieval Scholastics such as Anselm and Aquinas, but the two tended not to meet.

What would this look like? If she doubts God’s existence, soak herself in creation. Read a book on The Big Bang Theory and see how closely it matches Genesis 1. Reading Michael Behe’s book “Darwin’s Black Box.” Soak her mind with the truth of God as revealed in creation. Thomas Aquinas (medieval philosopher and scholastic) encouraged this with his formulation of the Cosmological Argument. Read Charles Malik’s book, “The Wonder of Being”. I think I’ve read that book three times in the last 30 years. He is a Greek Orthodox philosopher and diplomat. It saved my soul in college. I find his critique of Kant brilliant. He basically says that if you begin with wonder at creation and the miracle of existence instead of trying to establish a criteria for knowing that you come easily to God. If you become like a child and just see, if you don’t try to be something you are not…that is if you stop trying to be God, then you will see God. Isn’t that awesome?

The same is true when she doubts Jesus is God. She doesn’t sit and reflect on all that she knows and loves about Jesus. She collapses in the face of the doubt. She just goes into her Romantic foxhole and endures a pummeling. I don’t mean to be mean by saying “Romantic foxhole”. I’m just trying to capture in a short phrase the weakness of a purely affective response to evil. You need to think. Paul says in II Corinthians 10 to “take every thought captive”. How do you take something captive? Teresa only does the first step.
a. You identify it. Teresa does that.
b. You develop a plan to get it. Doesn’t do that.
c. You attack it. Thinking. Reason. Wisdom. Books. Massive Prayer.
d. You capture it. In other words, you keep at attacking until you win.

2. The World. She handles her doubts as though they were strange. She and we live in the most aggressively atheistic culture that has ever existed. In our PrayerLife seminar I mention how strange it is that Dan Rather didn’t open the evening news with prayer. In the roughly 100,000 known cultures (a wild guess) that have existed in the history of humanity, ours is the only one to not publicly acknowledge the existence of a spiritual world. That is weird. Everyone living in the 20th and 21st century breathes the air of unbelief. It would be strange to NOT have problems with doubt given how pervasive functional atheism is of our culture. For example, if I told you that I lived in Las Vegas and worked on the Strip and I was having problems with sexual lust, you would NOT think that was strange. In fact, if you knew I was going to work on the Strip, you’d likely say, “Can I pray for you? It must be rough out there.”

3. Public Prayer. Teresa appears to be weak in her application of prayer to her life. That is, she isn’t regularly asking people to pray for her faith. I think a Christian leader needs to be doing that on a regular basis. That is the foundation of the work. If that falls, everything falls. Paul the Apostle is regularly praying for the church’s faith. Read I Thessalonians 1, 2, and 3 through this window. Paul is in the throes of childbirth (his image) for the faith of the Thessalonians. He finally can’t stand not knowing and sends Timothy “to find out about there faith”. Almost every letter of Paul’s begins with describing how he is praying for their faith.

4. Repentance. Possibly, more was involved in this than I’m aware, but I don’t see her mentors or her reflecting on her heart, on doors that she might have left open for Satan. Hitchins even brings this up. He mentions her considerable self-will. It is hard to find a strong leader who doesn’t struggle with self-will. He was struck by the pattern of her strong will to begin Sisters of Mercy and then once it was started the doubts kicked in. Did self-will in Teresa’s life open the door to Satan? I don’t see her making those kind of heart connections. Satan goes through doors that we open for him.

5. The Gospel. I wish I could have taken Teresa through the Sonship course. In other words, I wish she’d been exposed to the Reformation. The gospel applied to the heart is a great cure for doubting God’s love for you. “Preach the Gospel to yourself” was one of the phrases we used in the Sonship course. In other words, meditate on the finished work of Christ even though you don’t feel it. That was the great Reformation discovery that grace is imputed to us not because we’ve arrived at the right emotional state but because of the blood of Jesus.

If you are reading this, would you pray for my faith, and the faith of the Christian leaders that you know, that they would have a simple, pure devotion to Christ?

Our daughter Kim works at Molly’s Run, a local kennel. Occassionally, Jill and I go in and work with Kim when we don’t have an aide. John came over to visit us and took the time to show Kim how to sweep the floor in the cat room. Kim is smiling because her big brother is yelling at her. She loves John very much. Kim and I are going to speak together at John and Pam’s wedding on Oct 14th.

