Ann - Part II

If you had an inner wart in your thinking, your moral or spiritual life, or in your heart the size of a grapefruit Anna would have found a way to address it that showed you the glory of Christ and your destiny in Him. She was one of the few incarnations of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 that I have ever known; love is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered...bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Now I don’t know about you, but in my life the sad thing is that I usually haven’t realized such treasures in others except in retrospect. I may have seen the radiance, I may have sensed the “Otherness”, I may have recognized the grace and love; but because of my drivenness, because of my focus on the mind as opposed to the heart, because of my insistence on consistency in thinking – I have been more prone to accept the grace and love and enjoy it rather than learn from it and pass it on. Oh, and did I include my pride, selfishness and vanity in the foregoing list that shields me from graciousness toward others?

I am a “yeah but” person. I see a wart in someone’s thinking and while I know 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 I have simply got to say, “Yeah but I need to challenge so-and-so about this idea.” I think the only “yeah but” in Ann’s life was, “Yeah, maybe that is true – that’s our Father’s business – but I’m going to just hug that person and squeeze that brother and love him with the love of God.”   

Ann’s passing comes at a time when I’ve been exploring what it means to overcome evil with good – a Biblical teaching that most Western Christians, including myself, ignore. I wonder how many of us who love Ann are willing to incorporate Ann’s life of overcoming evil with good into our own lives? Whether it is Corrie Ten Boom, Desmond Doss, Ernest Gordon, or Anna Nichols; isn’t the reality that we pay a form of lip service to them – well-intentioned of course – put them on our fireplace mantels as figurines every proper home should have, display them to our children, and certainly enjoy their stories and presence – but do we incorporate them into the fabric of our lives when things go against our grain? Where are they when others do us hurt, harm, and inflict pain? Where are they when we inflict pain on others?

How easy it is for us to relegate those who have learned how to love to “a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away,” lest they get too close for comfort, too close for our self-centeredness. After all, who really wants to conquer the Empire with love? Isn’t a star fighter or a light saber so much more fun to respond with? Don’t we derive so much more satisfaction from returning destruction for destruction? Mutual Assured Destruction was with us eons before nuclear missiles – it has been our mutual way of life from families to nations – thank God every generation has had its Anns to give us hope, even if we haven’t recognized the hope.

Maybe I’m just beginning to understand and appreciate Ann – but the only way to actually tell whether that is true is to roll the video on my future life.

To be continued…