Comfort to Spare (XVI)

The sixth meditation in Comfort to Spare is yet another based on a verse from Proverbs (10:22). Here, Van Baalen riffs on the promise that the blessings of the Lord make his believers rich. "All Christians are agreed on this," he says, but do all Christians believe such a promise? He shrugs his shoulders. "One is inclined to doubt it."

And why so much doubt among believers? Once again he describes a distinct spirituality I associate with Grandpa Dirkse.

Many also like to feel sorry for themselves. They make a display of their sorrow. When their kin and friends come to sympathize with them in bereavement, they give way to uncontrollable grief. Never was there such a sorrow. No one took it so hard. These work themselves up to a point where they enjoy their woe, their tears.

And what does Van Baalen say of that dark spirituality: "All of this is morbid and unchristian. It betrays a lack of faith, for which there never is a legitimate excuse" because "faith is merely resting in God, and there is always abundant reason for that, but especially in days of hardship."

It would be comforting to know that all such grieving is that easy to assuage. But, once again, it seems the sentiments he claims somehow fit the readers, my grandparents. Yes, of course, it's always possible to read words such as these and not take them to heart, not see them operate in your own life. Grandpa may have read that passage and not even begun to see himself. But I can't help thinking not reflecting would have been difficult.

If I didn't feel something of Grandpa Dirkse in me, I wouldn't have spent all this time trying to draw what I can from a few scribbles in a thin book of meditations I took from our library shelf and didn't even know we owned. I inherited that book from him, and, a generation later, from his daughter, my mom, who very certainly had some of her father's DNA. 

I can't remember the occasion, but I'll never forget something my dad told me that somehow relates. "You know," he said, "my dad used to say that people who spend time fretting about their salvation don't need to." He might well have said it more elegantly or convincingly than I just did, but the idea was that those believers who wrestle with their own sinfulness and salvation, their standing before God, simply don't need to because their doubts alone reveal their knowledge of their Lord and Savior. 

Grandpa Schaap was a preacher who'd retired from First CRC of Oostburg just a few years earlier, the pulpit Rev. John Piersma then took over. The Piersmas are noted inside the cover for giving my Dirkse grandparents Comfort to Spare.  

For years I've thought that my dad remembered that conversation with his father because, even though he never said it, he sometimes found it hard to understand his deeply spiritual father-in-law. 

How can I say that? Because there's another story. My dad received a job offer that had come to him because of his hard work for the cause of Christian education. I don't remember that. At the time, he never told me. I was just a kid. The National Union of Christian Schools had offered him a job in its offices in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

I knew my father well. I know he never felt at home with fast-living office brass he worked with in Fredonia, Wisconsin. I know my dad would have loved that Grand Rapids job.

He told me how he'd gone to his in-laws to tell them about that offer, an offer from an organization created to support Christian education in North America, and how he'd come to understand very quickly and very clearly that when he got home he had to turn down the Christian school job. Once he'd told Grandpa Dirkse what he was considering, Grandpa began to cry because Grandpa said he couldn't lose the only daughter he had.

What follows Van Baalen's scolding is a passage which strikes very close to home.

When sorrow suddenly comes--and it usually does--Christians are divided into two groups. There are those who, temporarily at any rate, collapse. Their faith falters. And there are those who receive a new joy, hitherto unknown by them, the avowed and recognized work of the Holly Spirit, whose temple they are by the grace of their heavenly Father and as a result of the merits and the intercession of Jesus Christ their Saviour and Lord.

What happened at the front door of the house in downtown Oostburg late that night seems an illustration of the distinction Van Baalen draws. And then he adds this, a clear sense of what he sees as the mission of the meditations, the thesis of the book itself. "These passages are written with the definite purpose of aiding in the transfer of Christians from the first group into the second," because, he says, he has been led to believe that among grieving, Christian parents, there are "far too many. . .in the first category."

Van Baalen returns to that mission just as explicitly in the last pages of the last mediation. 

. . .there are types of Christians when the first waves of sorrow have subsided. There are many who pity themselves. Others must comfort them. Even so they will admit that God is good, and add "yes, but. . .' These are not free from egotism, and they suffer more than necessary because of a hidden rebellious spirit.

If I'm right, and if the book was read closely and meaningfully, how might Grandpa have taken it?
After all, Rev. Van Baalen has offered enough to make my grandpa find himself in the descriptions. What might he have felt? 

Once more, I can only speculate.