Reminiscing Amongst Marigolds

Alexander Lee

Like King Solomon, I occasionally get my hands dirty working in a garden. But while Solomon grew cypresses and henna trees and vines in his garden, populating it with monkeys and peacocks, I in mine mainly spread mulch around, and plant little marigolds where my wife with her spade indicates in the dirt. Unlike Solomon, I have only one wife. Yet the king and I agree, after seeing enough of life, that in the end, “all is vanity and chasing after wind.”

When I was a child, I thought and understood as a child, as it says in 1 Corinthians. I was born in a small trading town by the sea in the Philippines. In my grandparents’ grand house, I whooped and whined and whiled away the days as though the hours were inexhaustible. My childhood memories are vague, but they are wrapped within a membrane of contentment. Nonetheless, being memories, their substance is lost to time. Nothing in this life, as Solomon realized, lasts forever.

The apostle Paul writes that when he became a man, he “put away childish things.” Often, we simply outgrow those childish things. But often also, we cling to them like toddlers with security blankets.

In my later years at a Catholic school in Cebu City, basketball became my main juvenile preoccupation. I shot hoops under the tropical sun, eager to dunk the ball through the sheer intensity of my desire. My height however, at 5 feet 9 inches, brought my aspiration down to earth. My spirit was willing, but the flesh was not tall enough. My love of the game diminished, to be replaced at around sixth grade with reading and literature. Soon I was writing adolescent adventure stories and long narrative poems, all of them increasingly serious in style, but invariably self-conscious and self-serving. My ideas turned secular, doubtless in reaction to the religious flavor of my education, but likely as well as a result of the strict Jesuit regimen of that education.

The Jesuits were gung-ho on rationalism and independent thinking. The act of writing, to an impressionable and immature student, allowed—welcomed—the investigation of new ideas and exploration of one’s fancies. In my senior year of high school, my parents sent me to the United States as an exchange student, and there, in the heady, easy-going freedom of American public education, my creativity blossomed. I lived a year in Oregon, returning to the Philippines in denim overalls, sunglasses, and a sweatshirt that showed the shark from Jaws, the summer blockbuster that year.

My sojourn in America transformed me into a bohemian, cool in aspect and sensibility. But unknown to me, within the bouquet of my creativity lay the seeds of intellectualism. In college, that intellectualism turned fervent and then fierce. All the Bible stories I had learned at home and in school suddenly lost credence. Adam, Eve, Noah? Eden, the Flood, a talking donkey? These characters and notions were promptly tossed aside as hopelessly outdated, and along with them, their accompanying relevance. I stopped believing in a personal God; instead I was a neutral cogitator—a man after Rodin’s famous statue—and also a pedant and a bore.

I was above it all—above my mediocre grades, above my parents’ and peers’ approval, above society’s mores. I questioned everything, and therefore was beyond reproach.

I continued to attend Mass to pacify my mother, who was devoutly Catholic. But being agnostic, I sneered inwardly at her devotion. One day I said to my mother, “Your religion makes things too complicated! I think the Protestants have got it right. If you’re going to be a Christian, all it ought to require is faith—no rituals or sacraments or ecclesiastical middlemen. Why can’t faith alone be enough?”

Sola Fide

My mother stared at me, aghast.

“I’m just being honest,” I clarified.

That must have counted for something—being honest. It kept me, thank God, from losing my way entirely.

Books, as it happened, were my sacramental relics. Books—from the Hardy Boys series, Reader’s Digest condensed novels, the tales of Poe and Stevenson and Borges, the volumes of humanist expostulation on my desk—had a hold on me, like opium. So, when the Christian library ship Logos docked at our city one rainy season, I went to check it out. It was there I picked up, out of all the thousands of books on offer, a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity . The Holy Spirit must have had a hand in that selection; certainly, the title intrigued me. Mere Christianity? Nothing but Christianity? And a book authored by a presumably wordy Oxford don?

I brought the book home and read it, and in the next months proceeded to read half a dozen more works by Lewis: The Problem of Pain, Surprised by Joy, The Pilgrim’s Regress , among others. They are with me still, on a shelf, a testament to God’s grace and good timing and eye for irony. Lewis’s candid elucidation, used by God, guided me through the thicket of intellectualism, and into the sunlit meadow of blessed knowledge.

The appeal of intellectualism is its permanent postponement of an ultimate answer. The questions posed by the human condition are many and difficult, and the humanist response to these is to say existence is a trackless desert and the final truth is that there is no final truth. Or else to say existence is a map, and where you are on the map depends of how you draw the map. Humanism is a perversely interesting undertaking, but it leads nowhere. Given that we all chase after wind, existentialists conclude life is all about the chasing; that whatever one does, so long as one is chasing anything, one will find oneself in some shape or other, and that is the end of it. Some people debunk matter and decry the chase altogether, identifying rather with the wind—with nothingness, nirvana. They believe chasing is futile because anything one catches or acquires just sets one back further from being nothing. C.S. Lewis persuaded me of the hopelessness of both ideologies. Lewis proposed Christ is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Presented thus, the options open to a seeking person are inescapable. I had enough sense, and certainly sufficient sin, to say, “Yes—You are Lord. Forgive me.”

