Cold Rice

This story of motherhood is not full of dandelion bouquets, ice cream, safety and comfort.  But I hope I can be more like this faithful woman's mother as I continue on my own parenting journey.

My mother, in a quiet place, with her grandson.

Esther Ahn Kim's mother had neither church nor Bible.  She taught her daughter to live by four tenets that a missionary had taught her when she was a child:
1. Jesus is the only Son of God and is the only Savior.
2. Jesus will never forsake his believers.
3. Jesus is able to take all the misfortunes of believers and turn them into good.
4. Jesus hears the prayers of his children.


My mother was one of those persons who always lived for others.  Once a week she filled a sack with aspirin, salve, candy, and tissue paper and visited the poor.  I had never seen her eat warm rice.  She would always cook a large amount of rice at one time.
"If I have plenty of cooked rice," she told me when I asked her about it, "I can give some to a beggar when he comes.  In order to follow Jesus, I think we should always be prepared to give to others."
Mother was so different from the other members of my father's household.  They only gave away that which they did not want to keep for themselves.  They seemed to hate each other and only lived from day to day.  They had no God, no holy day, no true joy of confidence.  Wherever Mother was, it was like a chapel of heaven around her.


By 1939, most missionaries had left Korea because the Japanese occupation endangered the local people when they had contact with them.  Everyone was commanded to only speak Japanese and take on Japanese surnames.  Those who didn't comply would lose their jobs and their children wouldn't be allowed in school.
  Shrines were built in every city, and small ones were placed in every school, church, and house.  It became a rule that every Korean must bow before the shrines.  Esther was a music teacher when her school was called to a rally at a great shrine in Seoul.  She had no choice but to go, though she felt very much like she was marching to her own execution as she led her students up the mountain.  The bold words of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego echoed against the fear in her mind.

Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O King.  But if not, be it known to you, O King, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.  
Daniel 3:17-18

In eerily coincidental fashion, the order came to bow.  As one, the entire great crowd obeyed, bending the upper half of their bodies at a straight angle.
Only one person remained standing.

Four detectives were waiting in her classroom; her students watched as Esther was led away for her brazen disobedience.  Though she managed to slip away before being incarcerated, she felt the need to prepare herself for the cold prison cell ultimately awaiting her.  She slipped onto a train, and her mother met her in the far north, near the Manchurian border, where the two of them found an isolated, deserted house.  This place was both retreat and preparation.  Her mother knew Esther's fear and frailty, but she also knew the strength of God.  She did not try to keep her daughter from impending suffering.  She helped her prepare for it.
In the weeks they were there, Esther memorized hymns and over 100 chapters of the Bible.  She fasted for longer and longer periods, even from water.  She slept without a quilt.  She practiced living in deep poverty, eating rotten beans and poor produce.  She expected it would only be worse in the prison camps.  She had many clandestine meetings with persecuted Christians who already hid in the mountains and could tell her their stories of torture and pain.  All too soon, she heard the Japanese knew of her whereabouts, and she had to flee.  Alone.

It was hard for Mother to see me leave... The tears flowed as I thought of Mother, who was left alone now with her aching heart.  She would be even more dependent upon the Lord than before.

When next they met, Esther's mother told her "The time has come for you to prepare yourself to die."  So, as Esther put it, she started "practicing to die."  In fact, she felt a burden to go to the Japanese and tell them of their wrong before God.  She left Korea and headed for Tokyo.  No longer waiting for death, Esther was diving into it.  Her mother watched her determine to follow God's directing, saying, "Concerning your going to warn the Japanese authorities, I can think of many things that make me feel that God has planed this for you since you were a child."
Esther and a friend made their way upward, talking and preaching to many in authority throughout the capital.  Finally they made it into the Japanese legislature.  They spoke boldly.  They were arrested.

Esther spent the next 6 years in prison, mostly in Pyongyang.  Often she expected to die.  She used the time to speak and live before many other prisoners and guards.  But years of cold, sickness, harsh treatment, and little food aged and weakened her body.  At one point, the prison doctor asked that she be released because she was growing blind and had frostbitten feet.  She met her mother outside.  The matron woman's figure was waif-thin and she hobbled painfully.  She remonstrated her daughter, explaining what life was like beyond the prison's brick walls.

We can get nothing except by rationing... We eat anything we can get... Because of these, I am blind; I cannot see your face... We can't get fuel.  My feet are so frostbitten I can hardly walk.  A citizen who is loyal to God has no place in this world.  Christians in prison are dying, but so are the believers outside...  Didn't you give everything to the Lord, including your eyes?

