Mister Knockout

Daniel’s front teeth pierced through his gums tonight.

Samuel arranged some wooden letters on his desk to give himself this nickname:

This year, Karin & I have decided not to watch TV while we eat supper. Instead, we’ve been reading the “family” portion of the M’Cheyne schedule. We use the International Children’s Bible. Samuel and Daniel are remarkably docile while we read the Bible out loud. Of course, they are strapped down in their chairs, with food on their trays.

Better get used to this, I tell them. We’re gonna keep it up until you’re old enough to leave the house.

Then, after we finish reading the Bible, we watch TV.

There is the “family” portion of the M’Cheyne schedule; and then there is the “secret” portion, which Karin & I each read on our own (in secret, of course). This year I’m secretly reading from the English Standard Version. I didn’t have an ESV bible until a few months ago when I broke down and got one because our pastor preaches from the ESV. I chose an edition called the Literary Study Bible. It’s published by Crossway and strikes me as very Wheatie, very Rykenish. It tells me what literary genre every passage is in. If the genre changes for a two-verse interval, the Literary Study Bible remarks upon it. So it’s useful if you wish to trace the outline of highs and lows and zoom-ins and zoom-outs. It’s also useful in bringing to the forefront of consciousness the obvious but too-often-neglected fact that the Bible is like the Dorothy Sayers novel The Documents in the Case: a collection of documents and a coherent story. (It’s too easy to think of the Bible as just one or the other of these things.)

Yesterday, I read this nice comment about Ezra 2:

Ezra was both a priest and a scribe (7:11), and the temperament of a scribe or recorder is fully evident in Ezra 2. The most obvious lesson that we learn from these lists of names is that the Bible is a historical document in which real events and real people are shown to matter to God and to the writers of the Bible. Although many of the names are unfamiliar to us, they serve to remind us that we, too, are known by God and that one day God will bring us home too.

To read this part of Ezra isn’t just to read a historian’s distillation (though some distillation occurs, of course). It’s more like being taken into an archive and shown a jumble of roll calls, receipts, and tax records – traces of People Who Were. Or it’s like reading names carved out in a graveyard or war memorial. It’s an invitation to pause and think about the dead.

And to be startled, later, when Jesus says: “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.”

A day-trip to Wheaton

Yesterday, I traveled with my parents to Wheaton, Illinois. Brian was graduating from college. He is my youngest cousin. I hadn’t seen him since he was a year old; he grew up in Indonesia.

He was very pleased to meet me, and we were immediately photographed together (I don’t have the picture). Then, we hardly spoke to one another. He is a pleasant young man, but very quiet. I am unpleasant, and also rather quiet.

Here Brian is with his parents, my Uncle Tim and Aunt Aphing (Ah-PING).

(My Uncle Tim is my mom’s brother.)

My Aunt Linda and her daughter, my cousin Tanya, visited from Kansas City.

Aunt Aphing served lots of good Indonesian food. But there weren’t enough seats at the table.

“Where will Brian sit?”

Aunt Aphing: “In his room.”

“But this meal is to honor him!”

Aunt Aphing: “But you are the guests.”

Brian and Aunt Aphing ended up eating in the kitchen, on barstools.

Not all of us went to the ceremony. Tanya and I stayed at home and read detective stories. Later, we livestreamed the ceremony, and my dad joined us. The greatest applause was for the ROTC graduates – which my dad thought bizarre (“at Wheaton, of all places,” he said); I thought it perverse but typical.

Watching this ceremony – and the baccalaureate religious service, earlier in the day – I was strongly reminded of Quito’s English Fellowship Church, in which North American missionaries would gather to use their mother-tongue. Wheaton’s organ music surely helped to remind me of the EFC. But the whole vibe of the place was familiar.

Wheaton’s evangelicals are more straitlaced, more prim, than those with whom I now associate in the United States.

Billy Graham was mentioned during the ceremony, of course, as were the famous missionary martyrs of 1956.