Endurance

I have to see how I have enough space on this skinny podium to put all my stuff. A little bit here and a little bit there. Betty Amy came up to me before services started. She had an impish look on her face, so I knew there was mischief afoot. And she talked about a seminar presenter who was teaching MBAs and executives, and that he was going through the human physiology in longer meetings.

And she said he was telling the group that if they would get up every hour and they would stretch and take some deep yawns, that it would reset all of the facilities and give them the greater ability to concentrate.

And she said she'd gone to Mr. Sepharic with that idea, Mr. Sepharic being an experienced pastor punted on that one. So I'd like all of you to rise and just stretch wherever the kinks are and don't pass out. Please, please don't yawn so big that you lose it. We may have a nurse here, we may not. But we don't want to have to carry anybody out.

Are you recharged? Okay. I told Betty I was game. This is a retreat to the unorthodox meeting, so don't expect this in Salem or Portland next Sabbath. It's probably not going to happen. But I know the feeling. It's nice to be in the choir. And you have to consider that if you sing from the diaphragm, even the hymns between the messages are a partial fulfillment of that. Just don't start stretching as you sing hymns.

People will wonder what happened to you. I think this last week Diane came up to me and said, now, I need to give you a briefing on what the theme is, just to make sure that you're in line with the theme. And I said, okay.

So she read something to me. And midweek I said, where did you get that from? She said, it's on the website. And I said, well, have you got a copy of it? She said, no, but I'll write one out for you. So she did. And I said, well, thank you very much. For those of you that have not read the website, probably most of you had, the theme set was set in this fashion. Is life feeling a bit overwhelming? Do you feel like you are bearing the world's problems on your shoulders along with your own problems?

Do you feel like you are just hanging on emotionally, just enduring? This weekend we will be discussing the topic of endurance and how our hope and God's promises can carry us, encourage us, lift us up, and help us thrive in spite of the challenges that we face in today's world.

Very nice statement of what you are here for this weekend. I fully appreciated Mr. Svarik's sermonette. Mr. Svarik split since he and I are splitting. I had to chuckle when he said, I get a crack at the Scriptures first, and he said, James. And I said, stay out of James. Go somewhere else. But thankfully, he waltzed around my part of James, so I was content.

All of us understand that no matter what Sabbath it is, no matter what the setting is, retreat, Sabbath services, Feast of Tabernacles, we all understand the underpinnings to who we are, where we are, and why we are. We understand we are on a spiritual journey. Destination is not ambiguous. We know where we are going. And we also are aware of the reason for the journey. The part that is a little more difficult is the markers along the way as we go through the journey. I know where I am headed, you know where you are headed. I know why I am here as a human being and why physical life has a limited span.

But the markers along the way are quite often not seen as they are coming to Wardus, but they are seen in the rearview mirror as we reflect upon having passed them. We know that the destination of our journey is eternal life. We know that we are to become children of God. And when we ponder on Hebrews 2, verses 6-8, we don't need to turn there, but when we ponder on what it asks and what it answers, when it says, what is humanity, that you would bother with them. And the answer is, I only made them for a short time to be at the bottom of the pecking order.

I have destined them to one day be over all things. Scripture that says, I has not seen nor ear heard nor can the mind of man comprehend truly fits the context of what it means to one day find that there is nothing in the universe that is greater than we are except the Father who has given us this awesome privilege and His firstborn son Jesus Christ.

And that as a sharer and a giver, He wants to share the entirety of eternity in the universe with us. So as we walk the journey, we realize that the reason for the journey is, in one sense, rather simple. We've got a set period of time, and we're here to demonstrate that we are both willing to live God's way and committed enough to do it consistently. We simply say it's a way of life.

Do we stumble? Sure we do. Do we fall down and bruise our knees sometimes? Absolutely. But we don't change directions. So like all of the patriarchs before us, none of us walks a perfect walk. But we're here to demonstrate that once we see the direction, that we don't turn some other direction. This is where endurance enters the picture. I'm going to read to you Isaiah 45 and verse 9 from the Living Bible.

I wanted to find a translation that would catch the essence, and sometimes the paraphrases would do a better job of catching the essence than the translations.

But God chooses the lessons as we learn endurance in all of its manifestations. I truly appreciated Mr. Sepharic's fascinating. Where he talked about patience, talked about endurance, talked about faith, talked about all of these things entering in. God chooses the lessons to be learned, and he chooses the timing for the classes. In Isaiah 45 verse 9 in the Living Bible, it references that. It says, woe to the man who fights with his creator.

