Please Note: Due to the high cost of postage and returned mail, we will no longer be sending out a mass mailing of Newsletters. If you can only receive the Newsletter through snailmail (the post), please contact us by email southborough@labri.org or phone: 508-481-6490 and we will be happy to mail one out to you specifically.
SOUTHBOROUGH L’ABRI NEWSLETTER, WINTER, 2010
I always seem to write this letter with both Christmas and New Years well-established in my mind. They are two different constellations, stimulating very different sets of thoughts, but which perhaps ought to be brought together.
We celebrated in Christmas what C.S. Lewis called “The Grand Miracle”, dwarfing all other miracles by its outrageous wonder – God actually joining the human race as a newborn. Any of us could have held him in one hand. This miracle is a central foundation of our faith. God himself became one of us to accomplish and secure our salvation from sin -- from which we are helpless to rescue ourselves.
One of most often-quoted verses of the Bible is John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. God’s gift of his Son is put forward as the measure by which we are meant to grasp the dimensions of God’s love for us. It is almost as if God invites us to try to falsify his love at that point. How can we be sure about God’s love for us? By trying to balance good and evil in the world, hoping that pleasure overbalances pain, that goodness outweighs evil? By trying to show the “good reasons” for why awful things somehow had to happen? No, neither of these, but “God so loved the world that he gave his only son…” I think we need to look where God himself tells us to look, at the gift of Jesus on the first Christmas and at his life all the way through passion week to the ascension. That is where God directs us to anchor our confidence in his love. If this gift is our anchor, we can trust not in our own speculations for evaluating specific events on some cosmic scale, but we can trust in God’s intention and ability to fulfill his promised plan, ultimately bringing us to eternal life.
When our calendars move us on to New Years day, quite different things come to mind. There will be a full range of emotions in response to the year just passed, but also anticipation of the unknown year to come. We are future-blind about almost everything that will happen in the world in 2010. As we say in our church, “Tomorrow is not guaranteed”. The next year will be a mixture for us of order and disorder, predictable experiences and accidents, events wanted and unwanted. The news is always filled with reminders of unpredictability, they are after all, much more “newsworthy”. Pundits try to both soothe us and alarm us about great events and trends. Will there be peace where there is now war? What will happen with the economy? With our job? Our education? Our family? Our church? Our health? Our relationships, near, far and as yet unknown? Our plans for…?
As people think of these unknowns in our society, talk about luck seems to step in. We hear about “trusting my luck”, “wishing me luck”, being “down on my luck” and not “pushing my luck”. Luck is all around us. It is lighthearted talk, but it puts only a thin, up-beat veneer over the top of a great meaning-vacuum in an impersonal world.
But if we look at the New Year while remembering Christmas, it becomes a different story. The God of Bethlehem is also the God of Easter Sunday, who is also the God who is alive today, tomorrow and forever. We may be blind to specific future events of 2010, but we are not blind to the God who is the Lord of that future. We are called to trust the God who gave us his only Son, who in turn went all the way to crucifixion for us -- as we face our own anxieties and fears. It is not as if we can trust him to give us a crystal ball, nor to make all our plans of the next year work out as planned. God is God, not our obedient boy-servant. But ours is not a story without an author. We are part of his larger plan in which we will bear real fruit that matters and ultimately receive eternal life.
We had a very good autumn term here in Southborough, with students taking real advantage of what was going on. There was, as there so often is, good diversity of ages, interests and backgrounds, making the interaction fruitful. Ben Brown did a great job as our lone helper at the start of the term and he was joined by Tim Reynolds, and together they carried a large load. We are also thankful to Mary Frances Giles, a speech therapist from Boston, who also came in a few days a week to help feed students.
We broke up the study schedule to have two memorable work days. Danny had figured out a way to rebuild the dam on our pond, which had been leaking badly and was about to collapse. He and students built forms and then in two days, poured nearly 18 tons of concrete -- the work done by our students, helpers and workers, men and women, and with great enthusiasm lasting well past exhaustion!
Thank God for financial survival in this time of economic stress. We have had some lean times, but we are still here. Amazing!
Thank God also for some very useful times that I had at a weekend with graduate students from Cornell and evenings that Mardi and I had, one with graduate students from MIT and the other with undergraduates from Harvard. I was also grateful to be able to speak at an apologetics conference in R.I.
Thank God for Danny and Marta’s wedding in England just before Christmas – a really joyful occasion. They will be joining us for the first part of our winter term here before moving to L’Abri in England.
We have sad news from Sweden, of the death of Per Staffan Johansson, who had led the L’Abri work in Sweden since its beginning. Pray for his wife and children and also for the future of L’Abri in Sweden.
Pray for our winter term here with new students, new helpers and fewer workers from February on. Pray that God would bring more students as there are uncharacteristically few signed up at this time. Pray for visits that we are now arranging with groups from local colleges.
Please pray for L’Abri in its vulnerability in the midst of all the unpredictability of 2010.
