Apologetics from an Anabaptist perspective
And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the wind passeth, and cleanseth them. Job 37:21
Our land is dry and thirsty; clouds in the sky lift our hopes. We are sad when they only dampen the ground as they pass over. Others not far away have been blessed with rain and more clouds are in the forecast. We continue to hope.
Clouds within the eye are not so welcome. It happens to us as we get older: a cloud, barely noticed at first, comes between us and the things we want to see. I had cataract surgery in both eyes several years ago and that cloud is gone.
Another cloud to distort my vision came eleven years ago . The doctor called it macular degeneration, said he could help but I would have to consent to having him poke a needle into my eye. With that needle he would deliver a tiny amount of drug into my eye to dry up the rogue capillaries that wrinkled the macula of my retina.
He has done that dozens of times since then and most of the time it has worked. My right eye has a tiny dark cloud at the centre of my vision, possibly because I did not notice what was happening soon enough, I consider myself fortunate, I can still see to drive, read and use the computer. If the macular degeneration had begun a few years earlier there would have been no drug available to treat it.
In March I began to notice distortion beginning again in my left eye. I called the doctor’s office and a couple days later had an injection in that eye. The tiny amount of drug in the fluid of the eye brought a cloud to the vision for a say or two. That cleared up and in a week the distortion cleared up, too.
I had another injection yesterday, preventive maintenance this time. By this evening the cloud caused by the injection is mostly gone. I will have more such injections in the future. I don’t enjoy them, but they bring hope.
I had cataract surgery the day after my last post on this blog (almost two weeks ago). The surgery went smoothly, the eye is recovering as it should and my distance vision is now as good without glasses as it was with glasses before the surgery.
So far so good. Better than good, wonderful. The problem is that after the surgery I couldn’t see well enough to read. My short range vision improved with the surgery, not enough to enable me to read with my naked eyes but enough that my glasses made everything more blurry.
A friend gave me the reading glasses he used after his cataract surgery. They were a step in the right direction, and helped me get some work done. Last Tuesday I bought a pair that were stronger. Since then I’ve been doing more work, but these glasses distort everything else, giving me a bit of a queasy feeling.
I am very happy with the results of the surgery, but wish I had asked to delay it for at least a month. This is income tax season and I have done a number of personal tax returns since the cataract surgery, plus tried to catch up with my bookkeeping work.
I felt a headache coming on while doing one tax return Monday evening. This was a new client with income from a variety of sources. I had it all sorted out when I began getting error messages from Norton. The solution suggested by Norton was to uninstall the program, download it again and re-install it. I did that, then got a prompt to restart the computer, now or later. I pushed now and then realized that I had not saved the tax return. I think that dumb mistake, not the glasses, was the source of my headache. I guess that’s my reward for trying to work late. It wasn’t that bad, I already had the issues sorted out in my mind and could quickly re-enter the data and have a completed tax return.
The vision problem is also the explanation for why I haven’t been writing. Yesterday I bought reading glasses that have three strengths, one for reading, one for the computer monitor and one for looking at other items on the desk. They are distortion free and I think I am good to go now for the remaining four weeks until I can be tested for new glasses.
I collected stamps when I was a boy. It was a fascinating and inexpensive hobby. Many stores sold packets of used stamps for less than a dollar, either mixed or sorted by country or theme. One could also buy from mail order stamp companies. If one had the money to spend there were more expensive albums and stamps available, but there was an abundance of stamps and supplies available that fit my small budget.
I learned a lot about history and geography from stamps. I learned that many countries called themselves something different than the name I had learned. Germany was Deutschland, Holland was Nederland, Norway was Norsk, Finland was Suomi and Hungary was Magyar. I learned of countries that didn’t exist anymore, such as Bosnia & Herzogovina. Bosnia has reappeared in recent years and I know where to find it on the map because when I was a boy I found out where Bosnia & Herzogovina used to be.
I saw how the stamps of Deutschland of many years ago had been continuously overprinted with new amounts containing many zeros and learned about the hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic. I saw the stamps of French colonies overprinted with France Libre and learned how Charles deGaulle had created a new French army to fight the Axis powers after the capitulation of Pétain during the Second World War.
Do boys still collect stamps? Stamps have become more and more colourful over the years, more and more expensive, and less and less useful. How many people today anxiously await the arrival of the letter carrier in the expectation that there will be an important letter? In our home, we only occasionally get a personal letter via the postal service and hardly any bills. Almost everything comes by email, including a lot of junk emails.
I believe there will be a need for the postal service for many years to come – but it won’t look much like the postal service of my boyhood and will never again be as important in our lives as it was back then. That makes postage stamps less interesting to boys and girls, despite the effort to make them look more interesting. And that’s too bad, there is so much that can be learned from stamps.
Something else that has been lost since my boyhood is the place of the Bible as an anchor for society. It isn’t that everybody read the Bible, or believed it, when I was a boy, many people didn’t. But enough people did at least believe that it had some worthwhile advice for our lives that it served as a stabilizing influence. The number of people who will even pay lip service to the Bible is quite small today.
We have lost much in many areas of life, but the most crucial is in our concept of family life. A large percentage of children growing up today will not experience a united home with the same father and mother during their growing up years. Those who grow up in such a setting may never have a chance to observe a stable, happy, two parent family. They probably don’t even know that such a thing is possible, or desirable.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). In French the last part reads “sans frein”, meaning unchecked or unbridled, literally “without brakes.” That’s a good description of today’s world; we have lost the vision and so people rush on trying to fix their problems with solutions that are more apt to make their problems worse.
The Post Office may not be fixable, but this situation could be fixed if only the vision could be regained.