Does the pot argue with its maker? Does the clay dispute with him who forms it, saying, stop, you're doing it wrong? Or the pot exclaims, how clumsy can you be?

So he says, you know, here we are. God is the potter. We are the clay. And we don't say, what in the world are you doing? Can't you do a better job than that? No. God does the forming. He sets the class sessions, and we demonstrate moldability, pliability, workability.

As we're going through that, we get to choose whether or not we wish to endure. Now, I'll thread the needle. Let's go back to James.

See, we don't set the class sessions, and we don't set the assignments. Our part in all of this is we choose whether or not to stay in the class and to stay there until the class is dismissed.

So in James 1, it says in verse 12, blessed, you know, this is an A, this is a star. Blessed is the man who endures.

Now, the word temptation is a broad word. It means everything from testing and developing and building all the way to the negative side of being enticed. But you can tell by the setting that this is the positive side. Blessed is the man who endures, temptation. So if you're in the class and you have assignments and they are to build and mold you, God says it is a blessed man who stays in there and allows that forming and shaping to take place. For when he has been proved, he'll receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love him. Endurance is learned in more than one way.

Stop and consider how you have learned endurance in your own life.

Most of our learning of endurance is vicarious. We have all these biblical examples. I stop and I think of Abraham being approached at age 75, being told, you have a wife that can't have children, but you're going to have children.

Now, you know, that's great if next year Sarah gets pregnant. But when it's not next year, and it's not 10 years, and it's not 20 years, where do you throw in the towel?

Where do you finally say, enough is enough? Where do you decide that you're going to drive the bus?

Abraham never did.

And he got blessings of a sort that until he's resurrected, he'll never realize how big those blessings actually were.

We look at Job, Mr. Sefarek's example. Most of what we learn about endurance, we learn vicariously.

The Bible stories that are there for our admonition and for our edification.

When it's first hand, if you're like me, most of what I've learned about endurance, I've learned in the rearview mirror.

I've learned after the event was over and I could look back at it. Endurance is not one of those things that you can normally see coming toward you. It's something you see after you've actually been there. It's completed. And you say, ah.

I want to share with you an area of my life where I've observed and learned about endurance by watching God mold, shape, and test someone else. So that's a vicarious experience. Oftentimes, as we watch someone else, we can learn a great deal more than we can if we're reflecting internally and saying, well, how's it working on me? What's happening here?

But I'd like to share with you the endurance and the aspects of endurance that I've learned by watching God mold, shape, and in this case test my own physical father over the half-century that he was a member of the Church of God. I've recently been going through, and probably one of the things that provoked the thought, recently been going through family records, pitching out things that aren't needed, sending to my brothers things that belong to them. And as my wife and I have talked, talked about blanks that exist in our family record that I moan about not having taken the time before both my mother and father died to ask them questions, to fill in the blanks. Parts of life that I didn't fully know. And now that they're both gone, there are some holes that I can't fill, or it appears I can't fill, so I have been doing the archival research to see if I can fill those holes. And it's been an interesting journey.

I can't speak for anyone else. I can say for myself that I have been deeply invested in my father's life, all my conscious life. As far back as I can remember in childhood, I have had an investment, an emotional investment in his life. I worried about him when I perceived, either as a child or as an adult, he was going the wrong direction. I cheered for him when there were challenges. I wondered about him when I didn't know exactly where he was. I wished the best for him. From my conversion onward, because I was a normal teenager, from my conversion onward, pleasing him was one of my greatest motivations, and seeing him please God was one of my greatest choices. His successes and his failures were emotionally my successes and my failures.

So with that framework, let me tell you about his spiritual journey from a firstborn son's point of view and how that journey provided lessons for me about endurance.

And I hope it'll give you things that you can ponder and think about as you walk and as you ponder endurance also. As I think about my own life, to this day, maybe I need to sit down with Jack sometime, Mr. Scruggs, as a psychologist, to say, Jack, I need some analysis.

To this day, I am mystified by the level of spiritual sensitivity that I had at an extremely early age. All of us try to go back in life and try to remember our earliest memories.

How far back can you go? Can you remember something at four or three or two? Where does the dim curtain come down? And it's just simply too early to remember. I remember preschool with concern coming to my mom and saying, Mom, what do I have to do to go to heaven?

