I have been absent during the past two weeks, and it was not planned ahead of time. I’m still not back in a close-to-normal routine today, but to be honest, I don’t want to go back to what used to feel normal. I want renewal, revival, growth. I want old things to wither and new things to take root. Maybe I should design a new face for the blog.

But about my absence–my father-in-law died suddenly early Monday, May 12. My sister-in-law, who is a great nurse practitioner, called us to pray while he was still having chest pains, and then afterwards to tell us he had passed away. We were praying the Lord would have mercy, and He did, just not the way we anticipated.

I’m glad I heard all of the tributes he received from friends and supporters at his funeral at Briarwood Presbyterian (PCA). He was the administrator for Partners in Asian Missions, so he had thousands of friends around the world. Hearing their praise and prayers repeatedly stirred me. I’m thankful to be in his family.

Of course, that week was harder on my good wife than it was on me, but the Lord has not left us to grieve alone. He has been with us as we walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Surely goodness and mercy . . . surely goodness and mercy . . .

Added to this trial, we’ve had a couple material disappointments. A week ago Friday, I decided to finish off the homemade ice cream and found it melted in the freezer. Our six-year-old refrigerator had short-circuited. We finally got a replacement delivered today, so we’ve been the week without a fridge. And when I returned from work last Thursday, we discovered our glass exterior door (the one outside our front door) had shattered. At first, we thought of vandals, but we have learned it was an accident.

So, I’ve been out of the office blogwise. I appreciate your prayers and even for taking the time to read this post. Let me pass on a message from my other sister-in-law, who is a great homemaker in America’s northern-most state, about her dad and the influence he has had on us.

No Time To Waste – My Father’s Life

Susanna Biederman

Sunday, May 18, 2008 at 10:16am

For those of you who don’t know already, my dad died and went to be with Jesus on May 12. I went to Alabama and Texas to be with my family for the funeral and burial. It was very comforting to hear what my dad’s closest friends had to say about him. But I think my cousin, Becca, put into words better than anyone else. Here is what she wrote…

My uncle, Jerry Sharpe, passed away earlier this week. Well, actually, to be truthful, for some unknown reason, God decided that it was time Jerry joined Him in Heaven and took him. It was a sudden heart attack, a surprise to all of his family.

Uncle Jerry was an amazing man. He leaves behind a legacy as a husband, a father, an uncle, a brother-in-law, a grandfather, a pastor…. I will miss getting his updates and prayer letters from his travels throughout Asia where he worked with national pastors. I will miss having him at those times when our extended family gets together to celebrate life in some way – whether Christmas or anniversaries or birthdays or summer vacations.

I find myself grieving for my cousins who are now without him, for Jean, his new wife that I haven’t even met, for my mother who treasured him as a brother-in-law. And I find myself grieving for myself; I will miss him. In some ways, he influenced my willingness to come to Asia. He challenged me in some way every time I had a conversation with him – challenged me not to settle for anything less than being sold out for Christ. And I don’t think he even realized that was what he was doing. He just did it.

So this week, as I’ve been grieving and pondering his life and influence, and wishing I could be with my family for the funeral, I’ve also been reminded how short our lives are. We don’t have much time – we really don’t! We don’t have time to focus on the little things that distract us from living for the big picture. We don’t have time to waste on the big things of this world that distract us from the little things that matter. We don’t have time to not pour out ourselves into the relationships that God puts in our lives. We don’t have time to not risk everything in order to go and make disciples of all nations. We don’t have time to not fix our eyes on Jesus and run after Him in passionate pursuit. We don’t have time to not live out our lives fully, wholeheartedly, completely devoted to pursuing God and His purposes for us. We don’t have time to not be on fire for Him. We just don’t have the time to not make our lives count.

I had a disturbing experience today, in the men’s room.

(If ever there were an opening sentence calculated to send most of our readers running from their computers, doing their Edvard Munch “Scream” imitations, that ought to be it.)

But honestly, this post isn’t about the natural functions of the human body. It is about plumbing, but the brass-and-chrome kind.

I called our maintenance guy yesterday, to let him know that the automatic flush devices in the men’s room had stopped working. I’m sure you’ve encountered such things. An electric eye senses when someone comes close and then goes away, and at that point it triggers a flush. The electric eyes here had stopped working.

So the maintenance guy came to look today. He passed his hand over one of the electric eyes.

The device flushed.

He tried the others. He found that sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. They definitely need maintenance.

But the thing is, he was able to trigger the electric eyes some of the time.

I tried it again. Nothing.

It was as if I were a walking phantasm, a shadow being, a monstrous thing of mist compounded.

I was a little afraid to check the mirror, for fear I’d have no reflection. (But I did. It was OK.)

Still, it was a troubling experience.

Then I thought, “Maybe I should make lemonade from this. If I’m invisible to electric eyes, I might have a brilliant future as a jewel thief.”

Continuing my one-man, hate-filled vendetta against the new Prince Caspian movie, I’ll link to a couple blog reviews today.

Christopher Cowan of The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has posted two pieces on the movie—here and here. His reservations are much the same as mine. Except for being more coherent, better developed, and properly researched, of course.

Gene Edward Veith at Cranach was disappointed with the movie, for a different reason.

Everything I read tells me that this is probably a pretty good flick, one which I’d enjoy under other circumstances.

But as an adaptation of Prince Caspian, it appears to be deeply flawed.

I’m sad about that.

It seems to me that one of the problems with believing in Karma (not that I’m seriously considering it) would be that most of us are prone to think we’ve earned less of the bad stuff, and deserved more of the good stuff, than is actually the case.

