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SOUTHBOROUGH L'ABRI NEWS/PRAYER LETTER,
49 Lynbrook Road, Southborough, MA 01772

Spring/Summer, 2009

I usually sit down in the spring to write this letter not long after our celebration of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I suspect that there is a problem for many of us that even this amazing story can become dangerously familiar and maybe even tame. There are two ways to experience a story. The first way is when you know the ending and are re-reading or re-hearing it. The second is when you don’t know the end or any of the events until they happen. The first can have greater depth and the second has the intensity of suspense in uncertainty.

Many of us know how Bible stories are going to turn out. This is a good thing, but also a liability. If we know a story well it is easy to have a sense that the end was natural, obvious or inevitable. Anybody could have seen it coming. Easter follows Good Friday. It always has. There are no surprises there. We cannot pretend to “not know” about Easter Sunday, but we can try to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who thought that Good Friday was the end of the story of Jesus. If we don’t do that, we miss out on a lot that we need to learn. The problem at hand is that we all live our own lives in the second way, learning of events only as they happen and not knowing how our story will end. We are all future-blind and we need to learn how to live that way, but by faith. The early followers of Jesus could not “fast forward” to Easter Sunday, just as we can’t “fast forward” over times of darkness, grief and disappointment in our own lives.

I think it is hard for us to realize the kind of catastrophe Good Friday was to the disciples. So many hopes smashed, so much grief, helpless outrage and bewilderment. How could they have gotten it so wrong? Where was God? It was too hard to imagine that God the Father had failed or that Jesus had failed either. But what had gone wrong?

There is new interest in Saturday, “Holy Saturday”, but it is not because the Bible tells us much about what took place that day. It was the Sabbath, so the main thing they had to do was to be still. But imagine what it meant for them to be still after what had just happened the day before – their Savior, their Lord, their Hope, their Friend and their God, the one they had given up everything to follow, had just been tortured to death. They couldn’t do any of the normal things to distract themselves because it was the Sabbath. They were stuck having to stay still, think about it, and worship God. But where had God been yesterday?

Somehow, they had no hope for his resurrection. When the news first came to them from the women who had been to the tomb on Sunday morning, they considered it “nonsense”, “an idle tale”. Why? My guess is that whenever Jesus had predicted his crucifixion, the disciples had been so adamant to dissuade him from even thinking about his death, that they never heard him when he went on to speak of his resurrection. Whatever the reason, they lived Friday, all day Saturday and the start of Sunday morning with grief, confusion and without hope.

One implication of all this is that God in his wisdom seems to have allowed his people to go through this time of darkness and even despair, to look into a chasm of hopelessness. It seems also that he allows this to happen to us also, as we live out our life’s story without knowing future events or having a fast forward button available. Most of us have gone through times of bewilderment and despair. Many who come here as students certainly have, but have been taught that despair should not happen to “good Christians” and so do not think they even have the right to talk about it. Thank God that people in the Biblical account did not feel so constrained! God seems to allow these times for reasons that are in any final sense, unknown to us. But perhaps a partial reason might be that we can learn things that we cannot learn when everything is working according to our plans. His presence is with us even when we feel that we are experiencing his absence.

Easter Sunday was a time of lights switching on all over the place, lights of understanding and hope. Suddenly Jesus as king could be taken seriously again. The idea of Jesus as High Priest could be taken seriously for the first time – that his death was his own intentional, once for all sacrifice for the sins of all those who would ever trust in him. So much of his teaching began to make sense to them, sense that it never had made before. They could suddenly see how he was the “good shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep”, the “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.

So, as we hear the story of Jesus, knowing its ending, let’s still try to experience it from the shoes of those who couldn’t see Easter coming. If we dare to look into the dark of their hopelessness, we may learn more about the brightness of the lights that came on at the resurrection, and that are still shining. That way we may also learn something about navigating our own future-blind lives by faith.

We have just come to the end of our sabbatical winter term and it has been a very fruitful time in different ways for each one of us. I will give you a quick “run down”.

I would have said that the Morrells were doing very well until Joe had a moderate heart attack in February just before the Rochester conference. He feels much, much better now and is exercising again, but his tests have shown that there has been some damage to a part of his heart which has, so far, not recovered. This has been discouraging because he had been on a better diet and an exercise regime since having a stent put in to repair a blockage five years ago. It has been very sobering for us all and a heavy load for Sue, who had to delay her trip to Australia to see her family. Luke is just coming to the end of his first year at the regional high school and has been doing well there. Nate continues on at The Imago School, and has become a major help in splitting wood for our firewood supply here.

Danny spent most of his time at the English L’Abri along with shorter visits to the branches in Holland and Switzerland. We are trying to give younger workers as much experience as we can in different branches. Along the way he has been doing a Regent College extension course in Old Testament. It has been a very fruitful time for him.

Ben and Nickaela have remained here except for some time with Nickaela’s parents in California. The twins are about 21 months old now. They now do more running than walking wherever they go, and are a great source of life and energy. Nickaela has taken a course about bereavement and Ben has taken one on early church history, both for credit at Regent College.

Mardi’s health has been shaky in the mid-winter but she is now gaining, though she still struggles with tiredness. She has been auditing two courses at Wellesley College, one on Islam in the World Today and the other in Christian Spiritual Literature. Both have been very helpful, with lots of reading. I have written about five chapters of a new book about (for me) an old issue, the questions of Jesus. The time has been broken up for me at healthy intervals by speaking engagements.

In the middle of the winter we had a “break” from our sabbatical when we had a group of students from Middlebury College come down for about a 6-day crash course in L’Abri. We gave them two live lectures each day, with lots of discussion. Give thanks for this wonderful and very lively time.
We are particularly thankful for our finances during this sabbatical time. We had been tempted to cancel the sabbatical when we saw that the economy was tanking, because of our extreme financial vulnerability. But we decided to keep on with the idea both because of the long-term gain for the work and also because financial vulnerability and unpredictability has always been more or less normal for us. Thank God with us for the many generous gifts that made this possible and pray that we would be able to stay in the black as the year continues.

We open for students this week. Pray for this new group, asking God to bring the people he wants here and for their time to be powerful and important in their lives. Pray also for our helpers, Grace, Lauren and Meredith. Pray for the group to work together well. Please pray also for the Friday night lectures, but also all the informal times of discussion and interaction.

Pray for Joe’s continuing recovery and Mardi’s tiredness to get better.

Pray also for safety with outside work in the summer.

May God be with us all to have a deep confidence in him and to be able to hold the most basic and profound truths of our faith to be truths that are fresh and alive.

Dick Keyes

P.S- We have been sending out an e-mail Prayer letter between main
newsletters to people who have requested to receive it. It includes more
detailed information and specific things to pray for. If you are interested,
send us an email at Southborough@labri.org with "PRAYING FAMILY" in the
subject line.