And I remember my mom saying, Bobby, all you have to do is be a good boy.

And I remember leaving that conversation and gnawing on that, saying there has to be more to that. There has to be more to it. And that it was, instead of a comfort, it was an aggravation to me, even at five or six years old, thinking there has got to be more to it.

I had a sensitivity about right and wrong, and in one area my father grieved me greatly. As we all know who have small children, or as we reflect upon the times when our children were four and five year olds, they're very impressionable, and they are touched deeply by things that as adults we chuckle at and say, well, that's not a big deal.

When my father cussed, it worried me profoundly because I knew that that conduct was, in the context of our religion at that time, that conduct was not going to get him to heaven. And I didn't want my father going somewhere other than heaven. And I knew that cussing, since it wasn't going to get him to heaven, put him on a track to go where I was, and I didn't want him going. And so it really worried me. I remember one time on the way to church on a Sunday morning, somebody must have done something stupid on the road, and he let out a few choice words. And I'm sitting in the back seat as a boy, listening to my dad cuss on the way to church. That was a grief to me. Dad was not a constant swearr. He didn't curse as a part of regular language. When he had choice words to say, it was usually because he had been frightened by something. Someone had done something really stupid, and it angered him. So it wasn't, as I look at it now as an adult, it wasn't a lifestyle issue, but it was wrong.

Life went on, and nothing really changed as I went through the grades. First, second, third, fourth, finished grade school, entered junior high school. At age 13, our family transitioned from southern Idaho to Pasadena, California, as dad entered Ambassador College. And in the summer of 1957, we left Idaho, arrived in Pasadena, and somewhere between our arrival and the start of the college year, I remember standing with my two younger brothers down in the Italian Gardens, the lower gardens in Pasadena, in the fountain that's built into the western wall, as my mother and father, one by one, were put in that fountain, immersed, and brought back out as baptized members of the Church of God. In the transition period of the two years leading up to our departure from Idaho and that event in the lower garden, my father changed. And it was a complete and it was a permanent change. Somewhere around 13 years of age, a worry and a concern that I had carried from age five or six melted away, disappeared, and never reoccurred. There's a scripture in Romans chapter 12 that at age 13, I didn't, I don't think I was aware of the scripture.

But I was witnessing a scripture even though I couldn't tell you where it was, nor do I believe that I knew the words at the time. It says in Romans 12 in verse 1, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. You know what I learned from my father's experience? I can tell you that from age five or six to somewhere around age 11 and 12, because I don't, you know, I knew there was a transition, but it was not an abrupt transition. It was formalized in that lower garden with baptism, but that isn't where it started. With the awareness that what he was hearing on the radio was truth and that it needed to be lived, there was a change of life, and that was formalized that afternoon in the lower garden in Pasadena. But what I learned that I've carried with me into adulthood and through adulthood is that part of endurance for us, part of endurance is not getting ahead of God. Part of endurance is not getting ahead of God. You know what you want, and I know what I want, and we all laugh. We all laugh a laugh of recognition of the farcical prayer, Lord, give me patience and give it to me right now, because we know that's how we are geared. Lord, I want to be patient, and I want you to give me patience, but I want you to give me patience right now. And so we get ahead of God. Part of endurance is letting God stay in front.

In this case, it happened to be the conversion of my parents. We have to allow God to convert those we love when He chooses to convert those we love.

We have to be willing to sit down in the bus and put on our seat belt and let God drive the bus.

And to do that requires of us—if I can combine two of the synonymous terms from Mr.

Sepharic's split sermon—it requires patient endurance.

So as I reflect back in my adulthood at that experience, I reflect back upon having been exposed to a spiritual lesson by watching someone else.

If there were something that defined my father over the entirety of his life in the Church of God, it would be a passion for prophecy, which started early in his converted life and it never waned. To the day my dad died, he was passionate about his view of prophecy.

He believed what he believed so much that he couldn't be convinced otherwise.

If I could say to you posthumously, my father's greatest desire, it would be very easy to say.

His greatest desire was that all three of his sons would have shared his prophetic views.

He died never having achieved that.

I was an editor by training, a journalist by minor. One day my dad brought his prophetic papers to me and said, would you edit my papers? I did, and that was the last time he ever asked.

We moved to Pasadena as I was starting my freshman year in high school.

