M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Letter from the Highlands, August 2002
by Anne Perry

This is another letter written, not from the Highlands, but from a hotel in London, from the romantic-sounding address of Primrose Hill.  I expect it was – once!  Primroses I mean.  But it is still reasonably pleasant.  I have been here for nearly a week, and will be a full seven days by the time I leave.  I came down here for three days consulting with my agent, including a visit to the Imperial War Museum for research, and four days at ‘Crime Scene 2002’ which is a literary and film festival at the National Film Theatre.

It has all been immensely productive, and I am not finished yet.

My agent and I discussed the five war stories (we did it in total luxury near a swimming pool!)  I have already finished the first draft and begun the second draft of the first story.  Later we threw around ideas for the new Pitt and Monk stories for the last one of this contract and the first two of the next.  Brainstorming for plots is the greatest intellectual fun you can have – coupled with receiving new ideas from others, meeting other minds and learning something you didn’t know before!  Altogether it was a wonderful time.

We went to the Imperial War Museum where they currently have a mock-up of a World War One trench in Flanders which you can walk through – both a daytime and a night time part.  There are figures of soldiers, some wounded, guns, stretchers, replica food, first-aid kits, all the equipment a soldier would have, and holes in the wall where you can press buttons to hear the sounds of tanks, rifle fire, shells exploding etc., or even get a whiff of the smells of the different types of gas used – mustard gas, chlorine and so on.  Stumbling along the winding zig-zag trenches in the dark with duck-boards on the floor, gives only the barest idea.  We were warm and dry and safe!  But it is still a better approximation than merely imagining.

There were recorded voices of old men who were actually there in their youth, telling us what they remembered.  In the main rooms were pieces of guns, shells, helmets, food cans, water bottles etc. actually dug up from battlefields.  There were uniforms from real men, on plaster models, many real guns of all sorts, and literally thousands of pieces of equipment.

Oddly, one of the things that moved me most was a display of recruitment posters talking about duty, courage and honour!  It seems another world where people were prepared to die for honour, and giving your word bound you absolutely!  Seldom today do we hear anyone say ‘I have given my word, so I must do it – no matter what it costs’.  So often it is ‘Well, something has come up – so I can’t do it now!’  I cannot count the number of times someone has said ‘Yes, I’ll do it’, then it becomes inconvenient, or they simply forget, or change their minds, and somebody else is left in the lurch.

Surely to be without honour is a kind of death.  If you cannot keep your word, don’t give it.  Once given, it is binding.  Only force beyond your control releases you.

God has told us many times that His word cannot be broken.  Once it goes forth it CANNOT return empty.

We are not Gods.  Sometimes we are governed by circumstances we could not have foreseen, and we have to apologize, and then do the next best thing we can.  BUT, we are aiming to become like our Father.  That is where we want to be, however long it takes.

I remember my stepfather, Bill, telling a story of his youth when he was a Boy Scout in Canada.  He thought he was doing pretty well – he had all the skills, and all the courage, until he failed to receive a promotion he expected.  He asked his scout master why.  He was told – ‘You are a good scout in almost all ways, but you are not reliable’.

He never forgot that, and he swore that for the rest of his life no one would ever be justified in saying that of him again.

I don’t think they ever were.  His word, once given, was unbreakable, no matter how painful, inconvenient, expensive to him it might be to keep it.  He did not do it to be respected by others, but because that was who he wished to be.  You could rest your life on his honour, and during the war many did!  I know of no one who was ever let down.

What a heritage to live up to!

But we all have the greatest Father there is!  And His heritage in Eternity to live up to, His duties and His glory to inherit.  We won’t do it all at once, but we can try all the time!  In fact we must try all the time.

I had so much to say last month that I had well filled my space without mentioning a Sunday School lesson I missed attending because I was away, but which touches one of the most painful subjects in the Old Testament.  I am referring to the story of the High Priest Eli, who taught the prophet Samuel when he was a child.  The lesson that elevates the heart and the soul is of Hannah, who prayed for a child, and promised God that if He gave her a son she would give him back to the Lord’s service as soon as he was weaned.  And she kept her word!  Thus began the career of one of the greatest of the prophets – with a covenant kept, no matter the temporary cost – and I stress temporary.  Think - weigh the eternal cost of one broken!

And the tragedy is of Eli, whose two sons were priests at the temple.  They abused their office for their own gain, and their father did not chastise them.  His love for them was of a short-sighted nature.  Perhaps, as we are all prone to do at times, he feared men more than God – and the result of ‘putting family first’ was that they became so ripe in their iniquity that they were destroyed.  Because of their position and their privilege, the Lord had no choice but to strike them down.

If we put family first we risk losing not only them, but even our own salvation.  The only way to assure anything good forever is to put God first – ALWAYS!  That is terribly hard to do if family, or anyone you love, or need, pulls in the other direction.  But if we lose God, then eternity is lost, as is everything that is truly good.

Many of the greatest men and women in the history of the world have lost people they loved, but you can keep nothing by placing it before God in your order of importance.

Has not God Himself lost many of His children?  Can we say we love any family or friend of ours more than God loves them?  We might need them more!  We might want or need them to love us more – but that is not the same thing.  What we mean then is love of ourselves – not of them.

