April 2020

When I was getting ready to start this year-long virtue series months ago, I asked friends and acquaintances to nominate others (whether famous or not) as suggestions for these brief profiles. Of the responses I received, one made immediate and complete sense. When I think of virtuous women I have known, she stands tall among them in my memory.

But most of what I recall of her is based on memories from before the second grade. Could I recall enough to write fully about her? And could I recall her accurately enough to offer a fair picture to my readers?

To confirm my own impressions (or add to them or correct as needed), I reached out to the source of the nomination, a most beautiful and beloved woman I affectionately call Tutu (the Hawaiian term for grandmother). About a month ago, Tutu finally wrote to share her further thoughts with me, and the timing could not have been more perfect. For I was just starting this month’s new theme. And Tutu’s very insightful notes helped me not only see how accurate my young memory had been, but also some other aspects of the nominated lady I was too young to understand and then later recall fully.

Please allow me today, then, to introduce you to an angel in skin named Ethel Harris. In that tightknit farming community, she was rightfully respected by all and affectionately called “Aunt Ethel” by a number of folks, whether they were related to her or not.

She was the first Sunday School teacher I ever had, during my toddler-preschool years, a time when I needed a very special love she gave as naturally as the air she breathed. She was something like a female Fred Rogers, and she treated each of us tiny souls with all the respect, attention, and grace she felt should be afforded to any human being. But as children are so often overlooked, dismissed, or misunderstood by adults, Ethel took it upon herself to give us extra attention and care. And it wasn’t buttery or pretentious. She spoke with us in a way we could understand, but still with sincerity, respect, and great intelligence. She felt called at every turn to model the teaching of Jesus that the littlest children should know His love and never be harmed or led astray from knowing His heart. When I was with her, every single moment as a child and also when I visited her again years later, before her passing, I felt loved about as unconditionally as I have ever felt loved by another person.

These are the things I reflected on in my own experience. But then I received Tutu’s letter.

While Tutu did confirm those things I remembered, she expounded further on Aunt Ethel’s deep and genuine humility, her fervent prayer practices for others, and her tireless generosity. And while she especially loved and prayed for the children, she had a heart of love for everyone. In Tutu’s notes, for example, I learned for the first time that Ethel also spent countless hours writing letters to prisoners to let them know they too were loved and never forgotten.

What strikes me most as I review the life of this one dear woman today? I think it is that sincerity is simply and truly seen when an authentic and loving person will choose to turn face-first to the world and shine a light from their deepest heart on others. A light that only God can put there. And a light that shines purest in the absence of fear.

I know Aunt Ethel prayed for me. I am one of so many in her still-living legacy. I could not be more sincerely honored to think about this. And I so sincerely want to live the rest of my life following her example.

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The same year that Bonhoeffer was ushered into glory, an American service member who had fought so bravely in the same war on the same continent came home.

And he came home a changed man.

Jimmy Stewart had been an actor before his first years of military service. And he had been a good one. From the beginning, sincerity was a must in most of his characters. And he soon gained a reputation of being both a regular guy and ideally approachable in most of his films.

But his wartime experiences changed him and, for a time, tormented him. He came home guant and dealing with nightmares and other symptoms we today would recognize as some level of PTSD. Yet, since acknowledgment of and treatment for such a condition were not really in existence at that time, he did what he knew how to do as a civilian to try and press forward.

He went back to acting.

Acting had never looked like acting with Stewart, however. So when his first assigned post-war film premiered, viewers likely thought he was just acting so well, like he’d always done.

But viewers who went to seen It’s a Wonderful Life in theaters didn’t know that in many of those realistically-passionate scenes, Stewart was using his acting to work though his angst, fighting his demons while the cameras rolled.

Members of the cast would later acknowledge that’s the way it was, and that it was rather unnerving to be on set with him at those times. But those same scenes, all these years later, draw us in magnetically by their raw humanness. By their frank sincerity.

Throughout the movie, Stewart demonstrated how he really felt. And while I don’t advocate harming others or scaring them half to death when we are sincere about our needs and feelings, I do think it is a great gift when we allow others to openly and honestly speak and be. And it is a great gift when others allow us to do the same.

Thank you, Jimmy, for being real for and with us. Sometimes we need the reminder.

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Sincerity, according to the dictionary I use when my ESL students, means that we show outwardly what we really think or feel inwardly.