Five years later, while I was a freshman in college, I was sitting in a class one afternoon, and there was a knock on the classroom door. The lecturer stopped and went to the door.

Then he turned around and said, Bob, would you go to the door? So I jolted out of the class, which I'm listening to, as to why do they want me to hit the door? So I walked to the door, and I walked to a room in Ambassador Hall, walked inside, and it was a room full of evangelists.

I found out in fairly short order that the reason I had been taken out of that class and asked to go to that room was because of my father's prophetic views, he was sitting right on the lip of being disfellowshipped.

And I had been brought into that room to be asked where I stood.

Which side are you on? It was all done very politely, and it wasn't a challenge for me. As much as I loved my dad, I wasn't blind, and I didn't have to spend a lot of time pondering my answer. My answer was, I am loyal to the teachings of the church first, and I am loyal to my father and my family second.

The discussion wasn't a very long one. I was sent back to class.

Next time I was together with the family, the understanding was a very simple one. My father was on probation, and that he had not been disfellowshipped, but he was in a probationary period that would lead to who knows what, dependent upon where he took it.

In the years that I've been in the ministry, and especially during the years that I spent on the Council of Elders, it was impressed upon me profoundly that these are the kinds of experiences that have destroyed many people.

Hebrews 12 is a scripture that will connect what I just said to you with a lesson that is the theme of this Ladies' Enrichment weekend.

Hebrews 12, beginning in verse 14, it says, "...pursue peace with all men, and holiness without which no one will see the Lord, looking diligently lest any one fall short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness spring up, causing trouble, and by this many become defiled." To fall short is the opposite of enduring.

Enduring means, as Mr. Sepharic was implying, it's a marathon. It's a long run. To fall short means you've checked out. You've decided that endurance is not priority number one.

Hurtful experiences have destroyed many because they fell short.

Part of the lessons of life is that hurtful experiences have to be endured.

If any of you make it through life without any hurtful experiences, you will have lived a profoundly rare life.

Because life has its built-in hurtful experiences. What you do with those hurtful experiences, that's what tests the mettle of the person. Whether or not we endure through those things that hurt is what makes or breaks us.

My father was not leaving the church voluntarily.

The fact that his prophetic views were not totally in line with the church's prophetic views were not for him a reason for him to pack his bags and leave. He wanted the church to see prophecy the way he saw it, not to leave because they didn't.

That time period passed. The test was passed.

Dad went on in his college career. He and I actually were in college together at that time. He was a senior and I was a freshman.

Dad never abandoned his obsession with prophecy. I eventually came to the place of peace with all of this for one reason.

Even though I wished profoundly that my dad would accept the church's position prophetically, I finally came to peace with the fact that my dad's thoughts didn't for one reason. I knew that on a scale of priorities, his loyalty to the church was of greater stature than his loyalty to his prophetic views.

As I was walking through the few papers, my dad was not a journaler and he didn't keep a diary, and so those things that really give windows into who he was and how he thought are not too numerous.

But in the few things that he left, dated March 2, 1985, a year before Herbert Armstrong died, here's an inter-office memo to Herbert W. Armstrong and from R.C. Dick, subject, personal.

I'd like to read you three paragraphs from it.

We're approaching the anniversary of a very memorable event in our lives.

And this was he was speaking of his life. It was April 11, 1968, when you came to spend Passover with us in Israel. Nearly 17 years have passed and some incidents of that visit have come into sharper focus with the passage of time. It was Passover day when you and I walked through the Dome of the Rock. As we descended from the Temple Mount, you asked where Mount Zion was located.

The next day that question was still on your mind and you demanded to know where I thought it was.

My answer did not please you, but it was a vital key to the understanding of prophecy.

Why is this important and how is it a vital key? And so here's Dad, 23 or 4 years after nearly being disfellowshipped, writing a personal memo to Mr. Armstrong, and still, within one year of his death, still trying to convince him to see prophecy his way.

But one of the later paragraphs in that memo speaks to what I said a moment ago.

The paragraph reads very simply, Mr. Armstrong, you have the love and respect of my whole family.

We want you to finish this great work that you have started, but there is a question that you should possibly consider. Mr. Armstrong, and after him, the ministry that worked for him, under him, and succeeded him, also understood where my father stood. And as a result, there was a little bit of the shrugging of the shoulders and the, you know, the caulking of the head and the clicking of the teeth that radic is who radic is, and that's probably not going to change. But his loyalty was not in question. What was first was first. What was most important was most important.

