Things Are Different Now by Donald Shaw Donald Shaw holds a BA. degree from Westmar College, LeMars, Iowa; a B.D. degree from Evangelical Theological Seminary, Naperville, Illinois and has done graduate work at New York Theological Seminary and State College of Iowa. Post-graduate work in Clinical Pastoral Training was completed at Kansas State Hospital, Osawatomie, Kansas, and Baptist Memorial Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. It all began in the summer of 1965. I had been going through what we ministers call a dry spell. I had been preaching every Sunday, but it was a powerless kind of preaching. There was little joy, little creativity, and little power. It had become pure drudgery. Saturday nights were almost nightmarish as I approached Sunday knowing it would be just another service as my parishioners and I sweated out another dull sermon. I dreaded seeing the sun come up on Sunday morning. I guess you could compare it with a batter’s slump that sometimes affects baseball players. Try as hard as I could, I could not seem to shake myself out of it. As the hot summer days of July wore on, our vacation time arrived and my wife Pat and I arranged a trip to Red Feather Lakes in Colorado. We knew the children would enjoy it and it would give us a chance to stop over with my folks in Arnold, Nebraska. I had found that sometimes a vacation was the best thing that could happen to a minister. Just getting away from it all often helped. Besides, being around my home folks was always a tonic for my tired soul. A few days after we arrived, Dad startled me a bit as I was finishing breakfast. “Don, why don’t you pay a call to old Mr. Hartman before you leave,” he said. “Who is Mr. Hartman?” I asked as I put sugar into my second cup of coffee. “He is a neighbor and a good friend of ours. He used to preach, but is now retired.” “Oh, I don’t know,” I answered, trying to find an excuse while sipping Mom’s good coffee. “We are supposed to leave this noon for Colorado. Where does he live?” “Right down the street,” Dad said with an unexpected bit of determination. “It will only take a few minutes to walk down and see him.” Against my wishes, I broke away from the leisurely visit around the breakfast table and headed down the shady street to the old frame house about a block and a half away. It was a beautiful July morning. Even nature seemed alive with expectancy. The Hartman house was small and weary looking. As I approached, I saw him in his garden with a spade in hand, digging potatoes. A small pail was bout half full of scrawny, pathetic-looking potatoes. He was a small, white-haired man of ancient vintage and his face was drenched in perspiration. His long-sleeved, blue shirt was spotted with darker patches of moisture as the hot Nebraska sun beat down on his bent, moving figure. I cleared my throat and spoke, “Mr. Hartman?” He looked up, wincing in the bright morning sunlight to see who had called him. I moved toward the edge of the well-spaded potato patch. He saw me coming and straightened up, wiping his wet brow with the back of his shirt sleeve in one motion. “Mr. Hartman, I am Donald Shaw,” I said, wondering whether he would recognize my name. “Come over here and let me shake your hand, son,” he said. “I have been wanting to meet you ever since I heard your Dad talk about you. You are the Presbyterian preacher, aren’t you?” Even in that bright sunlight, there seemed to be a supernatural joy that beamed from his face. His eyes seemed to sparkle with energy and vitality. Glancing down at his pail of tiny potatoes and then back at his face, I saw that his potato crop had not been all that might be desired. The potato crop in Arnold that year had been declared a total failure. Even the most venerable of the Arnold gardeners shook their heads gravely as they sat on the old timers’ bench discussing the blight. But Mr. Hartman seemed blithely unaware of his crisis. He was digging potatoes and praising God at the same time. I wondered how he could be so happy. What is his source of contentment, I asked myself. Here he is, living in a run-down old house all by himself. His potato crop is an obvious failure. He is out in the broiling sun, dripping wet with perspiration and bent with age, yet he is one of the happiest persons I have ever met. I had no answer to my questions. Immediately, he began to talk to me about the Lord and about God’s blessings on his life. Then, raising his eyes from the hard dirt of the potato patch and glancing around, he began to quote from the Nineteenth Psalm: The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament showed his handiwork. Day unto day uttered speech and night unto night showed knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he hath set a tabernacle for the sun.... I was pondering over the possible meaning of this strange paradox in the potato patch when I was again arrested by his words: His going forth is from the end of heaven and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heart thereof. What a strange man, I thought to myself. The conversation moved to my church and my pending plans to take a leave of absence and go back to school to complete my training in clinical pastoral care. He was interested and said, “Come inside for a moment, Donald; I have something I want to show you.” I followed as he moved toward the house, knocking the dirt off his spade and leaning it against the ancient wooden steps that