History, Real Life and Faith
Something recently caught my heart about suffering: In a Christianity Today article, Dorothy and Christopher Greco wrote: “Rarely does any organization, Christian or otherwise, offer another option: that of accompanied suffering. To be transformed into the image of Christ, we must suffer as Christ did, a suffering too great for any individual to bear alone . . . “Such suffering does not necessarily…
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We used to play a game called “Six Degrees of Separation,” in which we tried to connect ourselves to a famous person within six contacts, someone like a US president. You’ve probably heard of the game, based on the theory that everyone on the planet is only six people-connections (as trivial as your tour guide) away from everyone else. According…
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Primary source documentation is a fancy technical description for a question you’ve grown up with: “Tell me a story.” Out of the past can come amazing tales that not only are true but are pertinent to you. If your family remembers them, they probably reverberate with emotion, too. (And if someone claims to have no memory of their childhood, I…
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I’ve spent time in Wheaton College’s Special Collections library looking through first hand research in the Oswald Chambers collection. As I read through the papers, housed in archival boxes, the archivist asked me what, specifically, I sought. “I don’t know. Just color details.” I found plenty of remarks, tossed aside comments, diary scribblings (though not in Biddy’s Bible–she wrote her notes in…
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I’ve spent time in Wheaton College’s Special Collections library looking through first hand research in the Oswald Chambers collection. As I read through the papers, housed in archival boxes, the archivist asked me what, specifically, I sought. “I don’t know. Just color details.” I found plenty of remarks, tossed aside comments, diary scribblings (though not in Biddy’s Bible–she wrote her notes in…
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A Madeleine L’Engle letter astonished me in 2013 at Wheaton College. I had traveled to Wheaton College’s Special Collections Library to research Oswald Chambers. While I waited for the archivist, I noticed a table full of pamphlets detailing other writers whose manuscripts and letters also were in the collection. Wheaton has quite a selection: Francis and Edith Schaeffer, C. Everett Koop,…
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