Haven

by Dr. Richard Ladd

Photo: Jeff Kubina

My countdown to retirement numbered about fifty days and I was trying to enjoy the last few weeks in the classroom and the attachments I had established with several students over their four years in high school: talking to them about their future, their college plans, and their immediate designs.

One young man who, among others, had found a haven in my classroom came in to work on a political science project while the room was empty.
At that time, my world was caving in due to the prolonged illness of my mother, the alienation of relatives who might have helped shoulder that burden and my impending retirement without definite plans.

Unfortunately for him, when he asked, “How are you?” the flood gates opened. He turned away toward the computers. I had unburdened too much. But he hadn’t turned away; he opened BibleGateway.com to print a passage from Proverbs. “You gotta read this,” he encouraged me. As my eyes traveled down the page, I found that the wisdom was talking to and about me. My friend then handed me a CD that his grandmother had given him for his birthday a few weeks earlier: the Tim Keller sermon on that same passage. That evening I listened to Rev. Keller on my drive home and was inspired. The next day, the student and I talked about Proverbs and Rev. Keller’s take, and then he told me that I needed to find a congregation.

By Sunday, I had located a church near my home. I hoped to find remnants of my religious experience as a child. I arrived late for the service, yet I was quietly welcomed by many folks. Back at school, my friend kept checking with me, “Did you go to church this week?” and then with an assumption, “How was church yesterday?”

Eventually as our friendship grew, I thanked him for the wonderful gift of God that he had given me. He beamed and told me that my excitement and acceptance of Christ was alone and by itself a gift of repayment for him.

I retired. The emptiness I had dreaded set in. My mother passed away. And in a perfect storm, the structure of my world collapsed. But I was supported by John 16:33: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” 

This was one of several references that my friend had given me, and that together we had labeled “Verses for a &*#(^% Day.” These scriptures kept me afloat, because the haphazard approach to worship at the church around the corner lacked structure and meaning; omitting pieces of accepted liturgy because the pastor “didn’t like them.” The very reason I started to attend church was slipping away. I needed more.

My friend suggested that I visit Christ-the-Redeemer. On a recent September morning, ushers and parishioners greeted me. I sat and was quickly engulfed by the sanctuary and by the Holy Spirit. Straddling two churches, I sat and prayed for guidance until the warm tones of an organ prelude alerted me to the beginning of the service. Then, I witnessed the structure that I had been seeking.  A structure so intricately woven that a single thread tied together the Psalm, the Old Testament reading, the Epistle and the Gospel, as well as the carefully selected music.

Those parts of worship that had been excluded in the other church came alive: “Glory be to the Father!” Prayers that I had recited in my childhood flooded back to my memory; Fr. Tim’s sermon that morning connected these pieces into a cohesive whole. I found a meaning to Holy Communion.

The clergy’s sermons still loop things together for me as my faith gels.  In an Old Testament class I was auditing at Gordon College, the professor explained the ancient sacrifices on the altar at the temple in Jerusalem and that Jesus had made the ultimate sacrifice. I had always understood ultimate to mean most wonderful, but then connecting the liturgy of CTR, I realized that ultimate in this case means, last or final. From His sacrifice henceforth, there would be no more sacrifices before God.

Soon after, I visited my friend for dinner near his college, excited to reveal my sudden epiphany. He looked at me, and said, “Duh! Why do you think they call Him the ‘Lamb of God’?”

That first service for me at CTR concluded as we sang “Guide me, O, thou great Jehovah!” one of my favorite hymns that I hadn’t heard in forty years. As I listened to those words with a new ear, I realized that I had found the guidance I was seeking and that through the gift of my friend who persevered and through the welcoming, greatness and structure of Christ the Redeemer, I, too, had found a haven.