Thoughts on the question, “How long?”

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

The number of confirmed deaths from last week’s Christchurch earthquake continues to rise. It’s now difficult to imagine it possible to find anyone alive in the rubble, and yet there’s still hope someone else has survived.

Yesterday, Christchurch mayor Bob Parker said he hoped for a miracle, just one more survivor from the rubble. And it’s something we’d all like to see. It’s as if one (or two, or three) more surviving is some kind of victory for the human spirit.

So, we hope. It may be a faint hope, but still we hope.

Ripples of impact mean a disaster such as this one can’t be limited to a geographic area. I’ve spoken to several locals who have family in the Christchurch area. They’re relieved and recognise they’re fortunate their families are safe.

This has been a summer of dramatic and rolling disasters in our area. It’s unprecedented in our recorded history. No one can assume they’re safe. And as Christians aware of God’s desire to rescue our planet, we ask how much longer can this go on?

This isn’t a new question. “How long?” is a recurring question in the Psalms. It’s usually couched like this: “How long, God, will you let this situation continue? When will you step in?” It’s a question not limited to the Psalms, though (see Habakkuk 1:2, Zechariah 1:12 and Revelation 6:10, for example).

We Christians recognise God stepped into history in the first century. That gives us confidence in Jesus’s promise to return. It’s our hope. The life of Jesus makes it real, believable and certain.

However, that doesn’t stop us asking, “How long?” while we await this final miracle. And we pray for it. Events such as the Christchurch earthquake remind us this isn’t a selfish prayer, it’s something our world needs.

A lesson in graciousness

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

A few years back (2007), Time magazine ran a report on the 50 worst cars of all time. The first listed: the 1899 Horsey Horseless—although it isn’t certain if it was ever built.

What caught my attention was the name of the inventor, Uriah Smith of Battle Creek, Michigan. For many Seventh-day Adventists, Uriah Smith is well known as a gifted church pioneer and long-serving editor of Adventist Review.

He was also an inventor of such diverse things as an artificial leg with a moveable ankle, a school desk with an improved folding seat and the Horsey Horseless.

To soothe the nerves of horses in the presence of “horseless carriages,” Smith suggested a wooden horse head be attached at the front. Then it would resemble a horse and carriage. “The live horse would be thinking of another horse,” Time quotes Smith, “and before he could discover his error and see that he had been fooled, the strange carriage would be passed.”

With hindsight, it’s a crazy idea.

He wasn’t alone in wild car ideas. In 1911, Milton Reeves decided an eight-wheeled car would give a smoother ride and displayed the ActoAuto at the first Indianapolis 500. When he had no orders, he built the six-wheeled SextoAuto with no more success. He’s now best remembered as the inventor of the muffler—good idea.

Uriah Smith is best remembered as an Adventist pioneer and writer-editor. It’s true there’s a cluttered wordiness in his style, but that’s not his fault. Everyone wrote that way then. Much of what he wrote still makes good sense.

But isn’t this the deal? You and me, we have good and bad ideas. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which from within our own heads.

Fortunately, the occasional crazy idea doesn’t mean Uriah or Milton—or we—are crazy. Let’s call it a human condition, and let’s be as gracious about other people’s ideas as we are with our own.

We can be different

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

There’s an important truth here because all of us can find things in our past—and our present—that we don’t want to make the focus of our future. Theodore Dalrymple (in Our Culture, What’s Left of It) wrote this in the context of growing up in his home.

He tells of how his parents had “created for themselves a kind of hell on a domestic scale.” In the 18 years he lived at home, he never heard them speak to each other. Yet they ate at least one meal together every day.

When he visited his father on his deathbed, he was told his mother could come and visit “if she wants to.” After passing the message on, she told him, “Tell him I’ll come if he asks me.”

“They stuck to their principles and never did meet: for what is mere death by comparison to a lifelong quarrel?”

He says because of his home life, he pitied himself for a long time, with a “most sincere compassion for myself.” But then it occurred to him: his experience had in a sense liberated him from the need or excuse to “repeat the sordid triviality of my parents’ personal lives. One’s past is not one’s destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is.”

He now believes the only thing worse than having a family is not having a family.

It’s true we’re shaped by our past and its consequences, but they don’t have to control our present or our future. We can choose a different course. We can be different.

And there’s help says the apostle Paul: “Let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes” (Ephesians 4:23, NLT). One’s past never has to be one’s destiny. Thankfully.