SOLUS

Christus

I was baptized, in seawater no less, soon after my conversion after college. My mother, via her own road, had found Christ as well. When I recount to her that conversation, we had about faith in Christ being sufficient for salvation, she smiles, and forgives my teasing.

Upon becoming a Christian, my worldview shifted focus. International and interpersonal conflicts, instead of being indecipherable, revealed themselves to be the predictable terrestrial skirmishes in a war waged by spiritual combatants, and in which the only casualties are fleshand-blood partisans, namely us. Issues of psychology and philosophy were clarified in light of biblical wisdom. I retained my political antennae, and nurtured my mental life, grateful that it was fruitful and not, as it had been, bankrupt—which is not to say I experience no more issues of a personal nature. Why, yes, sin does continue to nip at my heels, and too frequently draws blood. To walk one’s faith is sometimes to sway and falter like a drunk, sometimes to swagger like a big shot, sometimes to leap like a buffoon. The unsaved can sin and chew gum at the same time. Christians can walk in faith and repent of their missteps at the same time—a miracle of ambulation.

Albeit more slowly, my heart softened, recovering from its old life of moralism and conceit, of impatience and indifference. The wheels of remorse, turning jerkily, move me onward to regular repentance.

Sola Gratia

Basketball, eons after the Bulls’ dynasty, elicits no interest in me. I am done with courting the muse of literature, and with making sense of the local news, and with deifying western civilization and American conservatism. Our continued on next page ideals too subtly turn into idols with hardly a change in enunciation, then as we watch, they vanish like wisps in the breeze. Over our joy and pain, over life and death, God is sovereign. In him we have our being (Acts 17). We hide (Psalm 91) under his wings. We may chase after wind, but Christ is the Lord of the wind and the end of all our chasing: the pearl of great price (Matthew 13) which no childish object in this world can replace or displace.

Sola Scriptura

I, like Paul, had grown to manhood. I taught freshman psychology at the local university, and on a couple of evenings went to “charismatic” prayer meetings. Soon my whole family was singing and worshipping at a Sunday service led by a Pentecostal missionary. In 1985 I taught English in China, and there met Virginia, from Illinois. We dated and got engaged; no fourteen years of waiting for us, a la Jacob and Rachel.

At age 28, I came to America, a married man and unemployed, but optimistic. In 1992, three years into a career with the Postal Service, and by then the father of two children, I took my oath of citizenship. Since that time, our world has changed, as surely as Middle Earth did. America, moving away from God inch by defiant inch, has today distanced itself from the divinity which inspired its founders. Yet God is yet at work here and elsewhere. The lawlessness around us is evidence of God’s foreknowing. God rules over the past and future; to Him both are present in one eternal moment. The prayers of the Church will approach critical mass until the moment the sky explodes in brilliance to reveal the King of glory unsheathing His terrible swift sword. As Billy Graham noted, a newspaper laid open beside a well-thumbed Bible can only affirm a believer’s faith.

Planting my wife’s marigolds in the spring, I can’t help recalling the previous flat of flowers I put in the ground twelve months ago. Flowers fade all right, as Isaiah observed, though he was no great gardener either. My knees ache from squatting. I am 63 years old, and a grandfather of four: Noah, Naomi, Oliver and Jonah, in order of appearance—a cast from the Old Testament. King Solomon bends down to give me a hand with the marigolds. “Easier than cultivating fig trees,” he opines, grabbing a trowel. When I turn my head, I see no one. The sky, though blue, darkens metaphysically. “It is nothing but wind,” I remind myself. I know there is a way to everlasting permanence— to an existence without and beyond expiration. It is a narrow way, but firm and trustworthy.

“I am the Way,” Christ says simply, beckoning. That is the choice of everyone’s journey.

Milestones

Births

Isla Hope was born to Josh and Brittany Bell on March 19. Isla joins her siblings Margaux, Naomi and Jack.

Louisa Ruth was born to Zach and Olivia Oslund on February 10 in Colorado Springs, CO. Louisa joins her big sister, Rose. Her maternal grandparents are Jon and Terri Penner and her paternal grandparents are Jeff and Alison Oslund.

Deaths

Pray for Pat Slone and family as they grieve the loss of Pat’s husband, Joe , who passed away on March 25 in Kentucky.

Pray for College Church missionary Beth (Dan) Long and family as they grieve the loss of Beth’s father, Donald Hall Stilwell, who passed away on March 23.

Pray for College Church staff member Diane Stephen and family as they grieve the sudden loss of Diane’s husband, John , who passed away in Florida on March 22.

Pray for Terri (Jon) Penner and family as they grieve the loss of Terri’s mother, Patricia Brown Paglione , who passed away on March 21 in Southhampton, PA.

Pray for Linda (Ken) Kelley and family as they grieve the loss of Linda’s father, Cyrus Adams , who passed away on March 18.

Pray for friends and family of longtime member Marilyn Kitchell who passed away in Lewisville, Texas, on March 12.

Pray for Abbie (Jeremy) Cook and family as they grieve the loss of Abbie’s father, Garth Miller , who passed away on March 7 in Ohio.

Pray for Kimberly Hutson and family as they grieve the recent loss of her mother who passed away in the Rockford area.

Pray for global worker Irene (Jeff) and family as they grieve the loss of Irene’s father, Grant , who passed away on February 19.