Gratitude for Love Found - Twice
Special Gratitude Edition – Man Up Monday
Guest Post by Tom Seltzer
When I was almost 20 years old, I met a young lady from Texas. A couple of good things came from meeting Lisa. First, she led me to the Lord, and then she led me to Texas. Before Lisa, several others had witnessed to me about Christ, but I had reduced their apologetic attempts to babble. One day, this Texas girl started talking about the Bible in front of a group of people in our dormitory cafeteria. The fact that she believed in it and accepted it as absolute truth in her life surprised me because I thought she was bright.
“Everything is relative,” I told her at one point in our debate.
“Really?” she said. “But didn’t you just state an absolute?”
Okay, she got me there. At the end of our initial discussion, I protested: “The Bible can’t be true.”
“Okay,” she said, handing me a Bible. “If it’s not true, prove to me that it’s wrong.”
As I read through the Gospel of John, I continued to ask her questions. She answered some of them but kept pointing me back to the Bible. Secretly, I hoped she was right. I could quote MacBeth and Albert Camus, but it was cold comfort to embrace these as truth. To imagine that life had some great purpose, and even more so to imagine that there was someone who could atone for my sins in the person of Jesus Christ gave me the first ray of philosophical hope that I had experienced since the age of 8.
After I finished the Gospel of John, I wanted more. I read Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians. Somehow, God got a hold of me. I was on the verge of faith but needed more. My fleece came on Christmas Eve, 1975. I asked God to perform a miracle. My parents’ relationship was loveless, and they hadn’t touched each other in years. I prayed that when I came down the stairs, my father would be holding my mother in his arms. And that is exactly what I saw when I descended the stairs. I believed.
When I read Mere Christianity, along with the Gospel of John and Paul’s letters, Christianity made sense for the first time in my life. The next C.S. Lewis book I read a year later was Surprised by Joy, about the author’s longing for joy in his life. Like Lewis, I found the reality of Christ’s atonement for my sins to be the most pleasant surprise of my life. The next decade was a time when I began to experience gratitude for His priceless death on the cross and how I was able to exchange my sins for His sinless perfection.
Gratitude never came naturally to me. Growing up, I was continually discontented. Of course, I had plenty of circumstances to justify those feelings. My mother was an alcoholic. I had few friends, and the future seemed bleak. Apart from Christ, the future is bleak. If you don’t believe in eternal life, you just wind up as worm food. When I received Christ, my outlook on life gradually changed. But I still found myself struggling with discontentment – despite having every reason in the world to be filled with gratitude.
What gratitude I did have was about to take a big hit. After 13 idyllic years with Lisa (eleven married), she died. Lisa told me before we were married that she had aplastic anemia, a condition in which the bone marrow does not make enough new blood cells. She told me she would probably die young, but I believed that God would never let that happen. After all, God loved me, so nothing really bad was going to happen. That illusion fell apart on May 28,1988, when Lisa went home to be with the Lord.
I spent the next six years cycling through the five stages of grief. The denial stage lasted only a short time because I was left with two sons, ages 6 and 4, who needed physical, emotional, and spiritual care well beyond what I was capable of. The anger phase started with a bang the first time the boys were gone.
Their grandparents (Lisa’s parents) had picked them up for the weekend, and I was by myself. After a busy day, I was lying in bed with the lights off, but sleep was eluding me. Then something snapped.
The best way to describe what happened next is for you to imagine Lieutenant Dan’s anger scene in “Forrest Gump.” It’s during a hurricane, and he climbs the ship’s mast to scream at God in rage and frustration over the loss of his legs and the perceived injustice of his life’s trajectory. This follows his earlier anger at Forrest for saving him, which he saw as cheating him out of an honorable death in battle. The storm scene represents his final confrontation with God, after which he finds a new sense of peace.
I’d like to tell you that my night of rage at God quickly resulted in a new sense of peace, but that would be untrue. The next morning, I woke up with anger still simmering. Looking back on those days so long ago, it’s obvious now that the Lord Jesus Christ was giving me a lot of grace. He hadn’t struck me dead the night before when I raged and even cursed Him. More grace was given the next day when a friend of mine called me to see if I was okay. “Okay? Friend, allow me to tell you just how not okay I am.”
“Tom, do you know how Scripture sometimes puts things into words better than we can?” I asked. “Let me read you something from the Bible to describe how I’m doing.” I then proceeded with a dramatic reading of the first sixteen verses of the third chapter of Job. My friend listened patiently, without interrupting me, and expressed compassion. Tom was sympathetic, but he wasn’t empathetic. That wasn’t his fault because he hadn’t experienced a loss like mine. Unfortunately, few people my age had.
It was time to return to the library of C.S. Lewis and read another book. This one was A Grief Observed. When I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. This book is nothing more than a series of journal entries from Lewis, as he processes the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. In A Grief Observed, Lewis gets real as he expresses grief, anger, and even doubt about the goodness of God. This is a good example of 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 connecting a believer with another believer struggling through a similar crisis.