led to the back porch. “Follow me,” he said as he pulled himself up the steps toward the old, weathered screen door. Inside the dark, plainly furnished house, we went to the living room where he began to fumble with the latch of an old trunk. It looked much like a treasure chest that had come from a Spanish galleon, and it had an aura of a “holy of holies” as he slowly lifted the creaking lid. “Here is my latest growing edge,” he said, smiling as he ruffled through a stack of quite new and up-to-date books. I noticed books by well-known writers. Very gently, almost reverently, he picked up I Believe in Miracles and handed it to me. “There is a great frontier these days in the healing ministry. While you are studying Freudian analysis and psychiatric medicine, I hope you will also open your mind to spiritual healing.” I glanced through the book with skepticism. The preface was written by a well-known judge and the dust jacket gave me some indication about the scope of the Kuhlman ministry. But who was Kathryn Kuhlman? Why all this enthusiasm? The whole idea seemed as strange as this prophet of the potato patch. Time passed quickly and before I realized it, it was almost noon. “I must be going,” I said. “The children are anxious to get to the mountains and we are leaving right after lunch.” Walking back up the tree-lined street, my thoughts lingered on the idea of spiritual healing. This had been one area which I had avoided like the plague during seminary days. Many times I had heard tales of those who had used it to accomplish their own selfish ends. Yet another part of me yearned to know more about all this, especially since I was preparing for a move into the field of clinical pastoral care. Maybe there was more. I had been trained in the scientific method and wanted to know a great deal more about that book. Was Kathryn Kuhlman really an authority on miracles? Was spiritual healing authentic? I had many unanswered questions. After returning to Conrad, we began to carry out our program for the new church year. There were the Conrad Hospitality Days and our eldest son, Mark, was busy building a float. We were also preparing to celebrate the eighty-fifth anniversary of our church. Things were active, as usual, but I had the vague feeling that church programs, study groups, and other good things were at the helm, and Christ was somehow left standing outside. I sensed that others, like myself, wanted to let Him in but simply did not know how to open the door. Two weeks later I was in Waterloo on business and stopped by the public library. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if Miss Kuhlman’s book was on the shelves. To my surprise I found it and decided to check it out. Returning home, I started reading—slowly, cautiously. I was approaching this new frontier as a critic. I also began to read other books on healing ministries. I learned to my amazement that even some of the greatest psychologists were men of faith. For example, Carl G. Jung once said: The truly religious person ... knows that God has brought all sorts of strange and inconceivable things to pass, and seeks in the most curious ways to enter a man’s heart. He, therefore, senses in everyone the unseen presence of the divine will ... If the doctor wishes to help a human being, he must accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is ... Healing may be called a religious problem. My interest was increasing. In our young adult Sunday school class, we were studying the Book of Acts. Although my interest in healing was primarily academic at the time, I shared some of my interests with the group. There was some cautious response, but some were outspoken in their rejection of the whole idea. I realized I did not have enough information to speak with authority and again read Miss Kuhlman’s book, as well as books on spiritual healing by Don Gross and Emily Gardiner Neal. I had thought I was fairly well-versed and prepared in those fields relating to the established church’s ministry. I had read many books in the field of psychiatry and clinical pastoral care as well as theology. My sermons were filled with quotes from well-known psychiatric and psychological writers. In other words, I thought I had all the tools necessary for a successful, twentieth-century ministry. As I read, I began to wonder about my knowledge. Was it enough? A whole new area of ministry was unfolding before my eyes. Where had I been all my life? I had a hard time reconciling the idea of miracles of healing with what I had been taught, for all I had learned was completely contrary to any such idea. But it was difficult to refute the testimony of those who had been healed spiritually. By nature, I was a skeptic, having grown up in a very intellectual and skeptical family. We had always prided ourselves on our education. I felt honored that I was being considered as a student at one of the best psychiatric training centers in America. This barrier of my cultural and intellectual background was difficult to eradicate. About the time school was out in 1966, we began to make serious plans to accept an offer to move to the Kansas City area where I would begin my year’s clinical work in pastoral care. I planned to serve one of the hospitals as a chaplain and member of the psychiatric team while I did graduate work in the clinical care program. However, two weeks before we left, I had to make a trip to Waterloo to return some books to