Catherine of Siena

 

Catherine of Siena

Two monumental things happened in Italy in the year 1347.  First, in the port of Messina, a ship docked – likely from somewhere in the Middle East.  A black rat slipped off that ship, unnoticed.  On the back of that rat was a single flea, carrying a disease Epidemiologists today call Yersinia Pestis – in that day they simply called it the Black Plague.  The Plague swept through the Western world in successive waves, ultimately killing more than one-third of the population between Iceland and India.

Second, a child named Catherine was born in Siena – the twenty-third of twenty-five children in a wool-dyers family.  She had committed herself to a life of fasting and prayer by age seven, having claimed to receive a vision of Christ at that early age.  She was intrigued by the great scholars and early church fathers of the Christian faith and studied them devoutly.  At age sixteen, she was pressured by her parents to marry – but hoping to enter the Lord’s service, she cut her hair very short to ward off potential suitors.

As a teen, she joined a Dominican organization which allowed for her to live at home, while serving the Lord and adhering to the disciplines of the Order.  She spent three years wrestling with God, her own flesh, and God’s call on her life.  At the end of those three years, she was awakened to the needs of the world outside – a world mired in worry over the recurring Plague, corruption and uncertainty within the Church, and general malaise and despair.  She and a number of her followers devoted themselves to the ministry amidst the Plague.  While others would flee, they would stay and tend the sick – at great risk to themselves.  She wrote of having to learn to deal with the nausea from the stench of hospitals overcrowded with the dead and dying, and forcing herself to stay in that environment until the Holy Spirit had conquered what she considered the ‘rebellion of her flesh’ in her nausea.  Hers was an exemplary life of selfless and untiring service.  One author wrote that Catherine was unconcerned about making a mark as a “woman in ministry” and was more concerned with Jesus’ call for her to be a “woman who ministers.”

Catherine’s intelligence and grasp of the world situation is remarkable for any person of her day – as was her moral courage.  At the time, due to fears from the Plague and political machinations, the Pope had moved the Papacy from Rome to Avignon, France.   The French political and moral influence had very negative impacts on the church and had even mired the Papacy itself in immorality and corruption.  Catherine began an extensive letter-writing campaign calling sinners to repentance, calling for the reform of the Church, and calling for Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome.  She wrote to the Pope personally:

“Be manly and not fearful.  Answer God who is calling you…Restore to the Holy Church the heart of burning charity which she has lost: she is all pale because iniquitous men have drained her blood.  Come, Father!”

Within a year of her writing the letter, Gregory returned the Papacy to Rome.  Over 400 of Catherine’s letters and other writings exist today.  She asks hard questions others would not ask, and often answers them herself.  Hers was a huge voice, calling the church to reform – while at the same time fostering reconciliation and calling Christians to service.  Using skills of natural diplomacy, she acted as a mediator between the Italian city-states, and even helped raise an army for one of the Crusades.

At the heart of Catherine’s teachings was a vision of Jesus, bleeding on the Cross.  It wasn’t nails or the cross that held him there, it was love.  She taught that from the cross, you could see the heart of God, his unqualified and unspeakable love for all mankind.

Catherine died in Rome at the young age of 33, having exhausted herself in ministry.  Roman Catholicism has given her the title “Doctor of the Church” – an honor given to only 36 people in history.  She shares that honor with people like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.  More than that, though, she leaves behind the incredible example of a courageous person completely devoted to her Lord in the midst of a chaotic, complicated, and distressed world.

Packer, J.I., 131 Christians Everyone Should Know, Broadman and Holman Publishing, 2000.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-94/catherine-siena-epidemics-christians-divided.html

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Catherine-of-Siena

https://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/pandemics-and-public-worship-throughout-history

 

Frances Ridley Havergal

The Consecration Hymnist

Frances Ridley Havergal was born in Worcestershire, England, in 1836.  Her father, an Anglican minister, enrolled her in a Christian school where she received Christ at age 6.  She was highly intelligent, mastering numerous languages including German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.  She found her love of the arts to be the way which she supported herself, publishing many volumes of poetry, composing music, and she was in great demand as a pianist and singer.  Frances loved Christ, and was very active in the Church Missionary Society – raising funds to support missions work around the world.

Frances kept very busy with writing and singing.  She turned down numerous proposals of marriage.  She loved one man very deeply, but he was not a believer and she called off the relationship in obedience to her Lord.  She is also the author of many hymns, including ‘Take My Life,’ ‘I Gave My Life for Thee,’ ‘Like a River Glorious,’ and ‘Who is on the Lord’s Side?’

An Advent Sunday, December 2, 1873, Frances received a little book entitled “All For Jesus.”  The book explained how every corner and room of a person’s life should be consecrated to Jesus.  The book moved her deeply, and the young woman re-committed her life to her Savior, resolving to commit her entire self to Christ.  This was a very significant moment of her life, one she called her “Consecration.”

Soon after this consecration, Frances had occasion to share a boarding house with ten people for a few days – some of whom were not saved, and the others not fully surrendered to Christ.  Frances prayed, asking God to give her “all in the house.”  She witnessed and, after the few days of boarding, she had the joy of seeing every person leave as Christians, fully yielded to Christ.  That last night of her visit, Frances was so excited she couldn’t sleep and instead wrote this hymn:

Take my life and let it be Consecrated, Lord to Thee.

Take my hands and let them move At the impulse of Thy love, At the impulse of Thy love.

Take my feet and let them be Swift and beautiful for Thee.