Twenty years after the memo that I just read, Dad died. He still held the same prophetic views, but he never allowed those prophetic views to trump his loyalty to the church.

Part of endurance is the ordering of priorities.

As parents, we get frustrated when our kids endure in bad conduct.

You know, there's endurance, and then there's endurance.

And implicit in endurance is that you are enduring down the right path.

Though Dad's prophetic views were a source of turmoil for me, as I said, I reached the place of realizing by year after year after year and challenge after challenge after challenge, that though if I could wave a magic wand and change him, this would be the area that I'd change him. I had to accept that through all of the tough times and all the tough decisions, what was most important stayed the most important.

So as we endure, we have to endure staying on the right path.

The third and the last item—I've got to keep a track on how I'm doing here, time-wise—the third and the last item had, in a direct sense, absolutely nothing to do with religion.

Dad's conversion and his following the way that God has taught all of us would not have been directly impacted in any way, shape, or form by the last of these three lesson areas.

But it affected his attitude. And you know, attitude, in many cases, is the greatest of things.

Doing the right thing with the wrong attitude, for all intents and purposes, cancels out the right thing. You can trump right actions by wrong attitudes for those actions.

And so it was never lost on me that that attitude in this particular case was a significant issue.

Now the area, because here was an area where my father had a bad attitude.

Growing up, my dad was about as unpatriotic a man as you could find. He had no love for the flag.

He had no love for any other of the symbols or the trappings of patriotism.

Now he was not subversive. He didn't ever express a desire to live anywhere else.

And any subversive action was out of the question, as you'll understand in a moment.

My father was patriotic to the religion he was raised in above country.

And in his young adulthood, that cost him greatly. In fact, it cost him so greatly that it created a cynicism and a sarcasm that was profound. My father finished high school in Dallas, Oregon in May of 1940.

One month later, the Selective Service Act was passed, allowing the peacetime draft of men who were 21 to 45 years old. Two years after graduation, dad and mom were married in August of 1942, and two months after their marriage, the draft age was lowered to 18, and my dad now became eligible for the draft. My father was a Mennonite. He had 500 years of Mennonite, or 400 years of Mennonite heritage. He had a history that went back through multiple countries and multiple places, losing lands, losing homes, losing possessions, as one country was left to migrate to the next.

And the linchpin in all of those moves was the same. Persecution by the state against the religious position held by the Mennonite Church toward nonviolence and military service. So my father entered that time period as a conscientious objector.

America has gotten kinder over the years to conscientious objectors, but it has never been completely kind. In my grandfather's generation, World War I, conscientious objectors were given the option of either being in uniform or going to prison. And the prisons were Leavenworth, Alcatraz. They were not minimum security federal prisons. They were the worst of the worst.

Some of them were beaten to death for their convictions. As World War II came along, the attitude was not much different, but through negotiations between the Quakers and the Mennonites and those denominations that were referred to as the traditional peace churches, an accommodation and an allowance was created in the law that was new. And basically what the government said was to the peace churches, you can set up public services, you can set up public service camps, and they can do public service work in lieu of being in uniform in the military. But you have to build the camps, you have to fund the camps, and you have to support the occupants of the camps. A man going into the military received a wage. A person in a CPS camp received $2.50 to $5 a month for living expenses. They had room and board, but in terms of additional money, it was between $2.50 and $5. To somebody who was in the military, their wife and children received a wage. To those who were in CPS camps, their wife and children received nothing.

If they could make it fine, if they couldn't, that was their problem.

The war ended in 1945 in the Pacific. Those men who were conscientious objectors who were in CPS camps were kept in those camps for 19 months after the soldiers were released, and they were not released until March of 1947.

Coming out of this as a young man, it left my father with very little patriotism. He was not a flag waver. To be classed as a coward and to be treated in that particular fashion left him with not a warm and fuzzy feeling about things patriotic.

It took over 25 years of my life to reach the point where I fully appreciated the sense of the Scripture we are about to read. It is Luke 21.

It is an axiom here in Luke 21.

It is one of these scriptures that stands on its own feet. It doesn't need any context. It is valid in all contexts. Luke 21.19 says, In your patience possess your souls.

As I said, to begin with, we know where we're going, and we know our destination. We know these things. But getting there, well, that's the challenge. And Luke is saying, or Luke has written down the words of Christ where he says, In your patience possess your souls.