Esther thanked her mother for reminding her of reality, then asked the guard to return her to her frigid cell.  "I have never seen anything like this before," said the Korean senior officer.  "The daughter is great.  The mother is greater."

Thirty-four Christians had entered Pyongyang prison in 1940.  On August 17, 1945, when the cells were opened and the Japanese occupation was over, fourteen had survived.  Esther and her family fled from North Korea, where the Russian occupation would prove to be worse even than the Japanese.  In Seoul, she met her husband.  She'd always wanted to marry an engineer; but her mother had always hoped she'd marry a pastor.  Esther said, "Mother and I had competed against each other in our prayers.   We both laughed at our predicament."  It wasn't long before Esther's husband gave up his engineering work to become a pastor.

Esther's mother was nurturing and very caring.  But her sympathy did not make her soft.  She was not stoic, but managed to be strong and courageous in the face of both her and her own daughter's intense suffering.  It is agonizingly difficult to speak the prayer, "Do whatever You will with my child," knowing that it may very well not be physical comfort, ease or happiness.
Yet I suspect there was never a mother prouder of her child, or a child more loved and prayed for than Esther Ahn Kim.

I always felt strengthened when I talked with Mother about God and His love.  I began to think that life might be worth living in this time of persecution.  It might even be a truer picture of the believer to agonize, to suffer, to be hated, and tortured, and even to be killed in obeying God's words rather than to live an ordinary, uneventful life. 
-Esther Ahn Kim

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you... Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Matthew 5:11-12



(Most of this story was taken from the book, Faithful Women and their Extraordinary God by Noel Piper.  Piper obtained the quotes and biography from If I Perish by Esther Ahn Kim.)

At last, God comes first.

No one would have blamed her for staying home.
No one would have said she was wrong.
No one would have disagreed with her logic.

The plan now laid before her was to spend a year traveling unreached northern portions of China at the beginning of the 20th century.  It meant transient life, poor sanitation and living conditions, far from anywhere, threat of rampant smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet fever epidemics constantly.  She had buried four children already.  The family had almost died many times during the Boxer Rebellion.  Rosalind Goforth agonized as her husband Jonathan asked her and their three youngest children to join him now on this new venture.

In my innermost soul I knew the call had come from God, but I would not pay the price. My one plea in refusing to enter that life was the risk to the children.



Again and again my husband urged that "the safest place" for myself and the children "was the path of duty"; that I could not keep them in our comfortable home at Changte, but "God could keep them anywhere." Still I refused. 
Just before reaching our station he begged me to reconsider my decision. When I gave a final refusal, his only answer was, "I fear for the children."



I have honestly never been in this woman's shoes.  There have been dark times, hard times, painful times of learning to trust God's leading when I could not see the path before me.  But I have only felt the faintest inkling of difficulty compared to many that have gone before me.  Is it possible to learn a lesson just from someone else's example?


The very day after reaching home our dear Wallace was taken ill. For weeks we fought for his life; at last the crisis passed and he began to recover. Then my husband started off alone on his first trip! He had been gone only a day or two when our precious Constance, a year old, was taken down with the same disease that Wallace had. From the first there seemed little or no hope. The doctors, a nurse, and all the little mission circle joined in the fight for her life. Her father was sent for, but arrived just as she was losing consciousness. 
A few hours later, when we were kneeling round her bedside waiting for the end, my eyes seemed suddenly opened to what I had been doing -- I had dared to fight against Almighty God.

In the moments that followed God revealed Himself to me in such love and majesty and glory that I gave myself to Him with unspeakable joy. Then I knew that I had been making an awful mistake, and that I could indeed safely trust my children to Him wherever He might lead. 

I saw at last that God must come first.

As I write this, eighteen years have passed since we started on that first trip, and none of our children has died. Never had we as little sickness as during that life. 

Oh me of little faith!  To know God as dearly as this woman did would mean I must trust Him as fully. I get upset when we have to disrupt nap time!  How much I have to learn!  A long, typical Monday is enough to ruffle my feathers.  But to have such a relationship with my Creator as she did, I have barely dared to indulge for fear of the difficulty.  Yet I know it is worth it all.  Incomparably.

Trust the hands that guide you...

As I recall those years of touring life with our children, words fail me to tell of all the Lord's goodness to them and me. Though there were many hard, hard places, these were but opportunities for special grace and help. 
Many times, when discouraged almost to the point of never going out again with the children, there would come evidence that the Lord was using our family life, lived among the people, to win them to Christ. Then I would take new courage, and go again. It is so true that:

We may trust Him fully

All for us to do;

Those who trust Him wholly

Find Him wholly true.     

