Clarke's Christmas Letter in 2024

 

Christmas 2024

 

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

Uni took the picture above at Thanksgiving this year. Our Thanksgiving was celebrated with Fred and Uni in Riverside. In our picture, David and Julia Zuckerman are standing, Uni and Fred Clarke are on the floor trying to get Oso to look at the camera. On the couch we have Craig and Esther Kinzer sitting next to Sylvia and Wil Clarke with Katie (or Catherine the Great) lying on Oso’s bed. Our whole family was together! Our dogs even made it, but on account of their consideration, the cat and rats stayed at their respective homes. Our kids made the food including dessert. They asked us to bring the drinks. Thank you, kids, for your consideration for the old folks!

A website called NaNoWriMo tends to build a fire under me to keep writing, even when it’s inconvenient. NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writers’ Month = November, and any genre (not just novels) is grist for their mill. It helped me get all but the last chapter or two of my book about our experience in Tanzania (1967-1971) written. It is in memoir form. I should really say our book because Sylvia has put a lot of time into it, too. I hope that before next year at this time, we will have the printed book in hand.

You may remember that there was an eclipse of the sun back in August, 2017. I was still recovering from West Nile Virus, and that prevented me from traveling to see it. So we laid plans to see the eclipse this year (April 2024), the only other total eclipse visible from the U.S. until 2044 (at which time I would be 102 years old, if I lived that long.) Julia, who works at Cal. Tech., figured out that Torreon, Mexico, would have the best possible chance of clear skies. So we flew there in April. We rented a car that was supposed to seat six people. Herz cheated us and gave us an SUV that only seated five. There were six people in our group: Julia, David, Fred, Uni, Sylvia and I. Almost everybody on our plane was going to Torreon, Mexico, to see the eclipse, so there were no other cars in the area from any rental company. Uni volunteered to sit in the back facing backward. Thank you, Uni! The skies were cloudy in Torreon, so we drove for over an hour to Durango and had a wonderful view of the eclipse. Watching the total eclipse gave me an amazing, unexpected emotional high. We are grateful to our children for making this possible.

We travelled east again this summer. My cousin Fred’s wife passed away around Thanksgiving last year, and my primary goal for the trip was to attend her funeral in June. (Because the ground freezes in northern Michigan during the winter, they delayed the funeral

until June.) An advantage of attending funerals is that it is usually accompanied by a family reunion. It is a foretaste of the grand family reunion we will have when Christ comes. I’m counting on you to attend that one with me! Thank You, Jesus!

          On Lincoln Highway in Wyoming

A couple years ago two young people phoned me from Ontario, Canada, They had done some research and wanted to write a historical novel about my mother, Esther. I asked them how much they knew about her, and Nolan sent me a document close to 50 pages long of stuff they had found on line! I was stunned. We spent a few weeks on and off, talking on the phone about her, and I tried to give them an idea of the human side of her life. So I set another goal to stop and see these two, Nolan and Sarah.

I had a frustrating time trying to get a time when we could all three meet. Nolan and Sarah live about 150 miles apart. While I was in Michigan and Ohio, I just couldn’t get it to work and couldn’t get hold of Nolan by phone, I finally prayed to the Lord to have Nolan phone me. That was about 10:00 one night when Sylvia and I were sleeping in the bed of our pickup. The Lord usually doesn’t answer me with such alacrity. But 2:00 a.m. my cell phone rang, and Nolan promised to make all the arrangements. I was stunned that God had chosen to answer my petition so soon! After the phone call, I lay back and laughed just like Abraham and his wife laughed when God promised to give them their son, Isaac. It is an astounding event when the almighty God chooses to answer you personally. We had a tremendous get together the next Sabbath in St. Thomas, Ontario. We were delighted to meet both of their families. Now I’m eagerly awaiting the fictional story of my mother’s life from their computers!

We had originally planned to come home via Washington State and see Sylvia’s brother Judson. However, a sequence of events brought us home pretty much along I-40, which doesn’t go anywhere within half a country from them. So in August we outlined a detailed plan that would take us north to Washington to see Judson and a number of our other family members and friends.