He's basically saying the make-or-break point is whether or not you have that patient endurance.

As it was in my very early years when I lived with the heaviness of knowing that my father's mouth was not consistent with his religion, it was always a burden on my shoulders to see in any patriotic event, at the very least, a distance. If it were provoked, then it would be a distance. And to know that that rested within my father was something that I carried as a burden, because cynicism and sarcasm are not consistent with the spirit that God wants within any of us. If any of us are sarcastic by nature or cynical by nature, we carry a flaw that we can ask God to help us rise above this. In 1967, so we're talking about something that my father was led out of the CPS camps in 1947, 20 years later, sitting in the dining hall in Big Sandy. Dad sat down at a table as a faculty member, and he said, and there was a chair opposite him that was empty. And eventually Ted Armstrong came in, sat down at that chair, looked across at my father, and asked him a question. He asked him a question about whether or not what he thought about living overseas. And he said, well, if that's what you need, then he was asked to ask him a question. What would you do? And he said, well, I'd go home and pack my bags.

And then he said, well, you're going to Jerusalem.

A couple of weeks were given to get passports, tidy up things, see family members, and off to London. After a week in London, on Monday, June 5, 1967, my father and Mr. Armstrong and Howard Clark, the college photographer, were in the college limo heading for Heathrow Airport and heading for Jerusalem. And Lawrence, the chauffeur, had the radio on, and the radio was broadcasting disturbances in Israel. And Mr. Armstrong asked Lawrence, do you think this is serious? And Lawrence said to him, yes, I think this is serious. I believe this is war.

That Monday was the start of the Six-Day War.

What had been engineered was Jordan, as they were driving to the airport, owned Jerusalem.

And the world tomorrow was going on Radio Jerusalem. And an office was being established in Jerusalem that my mother and father were going to move to. And another office was going to be established in Nicosia Cyprus that Mr. and Mrs. John Jewell were going to, because any Israeli who responded to the broadcast couldn't send a literature request into Jordan. So we had to have a neutral site for Israelis. That was Nicosia. And we had to have another site for all the rest of the world, and that was in Jerusalem. They turned around, went back to the campus.

Mr. Armstrong's view was that the United Nations would intercede. This would be settled fairly soon, and we would continue with our contract with Radio Jerusalem.

Time went on just long enough. The UN was going back and forth. Mr. Armstrong finally said to my mother and father, for the time being, we'll send you to Cyprus. There's the old joke about yesterday I couldn't spell engineer, and today I are one. Well, this was yesterday I didn't know where Cyprus was, and today I'm landing in Nicosia. Mom and dad landed in a country that was partitioned.

There were roads that Greeks could go on, and there were roads that Greeks could not go on. There were 15,000 soldiers maintaining the peace in a nation that had half the population of the city of Portland. United Nations soldiers checked your passport as you went through a check gate and said, you have 20 minutes or 15 minutes to get from this checkpoint to the next checkpoint. And the reason you have that time is because if you don't get to the next checkpoint in 15 to 20 minutes, we know that somebody has shot you.

A population that was nearly 90 percent Greek was being controlled because of the proximity of Cyprus to Turkey by a population that was less than 10 percent Turkish.

Dad and mom both, for the first time in their life, were outside of the United States and a couple of very little brief dip-your-toe into Mexico and back over the border experiences. So here was their exposure to a world.

One of my dad's great attributes was he loved people and he made friends very quickly.

While he was in Nicosia, his job was to be a photographer for the church and send back reports. He went into downtown Nicosia, down the small roads, found a place that was just wide enough to pull the car in, went into a photoshop to get some photo supplies, looked out the window and there was a policeman writing a ticket. He ran out real quick and he said, I'm leaving very soon. He heard him and he said, well, where are you from? He said, I'm from the United States. I represent Ambassador College. He says, let's go over and have a cup of coffee. Dad said, what about the car? He said, I'm from the United States. For the next 30 minutes, they sat in a cafe and talked about Ambassador College. Could he go there? If he went there, how would he support himself?

For 30 minutes, they talked. Dad left that in his memoirs, in the brief memoirs that he wrote, he said, and that friendship continues on to this day. They weren't in Cyprus more than six months.