John snapped this photo of Kim collecting the water bowls in the ABCD kennels. She cute?

Kim has gotten better at mopping. One of our aides, Asheley Farland, did a wonderful job of teaching Kim how to mop this last year. It is still a struggle so I’m helping Kim out a bit.

This spring, Jill said to me, “Paul, I’m concerned that the limb of the black willow tree that is hanging over the goats will fall off. Can we get the limb taken down?”

I said, “Jill, we are selling our house. It will cost quite a bit to take that limb down. I really think it will be okay.” I have a vague recollection that I might have said something like, “Trust me.”

Six weeks later we came home to this view of the tree. Jill of course has kept the photo as a reminder of….?

I just finished Walter Isaacson’s book “Einstein: His Life and Universe”. It is a well-told story that gives you a wonderful feel of the man and his science.

I was struck by Einstein’s deeply religious belief. He was no ‘believer’; in fact, he said that he was a follower of Spinoza’s god, a mix between Deism and Pantheism. But he has a childlike sense of wonder at the universe. He takes it a step further and even wonders about his ability to wonder. He is not arrogant as he contemplates the universe. That attitude is often rare especially among popular science books or the media.

Isaacson articulates this clearly throughout the book.
p. 549, “There is an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty.”

p. 551, Isaacson concludes the book by saying, “For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe.”

Einstein’s sense of beauty drove most of his science. He questioned whether the scientific method was really how scientists worked—it certainly didn’t reflect how he worked. Einstein saw himself as a poet working intuitively with images. He began with an idea, an intuition, and then hunted for data to substantiate it.

Michael Polanyi, a disciple of Einstein, went on to become an influential philosopher and articulated in a philosophical frame Einstein’s insight as to how science really works. Polanyi notes how scientists, like all of us, have traditions and communities. We don’t work abstractly from some neutral reference point. It is striking how Polanyi’s thought ties in with much post-modern thinking and the debunking of modernism.

Einstein’s life time quest was to unite the four basic forces of the universe: gravitation, electro-magnetism, the weak and the strong force. Isaacson points out that his desire for unity, to understand the mind of God, was the driving force of his life. I am struck by several fundamental ways though, that he missed this unity:

1. Even though, philosophically, Einstein did not believe in a personal God, he frequently refers to God personally. Isaacson, in his chapter on Einstein’s Religion, said that you can’t dismiss his personal references of God as just a figure of speech. It reflects Einstein’s view of the universe. Einstein’s principle dislike of the implications of Quantum Theory came from his sense that God had not created a capricious universe, but an orderly universe that reflects his character. “God does not play with dice” is how he frequently responded to Neils Bohr, the Danish scholar and developer of Quantum Theory. So while Einstein denies philosophically that God is personal, his thinking is driven by a personal view of God, but philosophically he denies that.

One of Francis Schaeffer’s principal apologetics was to see how non-Christians steal from the Christian cookie jar. That is, they have a non-personal universe and yet they value people. Schaeffer was relentless in calling non-Christians on this ‘cheating’. Einstein cheats a lot.

2. Einstein’s family life was an absolute mess. He was a remarkably bad father and husband. One letter he wrote his first wife is really the pits. Because he denied a personal God philosophically, he did not have a unified field theory that included people. He missed the design of the universe as it related to people. And practically it made it difficult for him to sustain close relationships.

This is just an aside, and I speak as a novice, but I wonder if Einstein had a richer view of God if he would have been more open to Quantum Theory…which he had pioneered. On the one hand, I think Einstein rightly reacted to some of Neil Bohr’s philosophizing where Bohr extrapolates from our inability to observe both velocity and position of an atomic particle to a philosophical uncertainty. On the other hand, I wonder if Einstein had a richer view of God, God as inscrutable, and us not at the center of the universe, then he might have been able to work more closer with the quantum school than simply be its antagonist the last 25 years of his life.

“Nemen” is our grandson Max Frearson. He is mourning the death of his hermit crab at Ocean City, NJ.

Here is the funeral for the poor crab. Our son-in-law Dave Frearson is presiding.