I am writing from the Sacramento jail, where I had the good fortune to share a cell with your friend Jesse Harris. He told me all about the time he spent in Miracle Springs, how he went there intent on killing your father and instead became friends with your family. He told me how much your family did for him. And he talks about what he describes as a clean new feeling in his soul from forgiving and being forgiven, and giving himself to God for the rest of his life.
It is like nothing I ever heard before, though now remembering some of our past conversations, Cornelia, I realize that you tried to tell me about God years ago, but I was so selfish and scheming that I never heard what you were really saying. I suppose it takes a run of bad luck sometimes to wake you up to how things really are and to get you to look at the truth as it really is. I guess that’s what happened to me. I want you to know that I’m a changed man now.
About a year ago I got myself mixed up with some land swindlers about fifty miles south of here. I didn’t know what they were up to, but was just looking to make a few easy dollars, so I agreed to operate their office front in Stockton—which was just for show—while they went out and made the deals. When the thing went sour they disappeared, and there I was in the office looking like it was my scheme all along because they’d gotten me to sign the lease on the office in my own name. I had been framed for the whole thing. Trying to explain things to two federal marshals, I saw immediately how stupid I had been, but it was too late. I’ve been in jail now for two months waiting for my trial, and with no money to put up for bail.
These last two months sitting here searching my own soul, and then talking with Jesse—well, the long and the short of it is that I’ve decided to give whatever’s left of my life to God too. Jesse’s told me what to say and how to pray, just like he did, and I feel a lot better already. I only wish I’d have listened to you earlier, Cornelia, and not acted like such a fool. I’m sure sorry for all the things I did and said to you through the years, and for the way I behaved in San Francisco last year. I want you to know that I’m a changed man.
I’m hesitant to ask, but Jesse says that the two of you are the kind of people who will help anybody, and he told me I shouldn’t be afraid to write you. So I decided to take his advice and write and ask if you might consider helping me put up the two hundred dollars in bail money. I know it’s a lot to ask. But my trial isn’t for three more months, and I know if I could get out, I might be able to find out something of where the men are who got me into all this, which the lawyer says would really help me. You’d get it all back, of course, at the trial. But I’ll understand if you can’t.
Well, that’s about all I have to say, except that I’m sorry again, and thank you for what you did for Jesse, who passed it on to me.
Yours sincerely,
Robert O’Flaridy
I let the two sheets drop from my hand with a sigh of so many different feelings, I hardly knew what to think. Christopher and I were both silent a long minute or two. Robert, whom I had known for fifteen years as Robin O’Flaridy—we’d both worked years ago for the same San Francisco newspaper—and who had pulled so many tricks and shenanigans on me I couldn’t remember them all, was the last person I’d have expected to hear news like this from.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said finally.
“It is exactly as your father said,” added Christopher, “somebody’s always watching. And now we come to find out that even Robin O’Flaridy was paying more attention than you thought.”
“It’s . . . it’s just so hard to imagine,” I said again. “He was just the same as always when we saw him last May.”
“Nobody is outside God’s love,” said Christopher, “even those we least expect to be attentive to his voice.”
“What should we do?” I asked.
“It hardly seems coincidental that this comes right after I’ve been telling the people about the practicality of the Christian faith. So much from my last week’s sermon comes right back into my mind. Do you remember what I said Jesus told us to do—lend money when asked, do good, visit those in prison?”
“But doesn’t this seem a lot like that woman in St. Louis?” I asked, wanting to believe the best, yet still hesitant. “The one who took your money after you tried to help her?”
“But this is completely different,” rejoined Christopher. “This is someone you know. That woman was a stranger and a con artist.”
“Yes, and I’ve been conned by Robin before.”
Christopher nodded and it fell silent. I knew he was trying to weigh his own feelings with what I’d said, and trying somehow to balance the two sides.
“So you think we ought to do it?” I asked finally.
“What else can this be,” sighed Christopher, “but the Lord’s way of giving us the opportunity to see if we really mean what I’ve been speaking about? If we don’t obey his words when we have the chance, how can I expect the rest of the congregation to?”
“Do we even have two hundred dollars?” I asked.
“I think we have just about that much left in the bank from my share of the mining work.”
“What about the tithe fund?”
“No,” Christopher replied, “that can only be used for the people of our community.”
We both fell to thinking again for a minute or two.
“What do you think you’ll do?” I asked finally.
“I suppose I could wire the money down to the capital,” replied Christopher. “But I think I probably ought to combine both those two commands—lend when asked and visit those in prison. I think I should take the train down there and see to the matter personally.”
“You could visit Jesse too,” I suggested.
“Would you want to come with me?”
“I’m not sure I’m up to a visit with Robin O’Flaridy quite yet,” I replied, “even if he has become a Christian. That may take me a little time to get used to.”
Chapter 26
What Is God’s Purpose?