    At Pumpkin Rock near home

Sylvia and I are now both octogenarians, so the morning we left home, I said to the Lord, “You know, Lord, I haven’t really talked to You about our trip. Please give us a safe trip, and if You think we shouldn’t go, please let us know, and we’ll turn around and come home.” The temperature was well above 105º (40°C), but we made good time. We were driving our car this time, and it has a better A/C, than the pickup. At 168 miles (270 km) from home along US 395, we stopped at a rest area.

Before taking off from there, I pulled out a map and studied it a bit. My cell phone rang, and my ENT (otolaryngologist) said, “I just got your culture back, and you have a staph infection. Find the nearest hospital and go to the emergency room and get treatment.” He was sure they would admit me. Not wanting to be in the hospital out there in the desert—if there were one to by found—I realized that the Lord was telling me to turn around. At about 9:00 p.m. I pulled into the Riverside Community Hospital. They indicated they wanted to keep me there. However, by about 2:00 a.m., they sent me home with a prescription. A couple weeks later, my ENT did surgery on my sinuses, and the staph has disappeared. Thank You, Lord, for taking a personal interest in my well-being and Dr. de Jager for following up on my condition.

One of the major reasons for going to Washington State was to see my cousin Eugene. He was in a precarious condition health-wise, and I really wanted to see him again. However, that was not to be. He passed away a couple months later. If I had driven north, I would have probably seen him, but there may have been two funerals instead of just his. My brother, Elwood, helped me financially to fly up to Eugene’s funeral.

Sylvia is celebrating her retirement by taking voice lessons from a voice teacher she found in Loma Linda, CA. She has sung in choirs on and off ever since before we were married and got a lot of training there. However, she never had the opportunity to take personal voice lessons, before. She is really enjoying the training. She has performed in a couple concerts recently including singing “The Holy City”, a musical ballad composed in 1892 by Michael Maybrick (alias Stephen Adams) and text by Frederic Weatherly. Needless to say, I’m mighty proud of her! This season she has laid some plans to take groups singing carols in the neighborhood especially for people who are shut-ins. You’re welcome to come and join her.

“The Inlandia Institute is a lively center of literary activity serving the 29,000 sq. mile inland Southern California Region”. Sylvia and I have benefited and been benefitted by the Institute. I have been an Inlandia Writing Workshop leader for four years now. I started doing this after the untimely death of Ms. Celena Bumpus, who was our leader for years before she passed away at the beginning of 2021. I have neither the creativity nor the wide knowledge she had. But our group is producing excellent material. Both Sylvia and I enjoy meeting with our group, Celena’s Scribes, and with Rose Mongé’s Memoir Writing Group. Rose spends a lot of time preparing for her group. She even publishes an annual writing anthology. Both Sylvia and I contributed some articles to what Rose calls Writing Warriors: Time Passages this year. Sylvia also has seven pages and I have six pages in the 2023 anthology, Writing From Inlandia, published last month. Besides my Tanzania memoir that I am finishing up, I also have a devotional blog I call “Experiencing a Bible Verse,” and I encourage you to check it out at https://wils-thoughts.blogspot.com/  I have not published as many blogs this year as previous years. Let’s just attribute that to my slowing down as the years go by.

We wish you a blessed and merry Christmas this year and pray for a powerful and prayerful 2025. It appears to us that things may be winding up for the spectacular coming of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We can rejoice to meet Him in person.

 

Love,

Wil & Sylvia Clarke

5547 Wentworth Dr.

Riverside, CA 92505

Wil’s cell: 951-231-5402

E-mail: wil.clarke@gmail.com

Erase our home phone if you have it

 

 

 

 

Laughter and Sadness

 

[1]

Proverbs 14:13 Easy-to-Read Version

¹³ Laughter might hide your sadness. But when the laughter is gone, the sadness remains.

 

My wife and his wife were good friends. Sylvia had encouraged Edna to publish a picture book of Biblical women. She had edited the book for her. She had even chosen to write a moving novella on the tragic life of Rizpah, one of Saul’s concubines, because of this picture book.

When Edna’s husband Leroy was cruelly struck by Parkinson’s disease and finally succumbed to it, I attended his memorial service. I had really not known Leroy, so I listened to the tributes paid to him by his children, his friends, and several of his pastors with great interest. I realized that He loved a good joke. A former pastor spoke of how he relied on the chuckles that Leroy sent him to lighten up his sermons, week by week.

