Book Review: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

This is a brilliantly written biography of a true Christian hero, martyr, and saint--if Lutherans canonized saints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be among the first, although he would deny that he deserved it. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany when Hitler came to power and was part of the Resistance (including the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler). He was from a brilliant and aristocratic family, scientists on his father's side and theologians on his mother's side, and he became a theologian and committed Christian in the truest sense. Metaxas never leaves the reader in doubt about how this will end--with Bonhoeffer's execution by the Nazis--but the story of how Bonhoeffer became the brave, thoughtful, and faithful man he was is inspiring and so many of his teachings have the ring of truth. Always he tried to turn the attention of his followers and listeners away from himself and toward a personal relationship with the Lord. Metaxas builds on other biographies of Bonhoeffer and had access to sources and letters previously unavailable. (Metaxas wrote the biography of William Wilberforce that is the "companion book" to the movie Amazing Grace.) This book is has wit, insight, history, theology, and thought-provoking reading for any person of faith. Highly, highly recommended.

Resting on Laurels or Growing New Ones

Yesterday I read a great (brief) book called Life's Lessons Learned by Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011). One of the chapters, "Transition to the Apostleship," has been on my mind.

Do you keep getting the same callings again and again? I do. We moved 13 times (and thus were in 13 different LDS wards) before we settled in our current home, where we have lived for almost 12 years. When I was younger, I was often called to be the Primary music leader or to teach or help others with family history. I taught adults in Sunday School and frequently was called to edit a ward or Relief Society newsletter. And I've always, it seems, been a visiting teacher and a member of the ward choir, and still am. Currently I'm also a family history consultant, co-teaching Marriage and Family Relations in Sunday School with my husband, and I was recently called to edit the ward newsletter (again). I've done it all before and I'm pretty comfortable with each calling.

What does this have to do with Elder Oaks' call to be an Apostle? Obviously, that's a call that only comes once. Before that, Elder Oaks had a distinguished career as a lawyer, law professor, president of BYU, and Utah Supreme Court justice, as well as serving in many callings in the Church. When he was called to the apostleship, Elder Oaks felt "inadequate and very apprehensive" (p. 99). To paraphrase, he felt that the qualities and skills he would need in order to serve effectively as an Apostle were not those he had become most comfortable with in his successful career. But he knew that we all tend to do that with which we are comfortable--and he could have fallen back on all those well-honed skills and qualities to be the former lawyer and judge who became an Apostle, rather than the Apostle who had been educated as a lawyer.

If I slide into old habits and methods of performing the callings that repeatedly come to me, I am becoming the "family history person" who's been called to be a family history consultant, rather than the family history consultant with some background in genealogy and family history research. And in an area that had grown and changed as rapidly as family history has (just google "family history"), the former is a recipe for ineffectiveness. If I create the ward newsletter the way I've always done it, I miss the opportunity to fulfill my current calling--to be the ward newsletter editor in this ward at this time--in the way the Lord and the ward members intend and need.

So each calling is a chance to grow into that new calling at a new time and in a new place, for new people with new needs, and to become the (fill in the name of the calling) the Lord needs now. Even in a longtime calling, like visiting teaching the same sisters for years, their needs change and the abilities and means of service the Lord wants us to develop change over time. Perhaps this is one meaning of "magnifying our callings"--not finding more things to do, but finding ways to fulfill the calling in response to others' and our own changing needs, seeking always to find out how the Lord wants us to serve now.

The lesson, borrowed from Elder Oaks (p. 100), is: "When called to a Church position, we should focus out efforts on being what we are called to be, not on what we feel qualified to do."

The Mortality of Zucchini

Columns, short stories, and even novels have been published about zucchini and its place in garden-happy cultures. When Alan was in grad school at Penn State, we would have to lock our car in the parking lot while we attended Church. After three hours in the unshaded summer sun, our 1974 Toyota (obviously a vehicle owned by a family in need) would bake us and the children to a convective crisp on the way home, but we didn't dare leave the car unlocked or the windows rolled down, lest we find our car filled with zucchini, post-services. In case you've been living in a world without dirt for a while, all it takes to grow zucchini--lots and lots of zucchini--is a little dirt, a few seeds, some water, and some sun. I'm not really sure the water is absolutely necessary if the humidity is high enough. The trouble is that well-meaning co-religionists would try to supplement our diet with baseball-sized squash, probably found under giant leaves after the small, tender, foodworthy zucchini had been harvested. We appreciated the thought, but the bigger the squash, the tougher and seedier it had become, and we didn't have the heart to pass it on to some even hungrier family. So into the dumpster it went.

All this came to mind when I discovered some zucchini that had died in our fridge, fortunately enclosed in an easily disposable plastic bag. I had purchased it a week ago--and it galls me to buy zucchini when you can grow it so easily and in such abundance, but it is January. An "easy" zucchini soup recipe had tempted me while I was planning the week's meals and making a shopping list. I promptly acquired a case of bronchitis and some saving-yet-sickening antibiotics and was down for the count for days. Alan made the dinners, but the zucchini languished in the back of a produce drawer, and yesterday I buried it in the trash, mourning the loss of its tender, perfectly sized greenness to whatever attacks squash neglected to the point of abuse.

So at dinner I reported that we would not be having zucchini soup any time soon. Alan was astonished. "Zucchini can't die," he said.

We thought zucchini was forever. We thought it just kept growing until it resembled a pod from an old horror flick and had to be hauled away by a HazMat team, or a young family in an old car. But it turns out that zucchini is mortal.

Fortunately, the generosity of those who know what it's like to be struggling financially lasts forever. (Sometimes people brought us wonderful, homegrown tomatoes and tender, succulent, ready-to-steam zucchini.) Lately the neighbors seem to know what it's like not to be successful gardeners, even of squash. They bring us stuff from their gardens and we take around cleaned-out margarine tubs of raspberries from our berry patch. (We save up the tubs all year.) Sometimes we have to explain that we are not giving our neighbors a tub of margarine in lieu of produce from the garden, but it's always good to have a reason to chat about mortality and immortality or other, less important subjects.