Two days later Christopher left for Sacramento.
He didn’t want to be gone over the weekend and had originally planned to wait until Monday. Then he was reminded of his words about the urgency of obedience and so decided to take the very next train. He asked Pa and Almeda and me and Mr. Shaw to take care of the Sunday services. He told us it was all right if we did a lot of hymn singing and said that Harriet Rutledge would be happy to help us with anything.
He arrived back in Miracle Springs the following Tuesday, a little subdued it seemed to me.
“How’s Jesse?” I asked.
“He’s doing very well. Still not much news about his future, but his spirits are good, and he’s telling everyone he meets about the Lord.”
“And Robin?”
“Yes, I saw him too. He’s fine. Seemed a lot different than the last time I saw him.”
“You put up his bail?”
Christopher nodded.
I decided to ask no more questions for the moment. Christopher didn’t seem in a very talkative mood. I imagined he was tired from his trip.
By the following Sunday he was back to his old energetic self. When that day came, once again he took his place in front of the Miracle Springs congregation to finish the last of the series he’d been doing, which had now been delayed a week.
“We have been considering together what I call my cornerstones of belief,” Christopher began. “In my mind, and in my life’s experience, they form a progression, a progression which I believe growing Christians must go through. Not just pastors who think about such things—but all who consider themselves Christians. Though some theologians may disagree with me, I do not find this progression optional. I believe that to grow, one must go through each of its successive stages.
“First, we must discover what God’s character is like.
“Sad to say, many Christians never really make this discovery, and as a result they live their lives fearing God’s wrath rather than learning to trust his goodness
. Thus they are unable to grow in their relationship with him, because they are not acquainted with his true personality. How many of you would say you were on intimate terms with me, for example, if you had no idea what kind of person I was? And yet we so easily make that same mistake with God.
“Once we are acquainted with God as our Father, the second stage of the progression, which we considered two weeks ago, is learning to walk with him in daily faith.
“Today we will look at the third and final aspect of this progression—toward what are we walking?”
Christopher paused and took a couple of breaths.
“The question we now want to consider,” he began again, “is this: What is God’s purpose in our lives? What is it he desires to accomplish? Toward what is faith supposed to point?
“We now find ourselves at what, for me, represents the third cornerstone of belief. And it is just this—I believe that the objective toward which the Father is guiding and leading his sons and daughters, that which he is ‘growing’ us to become, is nothing less than Christlikeness of character.
“If we are living trees, that is the fruit the species called mankind is supposed to produce. If we are flowers, that is the blossom that is the end result of being—Christlikeness.”
He paused again to let his words sink in.
“That is why it matters so little in one way what we say with our mouths and what we believe in our brains about the many doctrines of the Christian religion. What matters is this: What kind of people does our Christian walk cause us to become?
“Are we becoming more like Jesus? Then truly we are walking the Christian faith!
“Will any of us ever achieve Christlikeness of character in this life?” Christopher asked, looking around at us all. “Will we ever fully manifest that fruit on our character-trees? Of course not.
“We can, however, with each passing year, be walking upward on the road of faith so that, though imperfect, Christlikeness will slowly become more evident in our attitudes and our characters. The fruit of Christlikeness can grow on these trees of ours, even in spite of the human limitations of imperfection. Not every apple on an apple tree is what we might call a perfect apple. But they’re all apples, as different as every one might be . . . and they all make great apple pies.
“Such is the goal. This is what ought to define what we call ‘a Christian life.’”
Chapter 27
How Is It Achieved?
Christopher paused, while some shifting sounds went around the church.
“Now let me ask one of the most important questions of all,” he went on. “How does this growth I am speaking of come about? How does the Father cause the character of his firstborn son, who is Jesus, to be infused into the characters of all those others who choose to become his sons and daughters?
“It is very simple really. Simple, that is, considering what a high thing it is we are considering.
“I believe that as we do what the Father and Jesus have instructed, the Holy Spirit causes a change toward Christlikeness to take place within us. As we gradually slice off bits and pieces of our selfish self—what is called the flesh or the old man—the Father replaces them with tiny infusions of Jesus’ character.
“But that raises a question: Does Christlikeness come about by God’s doing or our doing?”
Christopher watched as everyone thought about his or her answer.
“Both,” he said after a moment. “God has given instructions about how his people are to live. As we practice and obey those instructions, by the choices we make and by our own determination to put others first, then he causes the change to happen—over the course of many weeks, months, and years. Increasingly, we respond to people, situations, and events more as Jesus himself would respond. It is not easy to do so. But with practice we gradually learn. And then the transformation comes as we do what Jesus has told us to do.”
Christopher paused, thought a moment, then smiled.
“Let me give you an example,” he said. “You come in after a long, hard day’s work with dirt all over your hands—just like Mr. Henry and I looked by the time we were finished with his trench! Now, you go to the basin and pick up the bar of soap with one hand. But your other hand is tied behind your back, so you have to try to wash your one free hand all by itself.”
