The Chase

Well hello again friends, Dick Foth here, with stories to make sense of it all. And we're coming to the end of the book known, finding deep friendships in a shallow world and under the section entitled Covenant, which is a huge part of building friendship, we have this last chapter in that section called the Chase. This is how it starts. So the word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. That's from the Gospel of John 1st chapter. Everyone wants to be pursued. A firm's value. When a corporate head under calls, we feel something it can deprive. When that young guy shows up at the door for the first day, it has the chance of being good. It's the step beyond the group gathering at the local exotic coffee house. You feel valued. In the broadest sense, deep friendship always has an element of pursuit connected with it. It's the desire for association, or as they say in the Midwest, the desire to be with, to come with, to go with, to hang with. As children, we equate love with the desire of others to spend time with us. I don't think we ever get past that. For our purposes, we'll call it the Chase. Across the range of relationships, parents, child, sibling to sibling, woman to woman, the man, lover to lover, pursuit is essential. The Chase should never cease. It might manifest now and again as an email, letter, phone call or visit. Or it may show up consistently day after day, week after week. It's a cousin to tenacity and should never stop. As he already is now in her 90s, parentheses, I'm speaking in the moment here. This was written in 2017, so Jesse, just a couple of months ago, celebrated her 100th birthday on a Zoom call, by the way, with all of her family and the parentheses. Jesse already is now a hundred. We met the Yardies, Paul and Jesse, when they returned Illinois in the early 1970s after many years of medical missions in India. They had six great children, three of them were teenagers. Paul and Jesse's expertise in family and children matters quickly made them ahead among the young couples in our congregation. In fact, the Yardies were so adept at child-waring that we felt perfectly comfortable leaving our four young children with them. I mean, that shows who they are. This is again, both parenthetically. When Ruth and I went on a teaching trip to India in 1975. We came back and the kids had been transformed. They made their beds each morning before breakfast. Each of the girls had hands on an apron and other achievements. We said to each other, boy, we'll never do that again, letting the kids stay in a discipline, productive atmosphere like that. In reality, as you can imagine, there was a huge encouragement. Chatting with Jesse one day, I asked her, how did you handle being in a tiny village in the jungles of Uttar Pradesh? While all six of your children were in a boarding school, 1,400 miles away. How did you communicate? Smiling sweetly, she said, I wrote each of them a personal letter every weekday that they were gone. And Paul wrote them on the weekends. Stunned, I choked out, every day. She said, of course, if they were at home, I would have spoken to them every day, but I, I spotted, well, sure, naturally, right. That little exchange detailed the chase right there. It is tenacity and is stamped on below. It's love showing up in the daily mail. It is ideas and feelings on a page that can be read in the early dawn or by flashlight under the covers after lights out. Who wouldn't want that? When I was a ninth grader at Frick Junior High in Oakland, California, a young 20-something youth worker befriended me. He would come every Friday from months to pick me up in his 1952 plymouth. It take me to play basketball. It isn't that I didn't have friends at my age, I had a bunch. It wasn't that I didn't have other options. I did. What so impressed me was his willingness to hang out with me, a kid ten years his junior in a critical year of my life. I didn't get the feeling that I was a project, just a young friend. I don't remember talking theology or even girls, but I'm pretty sure food was involved along with sports. What I remember was him coming to my school and picking me up at 330 each Friday afternoon that year. That was the chase. It showed up in a green 1952 plymouth. It was not weird, it was not dramatic. It was just good, the thing that happens between friends. Some friendships are lifelong and deep. They are of a different order, so we don't have many. During our 15 years in Washington, DCI watched people selected for high office come to town. Often they brought close friends. At other times they reached back for them. In a place of power where one is quite sure, why so and so wants to be your friend. It's good to be able to reach back. There is a kinship built over decades that is built no other way. No story in the scriptures capture that kind of friendship, quite like the story of Jonathan and David. Jonathan and David are young as Rayleighmen. One is born to the palace, the other to a sheep farm. Both the warriors, because these were tribal times, and they were warrior peoples. By birth, Jonathan should be king after his father Saul. But because Saul didn't listen to Yahweh to God, the prophet