the library. After checking them in, I had a strange urge to head back into the stacks. That is odd, I thought. I came here to return books, not to look for more to read. However, I searched through the stacks where the books were kept and by habit found myself walking in front of the books marked Religion. There it was again. The title simply leaped at me from the shelf, I Believe in Miracles. What is God trying to say to me? I wondered half aloud. I took the book down and turned it around in my hands. Then I was hit by another urge. Check the book out and take it home. “What?” I almost said it aloud for sure that time. I had already read this book twice. Besides, I was moving out of the state in less than two weeks. What was the need for the book? I had no answers, only a strong leading to take it home with me. So, shaking my head at my own foolishness, I returned to the front desk and checked it out. Now what caused me to do a foolish thing like that, I wondered as I walked down the worn front steps to my car. I was to find out the very next day. It was late evening; my neighbor had been clipping his hedge and the street was strewn with trimmings. We were joking back and forth rather loudly when I looked up and saw Harold Selby coming down the sidewalk, limping along bravely on his two canes. I forgot my frivolity as I thought of the tragic waste of life surrounding this once-vibrant young man who had been struck down by the great crippler, multiple sclerosis. In a town the size of Conrad you know most of the people. But we had just moved into the new manse and I had only met Harold once or twice. “Hi, Harold,” I called out. He smiled. It was a genuine smile in spite of the pain. We chatted for a few moments and I noticed he kept struggling to focus his eyes as we kidded with my neighbor about his adventures in landscape gardening. In a few minutes Harold moved on. I felt a sudden surge of pity for this man, so crippled, so hopeless, so in pain. “Harold! Wait just a minute. Wait there a second, will you? I have something I want to give you.” I dashed in the house and picked up I Believe in Miracles and returned to where he was waiting on the sidewalk. “This may seem a bit irrational, I know, but I feel led to share this book with you and your wife. There is much about this that is still new to me. If you have trouble reading, perhaps Arlene can read it to you,” I said. There was an evident eagerness on his part as he accepted the book. He shuffled on toward his house. Several evenings later he was back, talking about the book. We stood on my back patio while he said, “Don, I have read those case histories and I believe them. Why can’t things like that happen at home if people have faith and really pray to God?” “I don’t understand it, either,” I said. “Maybe there is some kind of power that is released within a group that is filled with expectancy and faith. I wish I knew. Frankly, it is still a bit of a puzzle to me.” I paused, half embarrassed to say what had to come next. “By the way, I will have to ask you to return the book to the Waterloo library. We are moving next week.” Our new parish at Greeley, Kansas, was only twelve miles from Osawatomie State Hospital complex where I served as one of two chaplains in the new Adair branch hospital. The work was fascinating. Adair, like the other three hospitals of the huge complex, used the Menninger pattern of milieu therapy. There I experienced a kindness and compassion among team members that filled my work with real meaning. Physicians, psychologists and other team members had a genuine respect for the ”Christian faith, and patients were encouraged to hold onto those aspects that were positive and life-affirming. Our chaplain supervisors were men of unfailing patience and good will. I often sensed Christ’s presence more among these broken bits of humanity in the state hospital than I did among the wealthy suburban socialites who crowded the fashionable churches. Since our chance encounter at Cedar Falls Bible Conference in Waterloo, I had not heard from the Selbys. It was while I was in the midst of training that Pat and I received a letter from Arlene telling of Harold’s miraculous healing back in Pittsburgh. I was amazed. I could hardly believe it. Yet I could not possibly doubt Harold’s integrity. The question uppermost in my mind at that time was, will it last? In the meantime, Harold had enrolled as a graduate student at Ohio University and invited me to visit him during his spring quarter holiday to look into some job openings. I agreed to come, but there was something else I was seeking — something even more basic in my spiritual life. True, I had been a Christian for years, but I sensed there must be a dimension of joy, enthusiasm, and power for service that I needed very much. How could I preach faith when my own faith had grown so very thin? I remembered reading from Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, “If you want faith, go where faith is.” Maybe this was what was drawing me to visit Harold. I could not fully account for the enthusiasm and steady optimism that came through so clearly in the letters we had received from them. I had been a Christian longer than either of them. I had studied both theology and the latest on Christian psychology. But here I was, so lacking in the one basic which underlay it all — faith. “I cannot share with my congregation that which is not real to me,” I told Pat