It is hard to exaggerate how far the movement to include women in the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” dictum has come since the Nineteenth Amendment passed. The female college seniors in a class I teach are unable to appreciate how hard and long the struggle to free women from millennia of patriarchal rule has been. They take with a yawn, as a given, as something obvious to any numbskull, that women are equal to men: “Who would question that?”
Our granddaughter will begin elementary school this year with no doubt in her mind that she is as free as any boy in the class to become a nuclear scientist or a neurosurgeon. Someday she will study history and learn to credit her freedom-fighting foremothers.
January 25
Dr. Kimberly Allison, a young pathologist whose specialty is studying breast cells under a microscope, got breast cancer. The unkindest cut of all was that the diagnosis came while she was still nursing her second child. Dr. Allison wrote the book Red Sunshine about her experience. One thing she covers is how becoming a cancer patient changed the way she relates to patients. They can never again be just cells on a slide.
An excellent movie on how becoming the cancer patient can transform the way a physician relates to patients is The Doctor starring William Hurt. Hurt plays Dr. Jack McKee, a highly successful, self-absorbed, swashbuckling surgeon who cannot wait to cut into the next patient. He taught one star-struck resident: “Get in. Fix it. Get out. I’d rather you cut straight, and care less. The surgeon’s job is to cut.”
Then the great physician McKee got a malignant throat tumor. Part of his larynx had to be removed.
Dr. McKee changed the way he trained residents and visited patients. The most influential event in his transformation came after a dying young woman told him a parable about a farmer who kept all the birds and creatures away from his crops with traps and fences. The farmer was very successful, but he was also very lonely. So one day he stood in the middle of his fields from dawn to dusk, his arms outstretched, to welcome the animals. Not a single creature came. They were terrified, you see, of the farmer’s new scarecrow.
Then the young woman set the dagger: “Dear Jack, just let down your scarecrow arms and we’ll all come to you.”17
Power may be the great aphrodisiac, but vulnerable love is still life’s most effective counter to loneliness and death.
January 26
A goat resides at Kinderdijk in The Netherlands.
Kinderdijk is home to the largest concentration of windmills in the world, some of them 250 years old. Industrious, courageous Dutch men and women created a system of dikes, windmills, and canals that successfully reclaimed land from the North Sea, enabling their families to live safely—of all places—below sea level.
At the entrance to this quaint village now stands a brass goat. It balances on one hoof atop a haystack rising out of a canal. The village people chose that sculpture to symbolize their forebears’ victory over the cold and threatening North Sea.
Why a goat? I am told by people who raise sheep and goats that three characteristics of a goat make that symbol make sense. One, goats tend to be independent and headstrong. Goats have a mind of their own while sheep, by contrast, do not like separation from their flock. Two, goats like to take the high ground and move uphill in search of food, while sheep are content to graze, heads down, in a pasture. Three, a goat’s tail turns up, while a sheep’s tail turns down.
Our time is out of joint. Many Americans have mortgages that are “under water”—they owe more on their house than the house is worth. Hurricanes and storms the last few years have flooded many homes located well above the one-hundred-year flood plain. Those homeowners had no reason to think there was a good reason to carry flood insurance.
When will lifting ourselves out of the economic tsunami that hit this country be over? No one knows.
Remember the indomitable spirits of our foremothers and forefathers who kept overcoming humongous obstacles to improve this country. Remember the Dutch who keep on reclaiming Kinderdijk from the sea.
Remember the hope goat.
January 27
“How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day”— Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Marian Stoltzfus Fisher had no idea what life would demand of her that Monday morning in 2006 when she checked into her little Amish schoolhouse. But when Carl Roberts, a deeply disturbed man, burst into the school and lined the little girls against the blackboard and told them he was going to shoot them all, thirteen-year-old Marian, the oldest, stepped forward and asked him to shoot her first.
Perhaps she thought her sacrifice might sate the gunman’s bloodlust so that he would spare the other girls, or that it might buy her classmates opportunity to run, or incentive to run, or enough time for help to arrive. Regardless, five girls beginning with Marian died that day and five were injured. The killer then killed himself.18
Marian lived the faith transmitted to her from her Amish mothers and fathers. They had taught her the saying of Jesus: “The greatest way to show love for friends is to die for them.”19
The Amish grandfather of one of the murdered girls, on the very day of the murders, said of the gunman: “We must not think evil of this man.”20 The Amish set up a charitable fund for the family of the killer. They attended his funeral, explaining: “The Bible teaches us to forgive those who trespass against us, and to mourn with those who mourn.”
The Amish tore down the desecrated schoolhouse. Six months later they opened New Hope School, where their children are learning to live in hope, love each other, love their enemies, and forgive those who sin against them.
January 28
I cannot forget the first time I saw the face of William Niehous. He was on the evening network news, having stumbling out of a Venezuelan jungle, looking like warmed-over death. His hair fell down below his shoulders and he had a Rip Van Winkle beard.
More than three years earlier terrorists had kidnapped him, ending the comfortable lifestyle he had enjoyed with his family as the executive of a glass company. The terrorists ripped him from his wife and three kids and held him for millions of dollars ransom. In those three years, living with snakes and mud and the likelihood of execution, Niehous saw not one human face. His captors kept him blindfolded the entire time. Whenever they did remove his blindfold, they were all wearing masks.
One day, in a crude hut, listening to the plaintive cry of a jungle bird, he glanced down and noticed an ant on the floor. It had found a crumb from Niehous’s last meal and was carrying it away. He couldn’t get out of his mind the enormous weight the insect could carry compared to its size. The ant made him think that God probably had built tremendous resources into all creatures, including himself.21
One of the most common comments I have heard from people like William Niehous, whose stable and comfortable lives got suddenly blown apart by an accident or illness, is: “I never would have believed, before it happened, that I could survive a body blow like that.”
Ants can move a rubber tree plant. One ant can carry a crumb several times its weight. We, like the ant, have powers within us that we may not know until we are put to the test.
January 29
How realistic is the advice to “forget the past?” Selective amnesia is virtually impossible and I am not convinced—even if we could forget—that it would help much. All our past, for better and worse, got us here. You have to dance, as legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal put it, “with what brung ya.”
Charles Dickens, whose past was very painful, at age forty eight went behind his Gad’s Hill house with two of his young sons and burned, basketful after basketful,