Samuel anoints David. The youngest of the eight sons of Jesse is the king and waiting. David has a warrior's heart and a poet's mind. He's a shepherd boy, a protector of flocks, who on long Middle East nights puts words to music. After David goes rock to forehead with the Philistine giant Goliath, he and Jonathan become instant friends. They swear a lifelong oath to each other which plays out in excruciating ways. As Saul jealous of David's successes and battles in life tries repeatedly to kill him. When David marries Michael, Saul's youngest daughter, he and Jonathan become brothers-in-law. Their stories and traumas are recounted in great detail in 1st Samuel 18-31 in Neal Testament. What loyalty, what covenant, what tenacity, what chemistry, what a chase. When Jonathan and Saul die together on the field of battle, David does what he has done all of his years. He writes a song. Is a song that haunts a lamentation in honor of the two men who at one time had both loved him. As Saul's jealousy drove him to fit safuri and forays into madness, David cannot stay close, but he always stays close to his friend, Jonathan. The wail of David's broken heart is captured in lines that three thousand years later resonate deep in anyone who has ever loved a good friend. Here is how he says it. Oh, how the mighty heroes have fallen in battle. Jonathan lies dead on the hills. How I weep for you, my brother Jonathan. People how much I loved you and your love for me was deeper than the love of women. David decrees that all of Judah should learn this song. At the heart of his kingdom, he must want them to know that they have not just lost a leader, he wants them to feel the loss of a friend. What did King David and Jesse Yardy know to be true? He, feelings, written down, carry conversation to another level. They give substance to pursuit and lasting quality to the chase. When Jesus left his home to become the hound of heaven and call us his friends, he laid the groundwork for every chase to come. And by his spirit and the hands of eight or nine men putting pen to parchment, we have the New Testament. The chase goes on, what a chase, what a reward, what a friendship. Ruth has some thoughts about this that I consider profound. I love to hear her speak and I love to read her writing. And so here she is just to share her thoughts on the chase. The decline in letter writing constitutes a cultural shift so vast that in the future historians may divide time not between BC and AD, but between the eras when people wrote letters and when they did not. There are just a few things that I treasure. One of them is a little stack of letters bound together with a faded pink ribbon, musings and heartfelt thoughts from over 50 years ago. Letters to me from Dick while he was traveling with a college music group for the summer. The words in those crinkled pages reminded me of our burgeoning friendship and our longing to be together again at the end of that tour. They bring to mind images of a GMC suburban loaded with a string base, five students and a college professor, adventuring on the back roads of the west. One of those letters is lost forever in the desert sand somewhere in Nevada, snatched by the wind from an open car window and tossed among tumbleweeds and cacti. What is it about a personal letter that draws you? Maybe it's a surprise element of not knowing what is inside and your impatience to find out. Maybe it's because you can hold the letter in your hands and read and reread it and discover every nuance or maybe it's just the knowledge that someone is thinking of you. I first learned the true value of letters when I moved away from home to attend college. A highlight of my day was going to the dorm lobby, opening my mailbox and finding a letter from my folks. I would tuck it away, then find a private place to sit and soak in all the words and phrases that took me back there, home with my family. I could feel the emotions of the moment when it was written, see my parents, hear them chuckling over something funny and bask in their expressions of love. I felt connected. When I was working full-time to put Dick through grad school in Illinois, letters were just as important. We longed to hear all the news that connected us to our homes. Sometimes it was good and sometimes heartbreaking. There was the day when we read the sad words written on paper. The news that Dick's father was leaving his mother. We held each other in cried. And the day we learned my parents and brother and sister would be with us for our first Christmas away from home. We held each other in laughed. In our little carriage apartment, letters were our lifeline across those many miles to the west coast. Sometimes some cash would be enclosed and then we made grand plans for the weekend. Rent a TV, buy some extra groceries, invite friends over and celebrate. The urging to become more serious about writing letters myself began when Dick and I moved across the country in the summer of 1993. Our destination was the hills of Arlington, Virginia and acute Cape Cod rental on vacation lane. It was a new beginning in the midpoint of our lives, leaving a salary position for one where we needed to raise our own