one morning. “If God is breaking through in some new areas as Harold has described, then I must go and find out for myself. Not only do I want to see Harold, but I must attend one of these miracle services for myself.” This was the reason that the following Friday I walked up the steps of Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh. I found myself standing in the midst of an expectant, mixed multitude. Many had been waiting nearly two hours. Poor and rich, upper, lower, and middle class, educated and uneducated, all blended together to make a truly ecumenical multitude. One of those waiting on the steps was Dr. Thomas Asirvatham, a distinguished surgeon from a well-known eye hospital in Dindigul, South India. He was in the United States doing some graduate study. He was convinced that this movement was the work of the Holy Spirit. If a man of this stature believes, I thought, then why should I be so filled with doubt? The service began and I watched in astonishment as the people joined in praising their God with joy and thanksgiving. There seemed to be a Presence which literally pervaded the atmosphere. This Something did not lend itself to analysis. It just seemed to saturate those present with agape love, joy, expectancy, and gladness. “Dear Lord, whatever you have for me, I want it,” I prayed. Then I added, “But, O God, if you do, please do it in a good, sane, quiet, respectable way. No emotion. No testimonies from me!” As the service progressed, however, my prayer changed. “Lord, whatever You want, I am willing. Do it Your own way.” Then it happened. It seemed that God’s love came down and saturated every atom of my being. I experienced new faith, new hope, new life. The place seemed filled with the glory of God. I sensed something of what John must have felt when he was “in the Spirit” on the Lord’s Day and described the brightness of the Presence of Christ. Whatever happened, it was as if a pilot light had been kindled in a cold, dead Presbyterian minister, and I suddenly tasted the fullness of the new wine of the Holy Spirit. I had previously known of the Comforter referred to in the Greek as the “paracletos.” I had taught that He is with the Christian but all do not have His fullness. My prior experiences led me to believe that He was with me only as the sun is with us on a cloudy day. But now the clouds were rolled back and the reality of the sunshine broke through, and all things suddenly became bright and new. Before returning home, I attended another of these Kathryn Kuhlman services. This one was held in the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh. There was the same note of happy expectancy, hope, eagerness, and faith. I met the pastor of that great church and we shared our amazement at how the Spirit of the Living God was manifesting himself in these days. The big change in my life is the way the Scriptures have come alive. It is, of course, the same Bible from which I had always preached, but now it is different. It is different because the Spirit who inspired those who wrote it is now inspiring me anew to love and understand it. I am learning, even yet, that the Word of the Lord is revealed “not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” I wrote Miss Kuhlman a letter — maybe it sums up the whole thing better than anything else I could say: I hope you will ever continue on in the ministry just as you are doing now, and that you will never permit yourself to be sad or discouraged by the coldness of some of the clergy who scoff at faith and miracles and the Christ who turned water into wine. These skeptics are perhaps well meaning, but in their blindness they do that which is more fantastic still; they turn wine into water. They take the blessed wine of miracles, of revelation, of Holy Spirit manifestation, and turn it into the “water” of humanism, Sabellianism, and the ever present Pelagianism which permeates so much of the theology of our present day. One more thing. Do you realize, Miss Kuhlman, that through the anointing and the power of the Holy Spirit, you have succeeded in a measure doing precisely that which modern day, secular psychotherapy often attempts to do, but sometimes fails? Your ministry has succeeded in attaining the healing of the emotions. Dr. Robert White of Harvard University, who wrote the text book used by our graduate school on Abnormal Psychology, describes psychotherapy as a “corrective emotional experience.” Do you realize that through your ministry you have often accomplished exactly this? Through the Holy Spirit, you not only deal with the negative emotions of fear, resentment, worry, and despair; but there is a special Presence which becomes a veritable dynamo of compassion, tenderness, deep settled peace, infinite joy, gentleness, goodness, and a special kind of praise and adoration of the blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ. Our modem day churches are filled with many good people (good in the usual sense of the word) who are terrified at the thought of emotion in religion. I think it was Clovis Chappel who once told us he had heard a minister of a very sophisticated congregation warning these people of the “dangers of emotion in religion.” And yet, Chappel said, “I observed that the pews in which they were sitting were more emotional than the people.” How tragic that we humans, in our humanness, tend to fear the very Power that will heal. When the Bough Breaks: Chapter 8 |