In that time, in conversations with my mother and father, there were people that they had become very good friends with and very fast friends with. This policeman, whose brother was the Secretary of the Interior, was one of their lasting friends. A young couple who were archaeologists were another set of close friends. Over in Israel, where they had not been, there was a house waiting and an office waiting for them to occupy. It was a house and an office that was owned by a Christian Muslim family, the Musalums.

Mom and Dad eventually, in fact within a year after being in that area, they moved to Ramallah, the suburb of Jerusalem, and into the house.

This is a comment that Dad makes so you get a flavor. We were met by the perfect host, Salim Musalum. We were assured over and over again that we were welcome. He led the way up the steps to the large port, then opened the door, and there was one of the finest homes in the entire region. Bob Smith had gone to Beirut to find the quality furnishings that best fit this structure. Every room was tastefully decorated. Within minutes, Joseph Musalum had arrived. Joseph owned the home but lived in a convent in the old city. Salim lived in a three-story villa adjacent to the house. Joseph also assured us repeatedly that we were welcome. It was a great beginning, a beautiful home, and heads of two of the finest families we'd ever known. It is a friendship that is endured through the years. Both Joseph and Salim are dead, but their families are still wonderful friends. One of Dad's closer contacts, a man that I met and dined with years later when he and I went to Israel, I to this day don't know his last name. He was simply Edward. He was in charge of the Hertz rental at the Tel Aviv airport. Edward and his wife were Iraqi Jews, which in that name by itself gives a legacy. They were people whose ancestry probably went all the way back to 497 or 521 B.C. and never left. They had lived in Iraq, Babylon, and been a part of the Babylonian Jewish community all the way up to very recent times when, due to persecutions in that area, they had to leave the Iraqi Jewish communities and resettle in Jerusalem. He made very good friends with Dr. Benjamin Mazar and his assistant, Mayor Bendove. All of these friendships among people who among themselves were at odds with one another, who in many cases had no use for one another, who may even have had contempt for one another, being on opposite sides of the fence. Dad and Mom were there from 1967 until 1969, when a mentally deranged individual by the name of Dennis Rohan tried to burn down the altar or the pulpit in the Al-Oscar Mosque on the Temple Mount. Mr. Rohan was mentally incompetent, but unfortunately, he had also been a reader of the Plain Truth magazine. And because of that connection, it was felt that Mom and Dad and any presence of the Church needed to be removed from Israel because of the political tenseness of such a situation. Mom and Dad returned back just before the Feast of Tabernacles in 1969.

And in their experience, God had performed a miracle that I could never see coming, nor would I have ever envisioned or imagined that in His timetable and in His way, He would perform something that was a source of very deep grief to me in a way that He did. To put it very simply, my father and mother's experience of living with people that they loved in war-torn Cyprus, they left on Christmas Day from Cyprus. They arrived there on the 4th of July. They left on Christmas Day. The UN was involved. The Secretary of State was ushering back and forth. There had been several people shot down by the Greek military, and Cyprus was literally right on the edge of civil war as they got on the plane and left for Jerusalem. Behind them, they left friends, people they loved, people they had built relationships with. They watched in the no-win situation in Israel as individuals who were Christian Jews who were not really treated all that well by the Israelis, and yet they were the dearest of friends. And they watched Israelis who were very dear friends trying to survive in situations where they realized that every hostile nation around them wants nothing more than their destruction. We called them one time to inquire, because the national news had reported a bombing in a Jerusalem supermarket on Friday afternoon that had killed many people. And I knew that was where mom and dad shopped, and they said we had been in that store that day earlier to prepare for the Sabbath and to realize that there were Jewish people. I don't remember how many who had been killed in the very store that they shopped.

Dad returned to this country with a very different spirit and very different attitude toward this country. His gratitude for what we have, his gratitude for the peace that we have for the safety, was such that from 1969, when my dad returned just before the Feast of Tabernacles, I never heard a sarcastic or cynical comment from his mouth about this country from that time until he died. Now, if I'd been driving the bus, I would have tried to engineer something to make that change much, much earlier. God simply chose a time that fit his timetable and his circumstances, and he put them through the school, and what came out was a far, far superior product to anything that I could have engineered. As I said when I began, we learn many of our lessons about endurance vicariously. I appreciate that my father's life has provided some profound opportunities for learning it. I know that your loved ones, husbands, wives, children, parents, friends, neighbors, in addition to that profound collection in the Bible, can do the same for you. May those lessons enrich your journey toward our destination.