Saying Goodbye to Ted

5 Nov, 2000

 Dear Ted,

 I say I envy you, and I mean it. In one sense it doesn’t look like a real good swap to trade bodies, but realistically you are way ahead of me. Marathon runners are supposed to be a little glassy eyed, sweat pouring down their flush face, and fighting a fair measure of pain as they come around the last lap and see the goal in front of them. Who do you think is better off; that front runner or the guy that doesn’t look half as shot but is still trotting along the street two miles behind? The guy two miles back may not be in as much pain but neither is he in the same position as the fellow who sees the goal 100 yards in front of him.

Apparently you have entered a new phase of your journey but that is perfectly normal for the way you are supposed to be at this point. When I was in school we always seemed to play one football in the mud each year. It was a lot more fun on sunny days, but it was more revealing playing in the mud. By the fourth quarter you could always see who was really playing hard and the turkey that was just going through the motions. The real guys were doro darake (covered with mud) and the one just going through the motions still had clean uniforms. If you go at it hard you are supposed to get a little muddy. Tires that have been run 50,000 miles are supposed to be smooth. That means they are normal.

 Phyllis hasn’t gone into much detail in her letters to me other than to say you have had a couple of strokes. No one wants to have a stroke and we aren’t supposed to say omedeto gozaimasu, but on the other hand having a stroke at this point in the program is not that unusual. I would say you are pretty normal. More than that you have long since left the pack of the national average behind and lived far longer than most. I have often thought about our Lord’s words to Peter in John 21:18; “When you were young you girded yourself and walked about wherever you wanted to go: but when you get old, you will stretch forth your hands and another will gird you and carry you where you don’t want to go.” I believe this is a general prophecy applicable to many believers. When we were young, independence was the rule of the day. We would be offended if someone else had to clothe us and we would chaff if we couldn’t walk around wherever we wanted to go. But as we near the end of our course the Lord takes us into a new phase that is not what we had in mind thirty years ago. Obviously this is where He has taken you at this point. I can only speculate what it must be like to be in your tent.

Recently I have been reading quite a bit of Richard Wumbrand, the Romanian pastor who was imprisoned and tortured for 14 years. One very interesting book is titled. “If Prison Walls Could Speak”. He tells of experiences of being in solitaire confinement for years and months of constant torture. It is impossible for us to imagine what that would be like. But suffice to say these were areas where the Lord led some of His people and shared with them things in these prisons that you couldn’t learn outside. In the same way He has brought you to a place to share things with you now that you didn’t learn in Bible School or seminary. I believe it must be true what Paul said, “Though our outer man perish the inner man is renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:16). Though your outer man has been subjected to severe limitations I believe your inner man is as genki as always, and will continue to improve for the next several hundred years. You are probably in the most mysterious time of life. John the Baptist had one of the most unusual walks with the Lord as any man that ever lived. The spiritual power he had moved the nation like no man had for centuries. His unique ministry to be the man who was appointed to officially introduce God’s Messiah to the nation, and his tremendous satisfaction when he saw Christ’s early success (John 3:25-36), must have given him a great sense of fulfillment. But then after his arrest and nothing went the way it was supposed to, this left even John in danger of being offended with the Lord’s ways (Luke 7:19-23). That must have been terrible for John to be shut up in prison and wait in vain for the Lord to do something commensurate with the character He was supposed to have. What a humbling disastrous end for John. By every measure it was a clear victory for the guys in the black hats. Where were the angels? Why didn’t Christ make a move to help him? Why did God leave him in such a miserable end? Strangely enough, the story is not isolated to John the Baptist, but a huge number of the Lord’s finest servants just quietly fade from the scene. Such is a mystery. But if we accept that God does all things well, we must leave this unanswered mystery in the hands of our Father and trust someday He will explain His strange purpose to us. I will be very interested in hearing your testimony when you share with us how this deep valley that you are presently in was one where you left the deepest wells (Psalms 84:6). One thing I do believe is that your inner man is being renewed everyday, right now, but we will probably have to wait to hear your testimony.

All spiritual things being aside, one visible blessing is the loving care you are receiving. In this alone you are the envy of many. What tender loving hands that fluffs your pillow every day! What a faithful devoted partner that sits and reads to you! Brother I don’t believe it is inaccurate to suggest you are the object of tremendous devotion and love of many. My spiritual father had to go in for serious heart surgery and the doctors weren’t taking bets on how the operation was going to turn out. The whole family was at his side before they wheeled him off for surgery. He later told me that was like one of the crowning moments of his life; to look up at the faces of all the children and his wife and see the goodness of God that surrounded him for the previous forty some years. His life was just like Jacob surrounded by his children. Ted, your life has been a uniquely blessed one and now you are visibly seeing the fruit of it. In this alone you are in a small minority of uniquely blessed people. You have been a faithful loving husband and father and now life is bursting forth in blazing color of the beautiful fruit of what you have sown. Homma ni omedeto gozaimasu!!! I live by myself in a single room in the NLL dorm. After being homeless for 5 years I am grateful for this accommodation, but it is lonely. If life continues for me as it has for the past 10 years someday Rosemary and her sons may hear a rumor, “Oh, by the way, did you hear Bill died last winter?” There is no one to hold my hand, to stoke my brow, or to kiss my check. Please forgive a little fleshly divergence on my part, but I really don’t think you would care to swap positions with me.

This morning I spoke in our little chapel on the text “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give Me to drink…” (John 4:10). Six years ago I was with a Japanese team doing dendo in Siberia. Because of the language problem our team leader asked me to take the responsibility of doing the preaching and that brought me out of five years of silence. One night I spoke on this text to an auditorium full of Russians. At the end of the service we had nearly 50% coming forward to ask of the Lord for living water and I turned the personal evangelism over to our Russian team members. As I stood on that stage and looked at the faces of the crowd of people standing up front, my heart broke. I went back stage and wept. Thirty minutes later my interpreter. Natasha, came back stage and saw me weeping. She asked, “Bill, why are you crying? We had a tremendous response tonight.” All I could do was sob, “Natasha, they don’t know the gift of God, and they don’t know who Jesus is.” This is our problem. You have been saved for more than 60 years, and I have known the Lord for 43 years, but we don’t know the 1/100^th part of what is the gift of God. I asked the believers this morning what the gift was and they were pretty good – it is Christ Himself. It is Christ in us; this is the mystery of God (Col. 1:27). Oh, my goodness, what happened when Jesus came into our hearts! We hadn’t the first clue that night when we accepted Christ. A divine life was born in Ted Brannen’s heart and that life has continued to grow ever since. I have asked some people if they want eternal life and they say, “Man, NO! This life is bad enough. Why should I want this to go on forever? But that isn’t eternal life. Jesus is eternal life: and that Life, that has come into our hearts, is life eternal. It knows the Father and that Life will go on forever. That Life cannot be separated from us because He has made us to be intrinsically part of Himself, just as He has made Himself to be part of us. It doesn’t matter what happens to the outer man. Of course it will wear out – it is supposed to; but that inner man can only be renewed everyday, and I’m putting all my money on you. That inner life has got to be genki and keep getting better. But it will only really get rolling when it sees Jesus – for then we will all be just like Him. 

Please forgive these foolish letters. I know you know all of this far better than I do and your walk with the Lord has gone well beyond anything that I hope to attain to in this life. But it makes me happy and I get blessed just thinking about you. Thank you for the great privilege of being your friend.

                                                                   In the grace of our marvelous Lord Jesus,