We laughed with the speakers, but in the back of my mind I realized that behind all of the humor, there was a pervasive sadness. His family went home that night. The merriment was gone at 3:00 in the morning, just the aching void left in their lives.

The majority of us in the church that Sabbath, were people who were there to support the family. A funeral is where family members come, not only to pay their last respects, but to see others in the family. Others whom they may have not seen in many years, but really wish they had kept up with over the years. Family ties and bonds are renewed. Many old personal injuries, real and perceived are laid aside, as petty or meaningless from this distance. On some rare occasions old animosities resurface—which I do not believe is happening in Leroy’s family.

Help us in honor and brotherly love to prefer one another above ourselves. 

 

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[1] https://www.myfarewelling.com/article/how-to-plan-a-funeral

Why Do the Wicked Prosper?

 

March 3, 2022

[1]

Psalm 73 Good News Translation

²  I had nearly lost confidence;
    my faith was almost gone
³ because I was jealous of the proud
    when I saw that things go well for the wicked. …

¹⁶ I tried to think this problem through,
    but it was too difficult for me
¹⁷     until I went into your Temple.
Then I understood what will happen to the wicked.

¹⁸ You will put them in slippery places
    and make them fall to destruction!
²⁸ But as for me, how wonderful to be near God,
    to find protection with the Sovereign Lord
    and to proclaim all that he has done!

 

During the late 1960s I taught at a rural boarding high school in Tanzania. The main support of the small village that had grown up near the school was poaching from the nearby Serengeti Game Reserve. Several villagers owned Land Rovers that they would use to drive out into the reserve at night and bring home animals that they sold for their meat and hides.

In order to avoid suspicion the Land Rover owners would strip the wheels, seats, and engine which would be kept by other villagers. They parked the stripped vehicles next to their homes. They were all old and showed no signs of having been used within the last several years. However, in the late afternoon a group of men would cluster around the vehicle. They would bring the missing parts and reassemble them. About five o’clock they would pull into the school gas station for gas. By the next morning they would have finished their hunting trip. The dusty vehicle would again be lying next to their home, wheels, seats, and engine all missing. It would appear to have not been used for a long time.

Several hunters would climb into the reassembled vehicle and drive out across a river that harbored both crocodiles and hippos. They were very careful to take a slightly different route each time so that no track appeared for rangers to follow them. They would mainly shoot large antelope, hack the carcass into liftable size pieces, and load them into the back of the landrover. When It was full they would head home and sell the meat to the villagers, including some of the staff of the school. Sometimes the Land Rover would break under the heavy load; then they would come on campus and seek me out to weld the break.

One of these poachers was much more prosperous than the others. His Land rover was practically new, a pretty green color. He dressed well, spoke passable English, and was much revered amongst all the villagers. We became friends. While he was making a delivery to one of the staff on campus late one night, I asked him if he had official permission to shoot the game. He smiled and assured me he did and produced an official looking requisition that had several animals listed on it.

One night he was out in the reserve loading the animals they had shot into his Land Rover when the rangers came upon him. Instead of jumping into the vehicle and fleeing like was usually done, he decided to have a shootout with them. During the fight he was killed. The rangers brought the vehicle back to the village with his body in it. The other hunters were carted off to jail. This time I saw his blood mingled with the blood of the animals. Of course, this did not put an end to the poaching.

There was a huge outdoor funeral for him. I joined hundreds of people who came to it, not only from that village, but many of the surrounding villages. Our school chaplain preached the sermon. He preached for several hours, while everyone stood or sat around patiently and listened. He covered the grand themes of Christianity in detail, including salvation, grace, the state of the dead, and the Sabbath. He told me later that he knew that this was the only time many of these people would hear the whole Gospel. He felt compelled to use the occasion to the best advantage for the Lord.

Oh Lord, thank You that You look after Your followers so well, even though we might not be as prosperous as the world’s tycoons. 

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[1] https://www.nrt-kenya.org/news-2/2020/11/5/10guardians-grevys-zebra-champion-stephen-lenantoiye