Up Around the Bend

Hey Everyone,

I’m finding out more and more that I am a goal oriented person. I like to have something out there on the road ahead of me that I am working toward. For me it needs to be relatively specific; something broad like ‘advancing the Kingdom’ is just too broad and too unobtainable for me.

In the last few months I think I had pretty much come to the end of all that I had been focused on. The FMC meeting came and went and that had been my last big goal. I mean there are other books out there to be written I’m sure and I am getting the fourth one ready to publish but it just doesn’t ‘feel´ like the right time to start writing a new one yet.

Part of the reason for that is that I know where I want to go with the next book but I am not at the place where I can work it out in detail. That is a reflection of my life as well. It feels like I’ve been working on this life-sized jigsaw puzzle and I’ve come to the realization that I’m missing a few pieces and I can’t finish the puzzle until I find them.

Over the last few years I’ve been getting hints about where to look and I’ve talked about them from time to time in my blurbs. Like the time when my friend Jim told me about the scholar and theologian H.E. Runner for the first time. It was like a light clicked on for me. The same is true when I found a used copy of Herman Dooyewerd’s In the Twilight of western civilization several months back.

How does a boy who grew up thinking that a Reformed church must be the equivalent of a reform school; start falling in love with Abraham Kuyper and his Dutch Reformed cohorts in his 40’s? I don’t know but I have. And in doing so I have also realized that I can’t fully understand the ramifications of these men’s writings on my own. I need iron to sharpen iron.

So it was with a mixture of joy and fear mingled with more fear that I received the news last week that I had been accepted into the Doctoral program of Edinburg Theological Seminary in Edinburg….Texas to study in the Dutch Reformed tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd.

How did I get here? I look back on my theological journey and I am amazed at how God brought things into my life without telling me anything about their background beforehand for my own good. For instance, I first encountered RJ Rushdoony in an Assembly of God church in 1986 or 87. Had I known what he stood for I would have run in the opposite direction but after I read the introduction to Institutes of Biblical Law there in my house in Beloit WI; I knew I would never be the same. I had been placed on a new path going a totally different direction. I had no way of know just how different at the time.

Not long after that my life blew up and I found myself working second shift as a janitor at a church in Nashville. Somehow, I ran across a cassette tape series on biblical theology by Gerhard Van Groningen and soon I was reading the books on the class notes which included Vos’s biblical theology. At the same church I found a copy of Van Til’s Defense of the faith and the man who owned basically said “Take it. I don’t have a clue what it’s about.”

Over the course of my life I have often wondered; why did my life end up the way it did? Why did I end up working as a janitor most of my life? Well, the truth is God took me down the paths he did so that I would find the treasures along the way. Had I never quit the ministry and gone back to work for McDonalds; I would have never come across Rushdoony. He would have been the devil incarnate in the circles I ran around in. The same is true for most of the others that I encountered along the way.

I’m reading a book by Calvin Seerveld right now that I picked up after I spent time in a recording studio where I was general all around flunky, talking to a young Canadian intern (which is a code word for work for free) who had just graduated from Dordt College who turned me on to Seerveld’s book Rainbows for a fallen world.
I realize that these names and events mean next to nothing to you. I guess they’re not the important part in all of this; what is important is understanding that unless I had walked the path that I walked I would NOT be in the place I’m in today. God had to send me on what I would consider many many detours to get me to find what I needed to find. But the truth was they weren’t detours at all.

I talk often about what a long strange trip it’s been but that is only from my perspective. God, who made me, knew exactly what it would take to get me to where I needed to be. He knew that if the hard hearted, socialist, law hater (I know that explains a lot to many of you and confuses others even more) that I was in my teens and twenties was ever going to change it would have to be by subterfuge and not a frontal attack. My acid tongue would have sliced apart anyone who came within a hundred miles spouting the validity of the law of God and the joys of earning a living through actual work.

So God, slowly but surely, tore my life apart, changed my hard heart, taught me to love his law and ways and now in the next stage of the race is sending me to reform school. For that I am grateful.

Maybe you can’t relate to the things that are important to me. That’s ok. I realize I am way off the beaten path for most people. But I would guarantee you can relate to the journey (especially if you’re over 40). I’m reminded of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song:

There's a place up ahead and I'm goin' Just as fast as my feet can fly
Come away, come away if you're goin' Leave the sinkin' ship behind
Come on the risin' wind We're goin' up around the bend

I’ve been going just as fast as my feet could fly most of my life in a hurry to leave the sinking ship behind. If it weren’t for the bends in the road I would have turned and run the other direction a hundred different times. I’m am blessed to be here on this road getting ready to start a new phase of the race, a race I would have run in a totally different direct had I been in control.

For now I think I’ll do the things that are at hand, keep working my way through the two thousand plus pages of new reading material that is coming in the mail soon and spend some time singing Doo, doo, doo, while lookin' out my back door.

Grace and Peace,

Brad
Cosmoyada.com