During a recent visit in the home of a young couple in another congregation, the wife talked about the church her parents had attended when she was a child. The membership of that church is now down to the pastor and a few women; no man has been able to abide the pastor’s controlling ways. That pastor may well have a sound grasp of the Christian faith and how it should be lived, but he is a divider, not a uniter.
My spell-checker doesn’t like the word uniter, and I don’t much care for it either. I would prefer to use the French word rassembleur, as that carries the implication not just of drawing people together, but of drawing them together for a common purpose. However, rassembleur would not be understood by most English-speaking people, so I will stick with uniter.
Can a revival have an enduring effect if it does not instill in believers a united vision of the purpose of Christian life? I am thinking of the Western Canadian Revival of 40 years ago. It swept through city after city, bringing together people from the whole spectrum of evangelical Christianity to hear messages calling on them to deal with sin in their lives. I believe many people were genuinely touched and their faith renewed or restored. But were they united? I don’t think so; the churches remained as before with all their internal and external frictions and divisions.
The church of God is often in need of revival. Anything that involves people will tend to get messy. Many people do not see the problems, they need to be stirred and awakened. A revival that only seeks to restore the purity of practice as it was formerly will not be durable as there is no vision of the purpose of that purity of practice. Some people see needs in the church, but have no patience for the slowness of others to see. If they attempt to impose their vision on others, some may abandon the faith. Or they themselves will abandon the assembly of the saints and wander here and there seeking others who see things as they do. These people are dividers.
Menno Simons was a true rassembleur (or uniter if you prefer). He was a priest at Witmarsum in Friesland who was converted almost 400 years ago through studying the Bible. While still in the Roman Catholic church he taught against the zealous and misguided people who took over the city of Muenster, expecting the Lord to return and establish His kingdom there. When 300 people took over an old monastery near where he lived and were killed in the ensuing siege, the burden of his conscience became almost unbearable. He felt that some had left the Roman Catholic church because he had revealed its errors, but he had not led them further in the truth.
“I thought to myself — I, miserable man, what am I doing?” “I began in the name of the Lord to preach publicly from the pulpit the true repentance, to point people to the narrow path, and in the power of the Scripture to openly to reprove all sin and wickedness. . . to the extent that I had at that time received from God the grace.”
Nine months later he left the Roman Catholic church, abandoning his reputation and easy life. “In my weakness I feared God; I sought out the pious and though they were few in number I found some who were zealous and maintained the truth. I dealt with the erring, and through the help and power of God with His Word, reclaimed them from the snares of damnation and gained them to Christ. The hardened and rebellious I left to the Lord.”
A year later , a group of brethren came to him and urged him to put use the talents he had received from the Lord to build up the church of God. “I was sensible of my limited talents, my unlearnedness, my weak nature and the timidity of my spirit, the exceeding great wickedness . . . of the world, the great and powerful sects, . . . and the woefully heavy cross that should weigh on me should I comply. On the other hand I saw the pitiful great hunger and need of these God-fearing, pious, children, for I saw that they erred as do harmless sheep which have no shepherd.”
He accepted the plea of the brethren to be ordained as an elder of the church and could later say: “The great and mighty God has made known the word of true repentance . . .through our humble service, doctrine, and unlearned writings, together with the diligent service and help of our faithful brethren in many towns and countries. It has been made known to such an extent that He has bestowed upon His churches such unconquerable power that many proud and lofty hearts have become humble; the impure, chaste; the drunken, sober; the avaricious, benevolent; the cruel, kind; and the ungodly, pious; but they also left their possessions and blood, life and limb with the blessed testimony they had, as it may be seen daily still. These are not the fruit of false doctrine. Neither could these people endure so long under such dire distress and cross were it not the power and word of the Almighty which moves them.”
In the 16th Century, church and state were closely bound together and any deviation from the state church was considered subversive, even the peaceable Anabaptists. There were many other sects at the time, due to widespread dissatisfaction with the state church. The Anabaptists taught and lived a Biblical faith that answered the cry in the hearts of many people. Attempts to destroy this faith by persecution only drew more attention to it and it continued to grow. There were many other leaders, but Menno Simons was the one who was best known to those outside the church. Thus, the members of the church came to be known as Menno-nites.
Early in the fall of 2007, I became aware of distorted vision in my right eye. I went for an eye exam and was referred to Doctor Kevin Colleaux, a specialist in Saskatoon. Within a few days I received the first injection in that eye. Over the next three and one half years I had more than a dozen injections in each eye before the macular degeneration was stopped.
I consider myself fortunate, because the drug used, Lucentis, had only become available a short time before I developed macular degeneration. I did lose the central vision in my right eye, but the left eye still has undistorted vision. I am able to drive, read, work and use a computer. I know someone who developed macular degeneration a few years before I did and he is legally blind, he can do none of those things.
More recently, the vision in my right eye has become quite cloudy. Wednesday, I had cataract surgery in that eye. The procedure involves making a small incision in the eye, inserting a tool to dissolve the lens by ultrasound, sucking out the dissolved material and inserting a new plastic lens. I was given several types of eye drops prior to the surgery, then a gel containing several more drugs was spread over the eye. It took some time for this all to work to dilate the eye and to make it insensitive to pain. The operation itself took five to ten minutes, I was awake during the procedure, felt nothing in my eye, and had no pain afterwards. I still have no central vision in that eye, but the cloudiness is gone. The plastic insert is a prescription lens giving me clear distance vision. In about six weeks I will have my eyes tested and get new glasses.
My wife had to drive me around after the surgery because that eye remained dilated for 24 hours or more, giving me foggy vision. As of today I am back to work and very thankful to Doctor Colleaux, his support staff, and all the researchers who have developed means to help me keep my vision.
There is a time in the life of every problem when it is big enough to see and small enough to solve.
– Mike Leavitt