A Grief Observed was a step in the right direction, but only a step. More than thirty years of healing lay ahead. The next six years is the single-parent part of my journey, and it is beyond words to describe the degree of difficulty. Just skip a few verses past the previous verses in 2 Corinthians to read Paul’s own words (2 Corinthians 1:8). When I entered the dating scene after a 15-year absence, the full extent of my loss became more real because of the brokenness I encountered. I call this chapter “50 First Dates.”
Before she died, I knew I was married to a godly woman who loved the Lord with all her heart, loved people almost as much, and loved me like I had never been loved before. She also loved her children with a reckless abandon. What I didn’t know was how few women like Lisa walked the earth. I can sum up my experience in the words of Solomon (Ecclesiastes 7:28 NIV). Please know that I wasn’t meeting women in bars. Churches and personal introductions from friends were the only way I rolled in those days.
One such introduction occurred on December 28, 1992. A friend of mine and his wife invited me over for dinner to meet their friend, Jennifer Klaus. The first thing I noticed about Jennie was that she was tiny –4’10 ½”, less than 100 pounds soaking wet. The second thing I noticed was that her smile was like a flood of sunshine erasing the darkness from my heart. The best description I can find is that Jennie had kept herself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27). I call this “Chapter 2,” based on the Neil Simon play. Like the play itself, our journey from a friend’s dinner table to the altar was fraught with challenges.
Raising a family is a difficult endeavor for a husband and wife. Blending a family in an increasingly secular world is virtually impossible, and only the grace of God will get you through it. Character is not created by difficult circumstances – it is revealed by them. I was a witness, and I will testify that Jennifer Klaus Seltzer demonstrated more character in her little finger than most possess in their bodies.
When we were married, Nathan, 12, and Daniel, 10, were angry and defiant. They didn’t like losing their mother, but they had grown accustomed to having a lot of freedom. Jennie drew boundaries for them, and they rebelled. The Seltzer home quickly became a war zone, and I found myself mediating a cease fire every evening when I came home from work. In spite of that, Jennie continued to show love. When her adolescent enemies were hungry and thirsty, she gave them food and drink (Proverbs 25:21-22).
Less than two years after we were married, I was diagnosed with cancer. Facing an uncertain future, I didn’t have to worry whether my children would be well cared for if I went home early. I knew my wife loved them and would raise them as her own. I didn’t go home early, and Jennie, I, and Jesus powered through those difficult years to forge a strong marriage and raise four wonderful sons. Again, I had every reason in the world to be grateful for God’s blessings, but I still wasn’t experiencing it as I knew I should.
During five decades as a Christian, I have been in and out of Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians many times. But it was only recently that I started to see how important gratitude was to Paul. It was one of the key themes in all of his writings, and it suddenly began to jump off the pages in those three epistles.
I note that Paul wrote all of them while in prison, while “always giving thanks for all things…” (Ephesians 5:20). No matter the circumstances, he was “giving thanks through Him to God the Father.” (Colossians 3:17).
Even as a Christian, I find it far too easy to grumble and complain when things aren’t going the way I want them to go. Grumbling and complaining is my default mode. I joked with Jennie recently that if I had lived during the wilderness wandering days with Moses, God would have surely struck me dead. The lesson I have learned, and am still learning, is that gratitude is something that I must cultivate. “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” (Romans 12:2).
This fall, I observed my 70th birthday. Reaching this auspicious milestone, I expected to have a cake and a few presents with family, but was stunned to walk into a surprise birthday at a local restaurant. Pulling off a surprise birthday party is no small feat, and it was certainly a surprise. Somehow, Jennie had found a way to get into my email and cell phone to get the contact information and invite fifty friends and family. The majority were able to attend, and it turned out to be one of the most special days of my life.
As Thanksgiving approaches, I find my heart full of gratitude. When my first wife died, I thought I would never meet a godly woman like that again. Then, I met Jennie. Jesus was once asked what was the greatest commandment in the Law, and His answer was a two-for-one package – love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-40). This is what my amazing wife lives out each day as she loves her coworkers, girlfriends, community group, children, grandchildren, and me.
Few men (or women) have found the kind of love that I’ve found with a spouse. The fact that I found it twice is incredible. Jennie and I have four adult children who have never been addicted to drugs, been in trouble with the law, or been unable to support themselves. We have 13 grandchildren who are all healthy. God has met all of our material needs and then some. I am grateful for the life that God has blessed me with here on earth, but I’m even more grateful for the eternal life that I look forward to.
Paul’s letters written while sitting in a Roman prison taught me that gratitude is not dependent on circumstances.
Gratitude is something you experience as you understand your relationship with God in Christ. Gratitude is something you experience as you pray – even in the most difficult circumstances. “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7)