It is easy to say, and quite another thing to do – but the lesson is one of the most profound, and tragic, in all our Scriptures.  By placing God first, Hannah kept everything!

By placing his sons before God, Eli lost them, not only in this life, but perhaps in eternity also.  What happened to him, we do not know.  What glory or loss he faces is God’s to judge, not ours.  But his example is preserved for us to learn from, and to try to avoid his errors.

We studied two more of the Old Testament’s great tragedies, that of King Saul, who was the Lord’s anointed, and yet slipped so far!  What happened within him?  Why did he fall?  It seems to have been a mixture of pride and jealousy, two sins which can touch any of us so easily.  We reach high office, and then cannot endure it when another takes what we perceive to be a little of our glory.

We forget whom we serve!

And the even greater tragedy was that of David.  He looked on Bathsheba and lusted after her.  It cannot have been love because he had never even met her, far less known anything of her character.  He slept with her (I do not know what choice she might have had in denying the king when he had sent for her – women had few rights then).  Then when she was pregnant he tried to maneuver her husband into a situation where he would believe it was his child.  But Uriah was too honourable to deny his duty and would not leave his men.  So David connived a way to have him killed.

And this was the man who had been so inspired by the Holy Spirit that he had written the Psalms, even the Messianic ones which prophecy of the Lord’s coming!  Read them – the words are exquisite, the spirit marvellous.

No one is too high to fall!  No one is too safe, too secure for his foot to slip.  We can NEVER afford complacency.  As the hymn says ‘the weight of your calling he perfectly knows’.  The writer is referring to Satan.  Of course God knows all of which we are capable, good and bad – but so does the adversary.

I was once told in a blessing that the adversary knows me by name.  It frightened me sick!  But then if he does not know you, then perhaps God does not either!  One cannot be a friend to God, or of any use to Him, without at the same instant becoming an enemy to the adversary.  Is that not a deeply sobering thought?

I am terrified to think that the great Enemy of all humanity knows me – me!  Individually!  And hates me!

And yet would there be anything in your most hideous nightmare more awful than to stand before God, your Father, and hear Him say – ‘I don’t know you!’  Is that not the final rejection beyond which there is no hope?

When we think we will do the least possible, obey the minimum commandments and slip by unnoticed, no head above the parapet where it might get shot at – is that not, perhaps, the most dangerous of all?

 ‘I know you.  You have made a few mistakes, got it wrong sometimes, and repented.  You’ve tried hard and above all you have cared’ – would be an infinity better than ‘who are you?  I know you not’.  Is that not the end of being?

The adversary knows our greatest weaknesses, and our greatest fears.  If we are capable of being mighty servants of God, then the adversary will use his greatest and most accurate weapons against us.  Of course he will!  Never imagine he is stupid!  He knew us in the pre-existence, and simply by being here, we have already succeeded where he has failed.  His enmity towards us cannot die because it is founded in envy.  His greatest victory would be to tempt us into failure now - through apathy, fear, complacency, despair, our own pride in our imagined authority over our fellows, our self-righteousness, our quickness to judge others unkindly, and when we have no right to judge at all, and should have no wish to!

We may judge an act to be good or bad, but when we think we can judge another’s soul, we usurp the right of God.

That came profoundly in one of our Relief Society lessons, and then immediately after in the Sunday School lesson as well, when one of our brethren spoke most profoundly of how differently God may see things from the way we do, when seldom do we know more than a fraction of the facts in anything.

What a spiritual lesson that was!

We have just finished Wimbledon, and spoken much about various forms of athletics lately.  My dearest friend, Meg, was telling me of an Australian marathon runner who told of the digging into the deepest of his physical, mental and spiritual resources to finish the run.  He was asked if he had to dig bone-deep.  He replied that it was more than that – he dug to the marrow within his bones.

It made me ask how soon do I tire, weaken, give up.  Skin deep?  Flesh deep?  Bone deep?  Or do I go on beyond into the marrow, keep going as long as I am conscious, longer than I think I can?  Do I sleep and dream my effort to do the best within me?

Surely only that much is worthy of the greatest eternal reward?  If at skin-deep I win, then what is there for those that will go flesh-deep?  If I stop at flesh-deep – and so on, and so on?

Dare I let ‘meek’ be interpreted as gutless?  Afraid to stand up and speak out, fight for what I believe, in case I get embarrassed, or people don’t like me, someone I love is upset, and I get hurt?

Dare I let ‘modest’ come to mean – won’t speak the truth if it isn’t what the majority want to hear, or might make someone I care about angry with me?

Dare I allow ‘humble’ to become - abdicate responsibility, let someone else lead the charge, let someone else ‘more worthy’ take the decisions and the risks?

Dare I excuse myself from anything by saying it makes me uncomfortable?

I cannot imagine it was very ‘comfortable’ to be scourged and crucified!  Not to mention in Gethsemane to experience the sins and griefs of every human soul.  ‘Comfortable’ is the devil’s plan!  ‘Glory’ is ours!

Tomorrow I go home again to the north, sunsets over the sea, a foam of white roses breaking fourteen feet high over the pergola, pale in the moonlight.  Sun and rain, light and shadow, and my mind blazing with new ideas and mountains of work to dive into.

Until next month, God will be with us – let us see that we are with Him.       

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