(All italicized words quoted from How I Know God Answers Prayer by Rosalind Goforth.  Chapter 6.)

From Thorns

 In 1879, the artist John Ruskin said "she would be the greatest living painter and do things that would be Immortal."  But to do so, he said she would have to give up her pursuit of spiritually-focused social work and devote her life to developing her art.  After a great deal of prayer, Lillias Trotter decided. She gave up a promising career as an artist.  Instead, she spent the next four decades living in North Africa among the Arab people as a missionary.  Her paintings are hidden away in the archives of the Asmolean Museum in England, viewable only upon request.  Her canvas became the hearts of the culture-cloistered Arab women of Algiers.  Her paints - the vibrant love of a God they wouldn't have otherwise known.  But Ruskin was right.  Lillias indeed did things that were immortal.  We'll see the masterpiece in heaven.
This is taken from a little devotional book she penned about 100 years ago.
I am captivated.

See this bit of gorse-bush. The whole year round the thorn has been hardening and sharpening. Spring comes: the thorn does not drop off, and it does not soften; there it is, as uncompromising as ever; but half-way up appear two brown furry balls, mere specks at first, that break at last--straight out of last year's thorn--into a blaze of fragrant golden glory.

"Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them that are exercised thereby." Never mind if the trouble shews no sign of giving way: it is just when it seems most hopelessly unyielding, holding on through the spring days, alive and strong, it is then that the tiny buds appear that soon will clothe it with glory. Take the very hardest thing in your life--the place of difficulty, outward or inward, and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot. Just there He can bring your soul into blossom!

Excerpt and painting from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Parables of the Cross, by I. Lilias Trotter

www.gutenberg.org
[EBook #22189]

Biographical details taken from A Blossom in the Desert, compiled and edited by Miriam Huffman Rockness.

Discovery House. 2007.

Dirty Laundry

I love my other half.  He eats what I cook, he lets me spend the money he earns, he plays with his children, and values my opinion on most things other than if the food is salty enough.  But, ahem, he isn't perfect.
Yes he takes the trash out when he's home, but no, he doesn't put his dirty socks in the laundry pile.  And other stuff.

You know the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?  Those men who were there at the beginning?  They were the first men God promised to make a special people out of.  And He did.  I mean, they are in the Bible.
But it wasn't because they were particularly good at hitting the hamper with their own dirty socks.  Actually, Genesis has a fair laundry list against them.

The socks I will pick up later.

I'm gonna take some license here and tell an old story.

Can you imagine being married to Jacob?  You wouldn't be alone.  He was also married to your prettier little sister, and had two girlfriends and their kids in the tent too.  When you first met him, he had nothing but a stick to his middle aged name.  In fact, he was kind of a momma's boy.  Your dad saw that, and took advantage of him for 20 years.  You wept on your wedding night, dreading the morning when he realized who lay beside him in bed, and he would get up, disappointed and angry.  In your anguish, you cried out to God.  He granted you children - babies to cuddle to your broken heart.  You carried many of his children - and the ensuing baby weight that your sister never gained.  You were the unloved wife of a stinking, dirty shepherd.  Divorce was not an option because you would starve or be stoned to death.  Life seemed pretty bleak.
Finally, one night, your husband hit his midlife crisis.  Being a late bloomer, he was already an aging man.  Now he had led you into the desert with everything you owned, claiming some unproven old promise from God.  But you knew his older brother was coming to find him out here.  Last you'd heard, his older brother, who was quite a weapons expert, wanted to kill him.  Would you be killed too - or ravaged and made a slave?  What about all your children?  Your husband wasn't the fighting type - he was instead attempting to buy off his brother with your children's inheritance.  You didn't sleep well that night.  Perhaps you prayed, desperately, for the God of your husband's grandfather to now be real to you.  You begged  Him to see you, stranded between the brazen sky and the baked earth, and save you.  Save your children.  Save your crazy old pansy husband!

