The Story - Chapter 11

I was in Indiana from Wednesday through Saturday last week, celebrating the life of my mom’s third oldest brother, Herb Summers. Herb was an interesting character, to say the least! My memories of him are mostly from family gatherings: he was a gregarious man, often in a suit, tape recorder in hand, and full of questions for a pretty uninterested kid (he always began his “interview” by asking, “Say your full name, age, height, and weight.” I’m not kidding!). These encounters left me with an image of my Uncle Herb as something of an absent-minded professor: brilliant, kind, with a sharp rhetorical mind and cutting wit, but also a man I might see downtown, sweating in the same suit, holding up a sign about some politician in the middle of July.

Many family members hold another image of Herb in tension with this one: as a young man, he was top of his class, an incredible athlete (voted one of the best in the city), earned a track scholarship to Ball State University, and served in the Navy. The image that best represents this part of Herb’s life is one he reminded me of every time he saw me in high school: “Hey Waltie, have you got your picture on the wall at North Side yet?” He was referring to the wall surrounding the gym at our high school, North Side, where photos of championship teams were displayed. Herb was the star of the 1963 North Side High School State Track Championship team. I remember that picture vividly: Herb, front row left, lithe in his track singlet, sporting his “pineapple cut,” mouth slightly open, as if the picture was an interruption to practice.

For me, that image—literally hanging on the wall at North Side—painted a vastly different picture from the one of him in the sweaty, ill-fitting suit with his tape recorder. The athlete, the student, the sailor: the hero who could do it all in a track singlet. I know many who loved Herb found it challenging to hold these two images in tension, and at times, I, too, failed to honor my uncle’s journey, sometimes painting him as a caricature.

I thought of Herb when I read the first paragraph of Chapter 11 in The Story:

Samuel, the prophet who anointed Saul as king of Israel, now has to anoint “one of Jesse’s sons” as the new king. Samuel expresses hesitation in 1 Samuel 16:2, saying, “How can I go [anoint another king]? If Saul hears about it, he will kill me.” I imagine Samuel struggling with two images of Saul: the anointed king and victor in battle for Israel, and the disobedient man who lost God’s favor.

Samuel is left with the same tension that many of us feel toward loved ones who are “out there.” And yet...while my family and I sometimes struggled to hold both images of Herb, Herb was able to accept and honor the person he was. While preparing for his service, I found a YouTube video of “Patty’s Page with Patty Hunter” from Access Fort Wayne Public Television in the early 2010s, in which Herb was a guest. Within the first few minutes, Herb reflects on his identity as a “nonconformist,” quoting William James (if Herb was anything, he was well-read). If you want to watch, start at 3:00:

After the quote, Herb says this: “Now this is the essence of life, what we’re getting into. Everybody we know has pluses and minuses, and what we do is we concentrate on one of them. [So] which is the Herb Summers? Well, the Herb Summers is both.”

Just like you and me, just like Saul, Samuel, and King David—and like each of our loved ones who are “out there”—Herb wasn’t just a plus or a minus. He wasn’t just the good or the bad; he was a collection of all his experiences: the track singlet and sweaty suit, the willing soldier and the anti-interventionist, the hero, the interesting, the tragic. Through it all, Herb was a kind and loving person who treated everyone with respect, ready to share a sly smile and a joke, willing to give the shirt off his back to anyone, writing poetry for his nieces and nephews, and so much more. When we remember that our loved ones aren’t merely a sum of their actions, we can hold them in faith, trusting that they are loved, valued, and ultimately saved through grace in Christ.

I pray for your “out there” family members and friends whom you thought of while reading this week’s blog. When you struggle to hold the pluses and minuses of your own “Uncle Herb” in tension, remember the promises shared in Romans 8:

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? 
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (ROMANS 8:31–32, 35–39)