By extension, many people may think of sincerity as being synonymous with transparency or even predictability. But is that always the case? In the life of one man, I would say both yes and no.

He was a young, brilliant intellectual with a quiet passion for truth. Over the course of his years living, studying, working, and thinking, he developed an ever increasing sense that the truest measure of abstract faith is found in visible obedience. “One act of obedience,” he wrote, “is worth a hundred sermons.”

No one who read his works or heard him preach could doubt his sincerity, that what he observed and taught fell one hundred percent in line with what he believed. And such sincerity would cost him increasingly more, test his faith even more fully, as the years went by.

Yet, as those years went by and his nation descended into further evil and chaos, the young man who had long held a pacifist’s stance began to secretly but actively try to overthrow his nation’s sovereign in a violent way. Were his feelings at that time fully transparent to the world? No. Fully predictable to the world? Absolutely not. But were they nonetheless sincere? I sincerely believe so.

For he would go to his death for his actions, but he would still preach what he knew to be true and show his Master’s love towards those around him in his prison to the very end.

His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he was executed at the age of 39. One cold spring morning at dawn, he was brought from his cell in a Nazi camp and led to a gallows to be hanged. It was April 9th, 75 years ago this past week. And it was just days after he had led his fellow prisoners in a worship celebration of his Master’s resurrection.

Protestants don’t canonize saints in the sense of the Catholic tradition. But if we started, I imagine this young man would be at the top of our collective list. And I find irony in that. Because he wanted always to mainly point others to the One he followed. As he once prayed, “May God in his mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may he lead us to himself.”

And maybe that’s the most beautiful thing we see reflected in his life: that while it was not always completely transparent or predictable, no one could doubt the depth of its sincerity.

Sounds a lot like the earthly life of his Master.

In Bonhoeffer’s honor and to the praise of the One who was there to lead him home, I offer a short poem:

When I stare into the coral horizon

And breath the last breaths of these lungs,

I will drink deep with anticipation

The marvelous truth of the glories to come.

My neck will snap, my body swing.

But my soul will rise up to meet its King.

Then, robed in white, His praises I’ll sing.

Wiedergeboren. Ruhm.

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Sometimes a person is naturally sincere, so that what they do and who they are spring up, like two intertwined vines from the same root, out of their core being. There is no pretense.

And sometimes a person possesses all of the potential they need to learn how to live genuinely and care genuinely for others, but their aim, passion, or outlook remains unrefined, misguided.

This month, we will look at a couple examples of each. This week, we will start with the latter.

He was a young fisherman and a younger brother who had a local reputation for his quick temper. Perhaps we can excuse at least a part of his impetuous attitude and selfishness with stereotypical thoughts of male egotism and youthful naivete.

That is a snapshot of who he was.

But then, he started hanging out with another guy, a teacher who was teaching a new way of thinking in a new style. And hanging out with that teacher for several years began an amazing transformation in the young fisherman.

He would walk and talk with the teacher, and serve alongside him. He would witness wonders and be humbled nearly beyond bearing. He would be present during several of the most iconic moments of human history. And he would be the one given charge to care for the teacher’s mother when the teacher first passed away and then later flew away into Heaven.

His name was John, son of Zebedee. And his was a life beautifully transformed.

While I certainly believe that the love and truth of Jesus had the greatest effect on him overall, and I wholeheartedly believe that Mary was only a common person with no divine power of her own, I can’t help but wonder how much of John’s sincerity was shaped by Jesus himself and how much of it was influenced or enhanced by John’s time of caring for Mary. Certainly the combination of the two fed a spring of goodness already somewhere present in John’s heart. And it led him to become a channel through which so much of God’s goodness would be expounded to us.

How many people have come to know the love of Jesus personally though John’s carefully and sublimely written gospel? How many people have come to understand a deeper meaning of love through John’s epistles? How many people have read with wonder of the power of God’s love as described in John’s revelation?

Before becoming the only apostle to die at a natural old age, he endured a time of prisoner’s exile. And though St. Paul has often received much more attention for the breadth and depth of his writings and his work, today I celebrate the life and the quiet, faithful sincerity of John.

The art posted with these thoughts is a royalty-free image I found online. When I see it, I think of John and smile. Love lifted him up above himself to see a wider view and to bless so many. And love was what he lifted up to Heaven and out to the world as an offering in return.

And that, my friends, is a most true and sweet essence of sincerity.

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