Your husband couldn't sleep either.  Would it be his last night alive?  You saw him out by the makeshift sheepfold across the brook, graying head bent low to the dry ground.  Your husband was more of a conniver, not a pray-er.  You watched for a long time.  A man approached him as he knelt.  Was it a man from his brother's camp?  It was too dark to see his face.  You shivered.  Jacob stood up and faced him.  The man was taller and was built more like a strong carpenter than your shepherd husband.  Jacob looked like he was whining to the man, gesturing and sighing.  The man said little, but after a few minutes held up his hand to halt him.  Something seemed to snap in Jacob.  He lunged at the stranger, and they started to brawl.  The man looked like he could easily throw your old husband off, but continued to wrestle.  For hours, you watched them.  It almost looked like a father play-fighting with his little son.  Jacob threw frenzied punches, the man easily deflecting them.  He occasionally jabbed Jacob with firm blows, sending Jacob reeling, though he returned again for more.  The stranger obviously could have killed him, yet it was clear he wasn't going to.  As the night wore on, you felt a slight satisfaction when the man punched him.  Years of your own frustrated hope in your husband lessened, a little, in those hours.  There was no weaseling out of this fight.  And Jacob didn't try to.  You almost enjoyed watching him get beat, yet you started to feel an odd sensation of pride as again and again your husband stood his ground.
Finally, the gray of early dawn started to streak the east sky.
There were dark splotches on Jacob's face.  You assumed they were blood.  The man's face was still veiled in shadows.  He looked toward the sky, and back at Jacob who clung to his legs in exhausted determination.  He spoke to Jacob, who shook his head vehemently and gripped more tightly.  The man reached down, gently, almost tenderly, and tapped Jacob on the hip.  Immediately, Jacob lurched back, tumbling harshly against the sheepfold door.  You gasped, and ran out of the tent toward him, splashing across the river to his side.  He wasn't dead; he was breathing heavily.  You looked up wildly for the stranger.  He was gone.

Jacob was a mess.  His eyes were swelling; there was a cut on his jaw.  He smelled of hours of stress and sweat.  But miraculously, you could find nothing broken beneath the bruises.  The only major injury seemed to be his hip.  He seemed unable to lift his leg.
You managed to get under his shoulder and help him stand.  He draped an arm over you and straightened.  You glanced over at his face in surprise.  Was it possible he was standing straighter than he had before this fight?  On an injured hip?  He felt your gaze, and turned his gray beard toward you.  He looked at you.  He looked right into your eyes and held your gaze for a long minute.  In twenty years, he had never been able to look you in the eyes.  Suddenly, you felt a little weak.  He smiled, just slightly under the swelling, and sighed.  A deep, exhausted, satisfied sigh.
"I am a blessed man."  He said.
You were never prouder to be called his wife.

It wasn't even an hour later that you held your breath as you watched from across the river.  Jacob winced as his muscular brother slapped him on the back.  But leaning on his cane, he stood firmly. And you didn't die.  In fact, they met and parted peacefully.  And life went on.  Jacob took your family to his beautiful homeland.  You settled in.
But life and marriage weren't perfect even after that.  You sister died giving birth to her second son.  Her oldest tragically disappeared.  You saw your husband stagger under these devastating blows.  Then your own beautiful daughter was raped, and you watched your hotheaded sons carve a wake of destruction as liars, cheaters, murderers, and adulterers.  And, of course, the baby weight never came off.
But in those twilight years, sometimes in the evening you would sit with Jacob outside the tent and watch little Ben play in the sand.  After your sister died, you raised her son on your own knees.  But oddly, he brought out a tenderness rather than animosity in you.  You laughed with Jacob over his funny antics.  And your husband told you about the God of his father and grandfather.  This God had promised to make your children into a great nation.  You were incredulous.  How could any deity take your ragtag bunch of misfits and turn them into anything worth noting?  And why would a God capable of that even bother start with such losers?  Yet Jacob said that on the night of that fateful wrestling match, God had once again affirmed the promise.  You never said it to him, of course, but your husband before that fight wasn't much of a man.  Something miraculous had happened to change him.  You would have given up on him long before that night.  You practically had.  But apparently this God hadn't.
The next feast day, grandchild after young giggling grandchild filled your tent.  Noise and the smells of fresh bread and roasting meat all mingled in a joyous, messy cacophony around you.  You caught sight of your old husband, leaning heavily on his stick, surrounded by burly, boisterous men - your sons.  And you - the matriarch of this family - bustled around, shouting orders, shooing children away from the oven, sharing gossip with all your daughters and daughters-in-law, and kissing the youngest grandbabies.
In the midst of the hubbub and chatter, you were startled by a sudden thought.  All those years of heartbreak and frustration, all the tears and pain when your prayers seemed to go unanswered, perhaps they were not in vain.
Perhaps Jacob's God just liked proving points through wimpy shepherds.
Perhaps He liked to use the most unlikely people to show just how capable He really was.
Perhaps He really had heard your anguished prayers for your husband and children in those miserable early days.
Perhaps, just perhaps, this God loved you enough that He would pursue you throughout your whole life until you learned the lesson.
Perhaps all the pain was simply to prove the miracle to your own unbelieving heart.