A few chuckles went around.
“Try it when you get home!” laughed Christopher. “It’s not so easy. It works a lot better when you get both hands into the water with that bar of soap!
“That’s exactly how the Christian life works. We can’t do it alone without the Lord’s help. But neither can he do much in the way of growing the kind of fruit he’s trying to grow in us by himself, without our help. God’s part and ours go hand in hand. You can’t separate them.
“The more times you are kind or forgiving to someone who is mean to you, the more capable you become of responding like Jesus. You become a kinder and more forgiving person. The Holy Spirit working inside you may be causing the change to happen, but you are the one who makes it possible by repeated kind and forgiving actions that you do yourself.
“God cannot do this without our help. ‘Father, make me to become like Jesus,’ is a worthy prayer. It is, in fact, one of the highest prayers possible for a man or woman to pray. But God cannot answer it unless we are doing what he tells us to do—being kind and forgiving and doing to others as we would have them do to us.
“It is from obedience that this transformation I speak of comes. That’s both hands working together.
“Therefore, we must know what we have been told to do and what kind of people the children of God are to be. In order to make this possible, it is urgent and imperative that we know what the New Testament teaches. Not so that we will merely know it, but so that we will know what it is we are supposed to do.
“In the New Testament are our instructions, our orders, to be found. The Gospels are most important of all. If we hope to become like him, we have to do what Jesus said!
“If Drum or Almeda were going to hire someone to manage the freight company who knew nothing about the business, they would first give him detailed instructions. They might even write down a list of all his duties. Then they would expect him to do everything they had instructed.
“As Christians we too have been left with instructions.
“The four Gospels are our guidebook. They tell us how we are supposed to live, what our attitudes should be, how we are to behave, how we are to think, what we should do in various situations. Familiarity with the Gospels is foundational if you and I hope to make progress on our walks of faith toward becoming like Jesus.
“When we do read our Bibles, there are many topics that can be raised for discussion. We can talk about salvation, we can talk about God’s mercy and grace, we can talk about what Paul calls justification, we can examine the prophetic portions of Scripture, we can try to describe exactly what faith is, we can discuss the afterlife.
“There are a multitude of doctrines and qualities of God’s being upon which theologians hang their opinions like coats on a row of pegs. Every coat looks a little different, and after a while the wall is so cluttered with coats that you no longer see the pegs. When I was in seminary I studied most of the theological pegs, so to speak, but I found myself none the wiser for it.
“I thus determined within myself that I would search the Scriptures to find what for me seemed the essential points which I myself believed to comprise the Christian faith. These I am sharing with you now. Open any page of the New Testament, point out any verse on any topic, and the truths therein will reduce, in the final analysis, to these cornerstone principles of belief I have been sharing with you.
“Who is God and what is his character?
“What comprises the walk of faith?
“What is God’s ultimate purpose in our lives?
“Those three questions may be found, as I say, on every page of the Scriptures—if only we learn to discover and discern them.
“There is not a single attribute of God, nor a single doctrine about his work, his plan, or his creation in which God’s good, loving, and trustworthy Fatherhood cannot be found. We could list fifty things that God ‘is,’ but they would all merely describe the fact that he is our Father. We could list a hundred things that God ‘does,’ but they would all be mere corollaries to his love, goodness, and trustworthiness.
“In the same way, there is not a single verse in the New Testament that does not contain a practical element, a call to God’s children to grow into Christlikeness by the obedient living out of self-denial and servanthood.
“Open the Bible to any page, read any sentence, and there, if you have eyes to see, you will find practicality, Christlikeness, and relinquishment of self—with the Fatherhood of God overarching the whole.
“It took some time, and I had to retrain myself to read my Bible through eyes that could perceive these three cornerstones and the principles involved in living them. You can imagine the difficulty of a former seminarian such as myself, who had studied under theologians with more letters after their names than my name contains, of putting aside doctrines, opinions, and ideas and seeking instead nothing from the holy Scriptures other than what I was to do in the next five minutes.
“But I did learn to retrain myself, to adjust my brain to see the New Testament not as a religious treatise full of ideas, but as the most practical guidebook about living the world has ever been given. As we study the Scriptures together while I am your pastor, it will be with just such a practical focus.”
Chapter 28
What Is Christlikeness?
Christopher paused momentarily, glanced down at his watch, then thought for a moment.
“It is about ten minutes till noon,” he said. “I had planned to stop there. Yet it somehow seems to me appropriate to continue just a few minutes longer in order to ask, and then answer, one more extremely vital question. What exactly do I mean, some of you may find yourselves wondering, when I speak of this thing called Christlikeness? I would not have you leave this morning with that question unanswered in your mind.”
A New Beginning Page 13