Sunday, April 26, 2009

Only three years

Sometimes looking back on my life, searching for those moments of real happiness, it seems that the longer I look, the shorter and fewer those times become. Maybe in a lifetime of fifty or sixty years, one might find only five or six years when the memory shows times of pure happiness, and not all connected either, but scattered about. This kind of pondering leads nowhere and belies the fact that one is happy right now, else there could be no leisure for such plundering of the vanished past. What’s more, everything looks and feels different in retrospect. We find that looking back seldom recovers the truth. In this body of sin, memory like everything else doesn’t work right, but always partakes of that fatal flaw that taints everything on this side of the resurrection. But on the other side of the resurrection, it’s a different story, literally.

Thinking back to my own youth, I remember how I spent four years of my life in training to become a traditional furniture maker under an old Norse-American cabinetmaker. This man was 32 years my senior, and I was his last apprentice. He grew up on a farm in the borders of Minnesota and North Dakota, one of twelve brothers (there was also one sister). His family was swept up in the pentecostal revivals of the 1920’s and 30’s, and he told me many stories of tent meetings and other experiences in his early life.


I was a new Christian, just having accepted the Lord at the age of 24 just six months before hiring on at the Sterling Furniture Company in Portland. I had prayed, while still living in Corvallis, to be led to a workplace where there would be at least one other Christian.
In short order, the prayer was answered.

The four years I spent with this elder were hard but happy years. Along with his teaching and example in the crafting of wood, without intending it, he passed on to me the legacy of his life in Christ, and little did he know (or perhaps he was aware) that I followed his every move so as to make it my own, my soul being stamped, like communion bread, with the cross of Christ. I was not a pentecostal, yet there was never a difference between us. Knowing about the ancient faith, he would sometimes say to me, when I had done something that especially pleased him, “May the saints bless you!” For my part, it never occurred to me to think of him and his faith as different from my own. Certainly not. How could I judge him? In my eyes he was perfect, what a Christian man should be. I wanted to emulate him in every way.

Only four years with this man shaped the rest of my life to this very day. And we wonder sometimes, what effect our own lives have on the people around us. To be a Christ-bearer in the world, what possibilities, if only we live in the light of the risen Christ! In only a moment, Christ in us can change the world, forever.


Then, there is the reason behind this all. The reason being the divine Word, through whom the world was made, and in whom we live and move and have our being. Though He is God, He entered into our time and assumed our flesh, living secretly, that is, unknown to the world, just as we live. No one will remember us after we’ve left this world, at least not for long, but the world remembers Him.
The world doesn’t remember Him for anything He did in the first thirty years of His earthly life, or at least not much, but for what He did in the last three.

Only three years was all it took for the world to remember Him, and not only to remember Him, but to be changed forever. No other time period in all of human history has had as great and lasting an impact on the rest of time as those three years. Yet, at the time they were happening, very few noticed those years at all, in terms of the world’s population. Only a few thousand people at most, and in a land which, though it has become the center of the world’s attention from time to time, is still just a small spit of rocky soil between empires.

Only three years of one man’s life, and billions of other men’s lives are changed forever, even the lives of those who don’t know Him, who don’t ask themselves the question, “Who is that man?” If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is, and only one could have that power, the Lord Almighty, who is alive and present with us at this very moment, the risen Christ.

5 comments:

pilgrim said...

Thank you brother...

jeff said...

woodworking? I suppose the significance is not lost on you: that was, of course, Joseph's trade, and presumably, Jesus himself learned it.

I think about the fact that this mentor of yours once had a mentor, and his mentor had a mentor, and so on. This string of brothers and sisters eventually leads to the person of Jesus as he walked the earth 2000 years ago. That's a pretty amazing thing.

Ρωμανός ~ Romanós said...

There's a lot of things about my elder that seemed like signs. Being woodworkers didn't impress me that much, because I looked at my apprenticeship under him as just God's way of letting me inherit the trade of my ancestors—both of my grandfathers were skilled tischlers (furniture craftsmen) from Europe, but they both died before I was old enough to start learning from them.

One of the strange things about my elder was that he was from a family of 12 brothers and one sister. Sounds familiar? The twelve sons of Jacob, and their sister Dinah! Even back at the turn of the century (19th to 20th), even in rural America, you would be hard pressed to find a farm family with exactly that combination of kids: 12 boys and 1 girl. I never asked him, but my guess is that there were probably more siblings than 13, as infant mortality was more common back then. Even in my Dad's family there was at least one sibling who died as a child and left my Dad (the youngest) a full 12 years younger than his next older (and only) surviving brother.

I always wondered, but again never asked, what position in the family my elder had. I'd like to have matched him up to one of the sons of Jacob. Was he possibly next to youngest like Joseph, my favorite Old Testament hero? I guess I can ask my elder when I see him again in paradise.

Andrew Kenny said...

A good post Romanos- we learn more about you:a little at a time,

Today I met with a man who was my spiritual mentor from the age of fifteen until about 19.He was 10 years older and guided me during the early years of my spiritual life. That role too was imprinted upon me and I seek to reach out to the lost and nurture young Christians in the same manner he did towards me.

However when I was 19 he got involved with the ‘Shepherding ‘ or 'Discipleship' movement which was big in the States at the time and spread across the world.It was then our relationship got very strained- it became very controlling and manipulative for the next 7 years. Whereas the previous years became precious memories to me the later years became a nightmare.

It was therefore good to talk to him today about it and hear from him how he had become deceived by this bad teaching and also bad practice! It really did devastate a lot of people.

I didn't go to him with angst( I had done that many years before) but sought to find out what his reflections were regarding that time.

Anyway, I told him how much I did appreciate him at the beginning of our relationship ( which still impacts on me to this day)and I believe there was a certain amount of healing that took place in both of us.

Sorry if I'm way off with these comments but it seemed interesting that you were speaking about your mentor and I had just spent some time with a man who had once been mine.

For those interested the 'Shepherding' was a forced mentoring that also subverted the young Christians relationship with Christ and ultimately brought judgement to those who abused their power ( See also Ezek.34)

Ρωμανός ~ Romanós said...

Andrew, you are not way off with your comments at all. Your thoughts and reminiscences are very valuable here, because by your testimony you show that formal mentoring often (if not usually) ends up in spiritual malpractice, if I may call it that. My relationship with Philip Holte, my mentor, was so absolutely free of that, that there is no spoiled memory at all in my entire experience with him. He did not ever claim to be my mentor, yet that is what he was. He taught me the most important lesson of my life, which I have blogged about, "Love without limit." That's even the title of the post about it.

Orthodox Christianity has had a longer history of formal mentoring than almost any other religious group, and this is normative for us in the form of having a "confessor", most of whom are so humble, that there also is no danger of exceeding one's spiritual and scriptural authority. But there have been some glaring exceptions.

Personally I abide by the words of Christ, "You have only one Teacher, the Messiah." I was most fortunate in finding Him in the words and deeds of one of His hidden but most faithful followers, my "mentor" Philip.

Go with God, Andrew, and thanks for your comment!