The Long View

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Her own mother, my grandmother, was born in 1898 and lived 102 years. The year she turned 94, an election year, we had an extended conversation about politics. “Who was your favorite president?” I asked. She thought for a moment and declared, “Roosevelt.”

“I can understand that,” I replied. “After all, he led us during World War II, and started many important programs, like Social Security…”

“Not that Roosevelt!” she interrupted. “I mean Teddy Roosevelt.” She told of taking a trolley to downtown Philadelphia to listen to one of Teddy’s speeches on a whistle-stop tour during his second run for the White House, in 1912. “He was such a handsome young man…” she mused.

I had recently returned from Russia, a country in chaos after the fall of Communism. When I described the changes I had witnessed, my grandmother piped in, “I remember when those boys took over,” she said, speaking of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. “I didn’t think they would last.” Outliving a century gives one a certain perspective: she had watched a powerful ideology appear on the scene, burst into light, then fade away like a dying star.

Remarkably, my wife’s grandmother also lived through the entire 20^th century; she died at age 104. A classy Southern woman, she had graduated from college with a degree in music. Growing up, she knew men who had fought in the Civil War, and buildings in her hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, still bore the scars of bullets and artillery.

In the year 2000, I congratulated her on her achievement. “Think of it, Grandmother, you’ve lived in three different centuries. She looked puzzled. “You were born in 1898, the 19^th century. You lived all through the 20^th century. And now it’s the 21^st century. Three centuries—that’s amazing.”

In her furrowed brow I could see her mind struggling to absorb that fact. Then she came up with a response no one could have predicted. “Humph. Seems more like five.”

I can hardly fathom the blur of changes both grandmothers saw. Born before the Wright brothers launched their rickety airplane, they lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Radio, television, the refrigerator, air conditioning, automobiles, highways, antibiotics, computers, nuclear weapons—none of these existed in their childhood.

As I probed our grandmothers’ astonishing memories, I noticed a trend that seems almost universal in the reminiscences of older people: they tend to recall difficult, tumultuous times with a touch of nostalgia. According to polls, 60 percent of Londoners who survived the Blitz now remember that time as the happiest period of their lives. Somehow a new spirit of community and patriotism sprang up to eclipse even the horror of bombs and V-2 rockets. In the U.S., the elderly swap stories about World War II and the Great Depression; they speak fondly of hardships such as blizzards, the childhood outhouse, and the time in college when they ate canned soup and stale bread three weeks in a row. (Will the current generation someday regale their grandchildren with stories about the COVID-19 pandemic when people wore masks, argued about vaccines, and stayed indoors during lockdowns?)

I ran into this pattern again when I worked on The Gift of Pain, the memoir of Dr. Paul Brand, a missionary surgeon who had entered his ninth decade of life and sixth decade of marriage. As I interviewed him and his wife Margaret about their life together, they too kept circling back to the crisis moments.

For example, there was the interval in 1946-7 when Paul had preceded Margaret to Vellore, India. In that year of independence and partition, unrest between Hindus and Muslims began spreading across the northern part of the country. In southern India, though, especially the region around Vellore, Hindus and Moslems lived together in reasonable harmony. Thus Paul wrote and asked his young wife to bring their two infant children and join him as soon as possible.

Back in England, things did not look so rosy. London papers reported that violence was sweeping across India, forcing the greatest human migration in history. Four million refugees had fled to the city of Calcutta alone. In the northwest, Sikhs boarded trains, made men pull down their pants, and killed all those circumcised (Muslims); Pakistanis waylaid trains going the opposite direction and killed the uncircumcised (Hindus). An estimated 75,000 to 100,00 women and girls were systematically raped.

Paul Brand’s glowing reports of the situation in Vellore contradicted the frightening headlines Margaret was reading in London: “SLAUGHTER IN THE PUNJAB…BRINK OF CIVIL WAR…MASSACRE OF EUROPEANS PREDICTED.” Her family, not realizing the nearest trouble spots were a thousand miles from Vellore, thought it the height of folly for her to take two babies to such a place. But Margaret, trusting her husband, took a leap of faith and did so.

There were other family crises as well, and I heard versions from both Paul and Margaret. At the time, these dramatic intrusions seemed to call into question their entire relationship. But they retold the stories with nostalgia, for the crises fit together into—indeed, helped form—a pattern of love and trust. Looking back, from the vantage of fifty years, it seemed clear that the Brands’ mutual response to the stormy times was what gave their marriage its enduring strength.

Every marriage has crisis times, moments of truth when one partner (or both) is tempted to give up, to judge the other undependable, irrational, untrustworthy. Great marriages survive these moments; weak ones fall apart. When divorce happens, tragically, both partners lose out on the deeper strength that comes only from riding out such stormy times together. If, for example, Margaret Brand had judged her husband crazy for beckoning her to India in the midst of political turmoil, and filed for divorce—how sad that would have been. A splendid marriage and partnership in God’s work would have been irretrievably lost.

Great relationships take form when they are stretched to the breaking point and do not break. Seeing this principle lived out in people like the Brands, I can better understand one of the mysteries of relating to God. Abraham climbing the hill at Moriah, Job scratching his boils in the hot sun, David hiding in a cave, Elijah moping in a desert, Moses pleading for a new job description—all these heroes experienced crisis moments when they were sorely tempted to judge God uncaring, powerless, or even malign. Confused and in the dark, they faced a turning point: whether to turn away embittered, or step forward in faith. In the end, all chose the path of trust, and for this reason we remember them as giants of faith.

The Bible is littered with tales of others—Cain, Samson, Solomon, Judas—who flunked such tests. Their lives, like the marriages that fail too soon, give off a scent of sadness and remorse: oh, what might have been.

In America, I’ve noticed, a consumer mentality tends to infiltrate relationships as well as commerce. Some people treat marriage partners like automobiles; every few years it’s time to upgrade to a new model. Some Christians treat churches the same way. And some even approach God with a consumer spirit: when God performs satisfactorily, that merits our worship, but when God seems distant or unresponsive, why bother?

Why bother? Because the deepest strength only comes through testing.

Partly from listening to elderly people, I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse. Fifty years casts another light on marriage; the century looks different to a 94-year-old. And I believe that human history will take on a new look from the vantage point of eternity. Every scar, every hurt, every disappointment will be seen in a different light, bathed in an eternity of love and trust. Not even the murder of God’s own Son could end the relationship between God and human beings. In the alchemy of redemption, that most villainous crime became a day we now call Good Friday.

C. S. Lewis once said that our first words on getting to heaven will be “Ohhh…” with an air of “Now I understand.”