support. The future was bright but also a little uncertain. Dick was immediately busy with a lot of new exciting opportunities. I had some time on my hands and decided to volunteer my secretarial skills with the international organization that welcomed us. Their values intrigued me. One value had to do with friends connecting with friends, either by visiting them, sending a friend to visit them or by sending a letter. I began work by transferring a large list of those friends found on paper copies in a prayer book to a new computer system. In the process, I got to know the people who worked in the office, a real bonus. I was humbled by their love for Jesus and their selfless work behind the scenes. Having finished my task, I was asked to join a couple of other ladies and begin writing letters to that list of friends I had just cataloged. Just a short simple note with greetings, some encouraging words, an appropriate enclosure and a friendly closing thought. I did have help in index card system with particulars on our letter writing history to each person and the guidance of the person who would sign the letter and add his own personal note at the bottom of the page. The agreement was that I would pray over each letter I wrote before mailing it. That became my privilege and day job for almost 14 years. It was a fascinating way to spend many hours. Never knowing just who I would be writing on a particular day was sometimes unnerving, but never boring. I had to laugh the day I was asked to write separate letters to all the members of a family and include one to the family dog. Sometimes I would phone dick with Christ for help. Who is this person and what can I possibly say? I was surprised to find that in a prayer God would often guide my thoughts so that I could meet the needs of those I was writing. When letters of response were shared with me or I was introduced to people I had written, I felt a part of a great network of friends. Being I knew by personal experience was confirmed during those years. You never know how a few heartfelt words on a piece of paper will affect the person who receives them. Letter writing has something to do with vulnerability and thoughtfulness and a lot to do with intentionality. I like what Malcolm Jones also said. Writing a lot of letters will not turn you into Lincoln or Shakespeare, but if you do it enough, you begin to put your essential self on paper, whether you mean to or not. No other form of communication yet invented seems to encourage or support that revelatory intimacy. And it's that intimacy that connects us across the room or across the miles. When I retired from that position in Arlington and Dick and I moved back west, I decided to continue writing letters, just a few, to family and friends. If for years I had written to people I didn't know, why not write to those I didn't know? First off, I thought of a few women who had been friends to me throughout my life, some whose husbands had died, who might like to find a personal letter in their mailbox each week. And I thought it would be a fun way to interact with my daughters and daughter-in-law with a newsy note that included a favorite recipe and some purse money. Later I thought it could be an interesting way to connect my 14 grandchildren who live in three different states. I could give them our latest news, ask them questions about each other, add a scripture, ask a riddle or tell a joke, and tuck in a five dollar bill. The questions I posed would be answered in next month's letter. Once I began writing an earnest, I couldn't think of a more rewarding way to spend some time. Personal letters are few and far between today because of our fast-paced lives and because we have other more instantaneous means of being in touch. They have involved from the only means of communication between people separated by distance to being discounted by some as snail mail. The amount of time it takes to write a letter, mail it, and then wait for it to be delivered by post, often does not fit into our schedules. The short messages we send electronically contain information, but unfortunately their purpose is not primarily to express our thoughts and emotions and how we live our lives. As such, they are often read one day and deleted the next. And they are in no way a substitute for a newsy letter that lets us know as much about the person who is writing as we do about their news. It's interesting to note that much of our recorded history would be lost if people hadn't taken pen to paper and recorded the events of their days and their reactions to those events. We certainly wouldn't have most of the new testament. So join me, think about some folk who might need your words of encouragement and write some letters. It's part of the chase. Well, I can't think of a better way to end that chapter than with Ruth's voice. Don't you like it? I'm totally biased. That's it for now, we're out, catch you later next week, and think about it. Why don't you think about writing a note to somebody? Not just an email, but writing a note and posting it. I know it'll cost you a buck and a half or whatever it is, but it's all right. We'll see you next time. Dick Folt's signing up.