Comfort to Spare (IV)

[I'm slowly working on a longer essay that aims at defining the character of my own stubborn faith by looking closely at my grandparents', and their grief at the death of their daughter, my aunt, in 1949. This is the fourth segment. There will be more.]

"Well, sir," said a sympathizing man to the present author, "your son gave his life for the liberty of others, and you may well be proud of his great sacrifice to make possible the victory over evil which the world enjoys today."

The Reverend Van Baalen speaks from experience in this little book gifted to my grieving grandparents. Undoubtedly, Comfort to Spare was passed along to devastated parents throughout the land, because it's clear from this slight mention in the intro that Van Baalen, during the war just concluded, had lost a son in the service of his country, one of thousands of young men who didn't return. He doesn't make a show of his own grief, mentions it only once, here. He knows enough about grief to understand that trying heal the profound sadness of others he doesn't need to march out his own anguish, only say that it's there--and he knows very well how trying grief can be.

But there's a theology to his diffidence.

One of the meditations in this little book relates the story of Dan Crawford, a missionary, who was returning to Africa from furlough. His party was in a hurry, but flood waters kept them from crossing a torrent they might otherwise have forded easily. "They camped and prayed," Van Baalan writes. "After a time a tall tree which had battled with the river for a century, perhaps began to totter, and then fell--clear across the stream. 'The Royal Engineers of Heaven,' Mr. Crawford said, 'had laid a pontoon bridge for God's servants.'"

Van Baalan's typical Dutch Reformed skepticism is evident: "Well, perhaps they did.. . .I doubt it though." He says he "likes to think" the tree's providential fall was "just an ordinary event of nature's work."

But he can't. He's an advocate of God's sovereignty after all.

"It is noteworthy," he says, "that God might have planted that tree right there a couple of hundred years previous and thereby plotted its fall at that exact moment as an answer to prayer." What he means by "noteworthy" is "newsworthy." He's exercising that Calvinist skepticism.

Then he lauds Missionary Crawford's praying, his trust in his Father God in their impossible distress. Crawford, like Van Baalen, believes in prayer. He much prefers prayer to guilt and shame, which, he introduces to his readers as altogether too present an option among his believers.

Maybe we are at fault. Perhaps God does not approve of us. Let's see. Oh yes, someone in the party forgot his morning devotions yesterday, and day before yesterday another member spoke harshly. It was hot, but he should not have gotten cross anyway. There you have it: it's all off, boys! God is sending hard luck to punish us. 

I can't help but think that my grandpa especially was hit between the eyes by that passage. But let me finish as Van Baalen finishes, with what seems a perfectly awful thing to say: "I care not just what the nature of your present difficulty is; it does not matter," he writes. "The greater the obstacle the better." Why? "In that way you won't be able to take any credit yourself for its solution."

I have no idea if the seventh meditation from Comfort to Spare made any headway in helping my grandparents deal with their grief, but I believe--I really do--that what Van Baalen had to say here especially might have helped them--or at least Grandpa Dirkse--because of who he was and how he believed.