To choose an example entirely at random, take me. This was The Weekend of the Set-up Crew for me. As you know if you’ve been following my bellyaching, my church meets in a gymnasium, and we have five teams that rotate rolling out the tarps and setting up chairs, stage, sound system, etc. It usually only involves one hour on Saturday and another hour after church on Sunday morning.

This weekend was not my team’s turn. But a call went out that most of this week’s team had conflicts (crafty villains that they were), and could somebody help? So I agreed, despite my abhorrence for both physical work and the society of my fellow man. I then learned that this weekend would involve three hours. First there’d be the routine Saturday set-up. Then on Sunday, instead of tearing down after church, we’d have to move some stuff around and set up risers, because our school was having its graduation ceremony that night. And then we’d have to come in Sunday night, after the ceremony, to do the actual tear-down.

It’s with considerable self-complacency that I inform you that not one of the regular team was present for all three sessions. Only one, lone volunteer did that—Your Arrogant Servant.

In my mind, I’m paddling in the deep end of an Olympic-size pool of good karma.

Let me tell you—any enterprise that depends on the energy and industry of Lars Walker for its success is in a bad way. Any crew whose most reliable physical laborer is Lars Walker is clearly suffering from malaise, decomposition and decline.

It hope it’s not a portent of my church’s future.

Had any trouble pulling out this blog lately? The vast technical team that keeps this blog running is working on a potential problem, but they want to hear about your experience good or bad. I guess they don’t want to take Lars and my word for it. I’d ask who pays the bills around here, but that would just escalate the tension. So, has BwB been slow on your end?

This was the first perfect day of the year, from a weather point of view (or at least from mine). It wasn’t just “sort of warm if you overlooked the frigid undertones.” It was genuinely warm, without any equivocation or small print. You probably would have preferred yesterday, since my thermostat is set a little warmer than most people’s, but I think you would have agreed that today was nevertheless the caterpillar’s overcoat (1920s slang cribbed from P. G. Wodehouse).



If you’re deeply conflicted (like all good Americans) by my critique of reports on the Prince Caspian movie yesterday, and want a good reason to see the movie in spite of my carping, Dirty Harry at Libertas gives a strong argument here.

We are nothing if not openminded here at Brandywine Books. Our openmindedness is the same as that of America’s greatest educational institutions—we present a broad range of opinions stretching all the way from people who almost agree with me on the right to people who almost agree with me on the left.

It seems to have fallen off the news radar today, but I meant to mention this story yesterday. The wildfires described are located precisely in the area where I lived, when I lived in Florida. I had a mobile home in a park on US 1 in Malabar, and my parents lived in Palm Bay. I’m not actually in touch with anybody down there anymore, but I pray my old friends haven’t suffered any loss (assuming any of them are still in town).

It’s all Florida scrub down there, and from an ecological point of view a wildfire every twenty years is the best thing that could happen. I can say that, of course, because I don’t own any property there anymore.

I paged through WORLD Magazine yesterday, and saw that they published a big, vividly illustrated article on the new Prince Caspian movie.

The article was very positive, even boosterish, but it had the opposite effect on me than was intended. I’d been excited to see the movie, but after reading the article I made the sad decision not to go.

What set me off was a statement that director Andrew Adamson decided to make Susan Pevensey a warrior in the battle (in the film), though Lewis had made it a point to keep her out of it (in the book).

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. I understand that I’m touchy and obsessive on the subject, but there are times when madmen (like me) can see the truth that sane people can’t, because we look where nobody else is looking. If it’s true that the truths that are most important to defend in any age are precisely those that are most despised, then madmen are sometimes the bloodhounds who smell out what the truth-hunters don’t see.

The decision to kick aside a plot point that mattered to Lewis, just because it’s unfashionable, is not a minor matter (or so it seems to me). In this situation it’s a declaration that there is no special calling for a man to be warrior and protector in the world. Nobody seems to see this, but to me it’s obvious—such a view has dangerous, catastrophic consequences, not only for boys and men but for society as a whole. It’s an assertion (one at which Lewis would have snorted in contempt) that there is no essential difference between men and women; that there are only interchangeable hominid units.

You think this doesn’t matter for society? Look at what happened at the California Supreme Court today, where the justices struck down the state’s marriage protection law. The court’s decision was based, at bottom, on the conviction that men and women are interchangeable. Marry a man. Marry a woman. Take your choice, it’s all the same.

If you think the court decision was good, you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about. But if it troubles you, maybe you’ll see what I’m trying to say.

Even if I’m nuts.

Finally got in a walk tonight. What with bad weather and uneven health, I haven’t been able to do that for a month.

I spent the morning with a salesman for the company that provides our library cataloging software. We’re essentially in the Bronze Age in our technology, and it’s going to have to be upgraded. Unfortunately, I fear we won’t be able to go with these guys anymore, because I suspect our schools won’t spring for the price tag.

But it was an enjoyable few hours. The salesman was an Englishman, transplanted to America, and in the dead spaces caused by some wireless connection problems we found that we have shared enthusiasms for Norway, Monty Python and Patrick O’Brien.

It’s a rare pleasure for me to spend time with someone who wants something from me, and so is forced to act if I were good company.

Here’s a story the Sons of Norway won’t be highlighting anytime soon. One of the noted Norwegian-Americans we don’t talk about much was an Indiana farm woman named Belle Gunness. She was a celebrity in her time—one of America’s first known serial killers, and an example of the rare female variety at that. The University of Indianapolis has exhumed the body identified as hers after her house mysteriously burned down in 1908 (evidence is strong that it was another woman Belle murdered to fake her own death), along with Belle’s children (named Sorensen and Gunness due to multiple marriages), whom Belle probably poisoned to death before setting the fire. They’re going to do DNA tests to see if they’re all related or not. Continue reading The bell tolls for Belle, the troll →