Yours,
Dick Keyes
SOUTHBOROUGH L’ABRI NEWSLETTER, WINTER, 2010
I always seem to write this letter with both Christmas and New Years well-established in my mind. They are two different constellations, stimulating very different sets of thoughts, but which perhaps ought to be brought together.
We celebrated in Christmas what C.S. Lewis called “The Grand Miracle”, dwarfing all other miracles by its outrageous wonder – God actually joining the human race as a newborn. Any of us could have held him in one hand. This miracle is a central foundation of our faith. God himself became one of us to accomplish and secure our salvation from sin -- from which we are helpless to rescue ourselves.
One of most often-quoted verses of the Bible is John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. God’s gift of his Son is put forward as the measure by which we are meant to grasp the dimensions of God’s love for us. It is almost as if God invites us to try to falsify his love at that point. How can we be sure about God’s love for us? By trying to balance good and evil in the world, hoping that pleasure overbalances pain, that goodness outweighs evil? By trying to show the “good reasons” for why awful things somehow had to happen? No, neither of these, but “God so loved the world that he gave his only son…” I think we need to look where God himself tells us to look, at the gift of Jesus on the first Christmas and at his life all the way through passion week to the ascension. That is where God directs us to anchor our confidence in his love. If this gift is our anchor, we can trust not in our own speculations for evaluating specific events on some cosmic scale, but we can trust in God’s intention and ability to fulfill his promised plan, ultimately bringing us to eternal life.
When our calendars move us on to New Years day, quite different things come to mind. There will be a full range of emotions in response to the year just passed, but also anticipation of the unknown year to come. We are future-blind about almost everything that will happen in the world in 2010. As we say in our church, “Tomorrow is not guaranteed”. The next year will be a mixture for us of order and disorder, predictable experiences and accidents, events wanted and unwanted. The news is always filled with reminders of unpredictability, they are after all, much more “newsworthy”. Pundits try to both soothe us and alarm us about great events and trends. Will there be peace where there is now war? What will happen with the economy? With our job? Our education? Our family? Our church? Our health? Our relationships, near, far and as yet unknown? Our plans for…?
As people think of these unknowns in our society, talk about luck seems to step in. We hear about “trusting my luck”, “wishing me luck”, being “down on my luck” and not “pushing my luck”. Luck is all around us. It is lighthearted talk, but it puts only a thin, up-beat veneer over the top of a great meaning-vacuum in an impersonal world.
But if we look at the New Year while remembering Christmas, it becomes a different story. The God of Bethlehem is also the God of Easter Sunday, who is also the God who is alive today, tomorrow and forever. We may be blind to specific future events of 2010, but we are not blind to the God who is the Lord of that future. We are called to trust the God who gave us his only Son, who in turn went all the way to crucifixion for us -- as we face our own anxieties and fears. It is not as if we can trust him to give us a crystal ball, nor to make all our plans of the next year work out as planned. God is God, not our obedient boy-servant. But ours is not a story without an author. We are part of his larger plan in which we will bear real fruit that matters and ultimately receive eternal life.
We had a very good autumn term here in Southborough, with students taking real advantage of what was going on. There was, as there so often is, good diversity of ages, interests and backgrounds, making the interaction fruitful. Ben Brown did a great job as our lone helper at the start of the term and he was joined by Tim Reynolds, and together they carried a large load. We are also thankful to Mary Frances Giles, a speech therapist from Boston, who also came in a few days a week to help feed students.
We broke up the study schedule to have two memorable work days. Danny had figured out a way to rebuild the dam on our pond, which had been leaking badly and was about to collapse. He and students built forms and then in two days, poured nearly 18 tons of concrete -- the work done by our students, helpers and workers, men and women, and with great enthusiasm lasting well past exhaustion!
Thank God for financial survival in this time of economic stress. We have had some lean times, but we are still here. Amazing!
Thank God also for some very useful times that I had at a weekend with graduate students from Cornell and evenings that Mardi and I had, one with graduate students from MIT and the other with undergraduates from Harvard. I was also grateful to be able to speak at an apologetics conference in R.I.
Thank God for Danny and Marta’s wedding in England just before Christmas – a really joyful occasion. They will be joining us for the first part of our winter term here before moving to L’Abri in England.
We have sad news from Sweden, of the death of Per Staffan Johansson, who had led the L’Abri work in Sweden since its beginning. Pray for his wife and children and also for the future of L’Abri in Sweden.
Pray for our winter term here with new students, new helpers and fewer workers from February on. Pray that God would bring more students as there are uncharacteristically few signed up at this time. Pray for visits that we are now arranging with groups from local colleges.
Please pray for L’Abri in its vulnerability in the midst of all the unpredictability of 2010.
Yours,
Dick Keyes
P.S- We have been sending out an e-mail Prayer letter between main
newsletters to people who have requested to receive it. It includes more
detailed information and specific things to pray for. If you are interested,
send us an email at Southborough@labri.org with "PRAYING FAMILY" in the
subject line.