Perhaps, just perhaps, you had to be broken by God to realize you were one for whom God would fight.

Perhaps, what men meant for evil, God had plans all along to use for your good.

Wrestling with Daddy.

Even, perhaps, the dirty socks.

To lie down under his smiles

I thought of her the other day as I wrangled all four boys through a multi-specialist doctor visit for the baby.  We survived, so did the doctors, though the hearing test was a bit difficult with my two year old knocking on the door of the not-so-sound-proof booth.  Still, I was proud of my little brood for not having any meltdowns, or critiquing any strangers too loudly, not running too fast in the halls, and not licking the glass of the doctors' fish tanks.  They aren't that bad, as kids go.  In public.  On Wednesdays.  In a leap year.
But I've been thinking of a woman who served the Lord by raising 11 children in the years before running water, electricity, antibiotics, minivans and educational public television.  I am humbled by the enduring example of Sarah Edwards.

The power went out as I started to write this.  Appropriate; get me in the mood as I type on battery power on my laptop; I'll have a taste of how her evenings must have felt.  Blogging by candlelight, keeping the fridge closed to retain the cold; relegated to snacking on old chocolate bars in the pantry.  My respect for her hard life is growing even now.  Can you imagine life without ice cream in the freezer?!?

In 1727, seventeen year old Sarah was married to a young preacher named Jonathan Edwards, pastor of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts.  He was an intense man, brilliant, philosophical and introverted.  By his own admission, he was not full of social graces.  He had graduated from Yale at age 19 to begin preaching.  The Great Awakening, a revival that spread throughout New England in the mid eighteenth century, began in his parish.  He wrote many forceful sermons which endure today, including "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and "Religious Affections."  His life ended in 1758, shortly after he accepted the position of president at what would become Princeton University.
Sarah, a thinker in her own right, was his opposite and perfect counterpart, outgoing and gracious, and the consummate hostess to the steady stream of visitors which flowed through their parsonage.  She carried the bulk of the job of raising their eleven children, disciplining, clothing, and feeding them all, cleaning and maintaining the home, caring for their farm, entertaining guests and filling her marriage with love and spiritual insight which her husband highly valued.  She freed him to study, write, and attend to his congregation.  He normally spent 13 hours daily in his study, though he always set aside one hour of the day to engage with his children.  Sarah was responsible for the rest.
(At first I didn't think that sounded like much, but I stopped to consider it.  A daily, guaranteed full hour together with no t.v., phones, or internet, not spent catching up with the bills, or reading, or in the garage working on some man project, would mean a great deal of interaction and conversation in a family.  It sounds quite nice, actually.)
There is fair evidence to show they did their job.  A study was done in 1900 on John and Sarah's descendants.  By that year, their marriage had produced:
"13 college presidents
65 professors
100 lawyers and the dean of a law school
30 judges
65 physicians and the dean of a medical school
80 holders of public office, including:
3 US senators
mayors of 3 large cities
governors of 3 states
a vice president of the US
a controller of the US Treasury
Members of the family wrote 135 books...edited 18 journals and periodicals.  They entered the ministry in platoons and sent one hundred missionaries overseas, as well as stocking many mission boards with lay trustees." (You can find this in a book called Marriage to a Difficult Man by Elizabeth Dodds, pages 31-32, which I have just started reading and want to share a bit.)
The study went on to list all kinds of industries and businesses that descendants of the Edwards owned or had charge of.  "There is scarcely any great American industry that has not had one of this family among its chief promoters... Has any other mother contributed more vitally to the leadership of a nation?"

Talk about a legacy.  I'm glad at the end of the day that my descendants are still alive and the house is still standing.  Maybe I should set my sights a bit higher.  I will grant myself a bit of leeway; after all, she had a servant or two, and her five oldest children were girls.  Those facts probably decreased some of the mayhem.  But she didn't have flushable toilets or grocery stores down the street either... Or a dishwasher, washing machine, central heating, electricity, a local hospital, a government, a car, a computer, a refrigerator, or Facebook.  And she left an impact.  I don't want to be raising cain; I want to be raising the bar.  I think it is right to be challenged by her example.  It is all for God.  I want to make the effort count!

Her husband once quoted her (I read this first in Faithful Women and Their Extraordinary God by Noel Piper),
"Oh how good...is it to work for God in the day-time, and at night to lie down under his smiles!.. But worldly business has been attended to with great alarcity, as part of the service of God... it being done thus, it was found to be as good as prayer."