Take my voice and let me sing Always, only, for my King.  Always, only, for my King.

Take my lips and let them be Filled with messages for Thee.

Take my silver and my gold; Not a mite would I withhold.  Not a mite would I withhold.

Take my love, my God I pour At thy feet its treasure store.

Take myself and I will be Ever only, all for Thee.  Ever only, all for thee.

Frances made a habit, every December 2^nd, the anniversary of her consecration, to revisit this hymn in her devotional time.  On one occasion, she pondered the words, ‘Take my voice and let me sing, always, only, for my King.’  She sang frequently, including with the London Philharmonic, but from that moment on, she only sang for Christ.  On another occasion, she prayed over the words ‘Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold.’  Over the years, she had accumulated a fair bit of jewelry, but she felt very convicted that those pieces, too, should go to her Savior.  She packed a box with all her jewelry and mailed it along with an expensive jewelry cabinet to her beloved Church Missionary Society, saving for herself only a brooch that belonged to her parents and a small locket with a picture of a niece who had passed away at a young age.  Writing to a friend, she said about this, “I had no idea I had such a jeweler’s shop; nearly fifty articles are being packed off.  I don’t think I need to tell you I never packed a box with such pleasure.”

Frances passed away unexpectedly in 1879, at the young age of 42 – a shining example of a consecrated life.  Her poetry continued to be published for over 30 years after her death, selling over 4 million volumes.  Many of her hymns continue to be published in many languages to this day.

Morgan, Robert J., Then Sings My Soul, Nelson Publishers, 2003.

https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1801-1900/frances-havergal-wrote-take-my-life-and-let-it-be-11630571.html

https://www.havergaltrust.com/about-f-r-h/2/

R.G. LeTourneau, Mover of Men and Mountains

Robert Gilmore “R.G.” LeTourneau was born in 1888 to godly parents.  In his autobiography, he confesses that as a youth he was “fanatically determined to amount to nothing” – and came to Christ only in his later teen years.  He dropped out of school in the 8^th grade to take a job hauling sand for a foundry.  He took an interest in machines and how they worked, doing his best to dabble in the machines at the foundry.  During this time as a young man, he stumbled across a syllabus and text for a course in mechanics from the International Correspondence School.  He didn’t take the tests and he didn’t pay for the credits, but something stuck and he continued to dabble in mechanics. 

At age 21 he designed a “final exam” for himself.  With no formal education, he disassembled and reassembled a motorcycle within a day.  He declared he had a “Bachelor of Motorcycles” degree, a title he used off-and-on the rest of his life.

After a brief stint in the Navy during World War I, he bounced around looking for work.  By age 30, then married and in debt due to a failed business venture, he took a temporary job fixing a farmer’s tractor.  To prove it worked, he used the tractor to level part of the farmer’s field.  RG later said that this was the most satisfying job he ever had. 

R.G. began to get serious about his faith, and had a long conversation with his pastor, asking about potential avenues to go into pastoral or missionary work.  His pastor responded to him with the words, “R.G., God needs businessmen as well as pastors.”  This conversation set the direction for the rest of his life, declaring that his business partner was God.

R.G. took the experience with leveling the farmer’s field that he financed a similar tractor for himself and founded R.G. LeTourneau Inc., an earth-moving company.  He struggled with work throughout the 1920s, trying his best to underbid competing companies then inventing machines to move the earth more efficiently.  He found himself deep in debt from a couple of failed contracts and ended up having to sell a few of his machines to make ends meet.  R.G.’s debtors hired a man named Mr Frost to go over his books and help him get his books back on track and get to a state of profitability.  Frost arrived to a situation that, to his mind, was worse than he had thought.  Due to his faith, R.G. refused to work on Sundays, and was committed to meet a missions pledge of $5,000 to his church.  To Frost’s amazement, God brought in just enough business for R.G. to meet his commitments, though still in debt.

R.G. considered himself to be, first and foremost in the business of moving earth, but his creditors convinced him that instead of rolling the dice on large construction jobs that he’d be better suited for manufacturing and selling the unique machines he had invented.  This proved to be the best business move he could have made – he went from being indebted and near bankruptcy during the 1920s to tremendous profitability during the Great Depression.  His company and his machines were instrumental in the building of the Boulder Highway, the Hoover dam, the Orange County Dam, and other high-profile Depression-era infrastructure projects under the New Deal.  By 1938, his company was netting nearly a million and a half dollars in profit.

R.G.’s incredible imagination developed many of the earth-moving machines we know of today, from the bulldozer to the rubber tire to the electric wheel.  Other inventions included scrapers, mobile sea platforms for oil exploration and drilling in the deep ocean, dredgers, portable cranes, bridge spans, dump trucks, and logging equipment.  Many of these machines are unchanged in design to this day.  He developed various types of welding different types of metals in different circumstances.  During the second World War, R.G.’s factories produced 70% of all the earth-moving equipment used by the Allies during the war.  In all, he held 299 patents.

R.G. and his wife Evelyn held to the principle, as they put it, of “It’s not how much of my money I give to God, it’s how much of God’s money I keep for myself.”  They practiced what they called “reverse tithing” – giving 90% of their income to the work of the Lord and keeping 10% for themselves.  R.G. and Evelyn, as well as their six children, were very active in missions and charitable work.  They set up Christian missions in Liberia and in Peru, and used their Foundation to funnel tens of millions of dollars to Christian missions and ministries throughout the world.  They also established LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, still a highly-regarded Faith-based technical school, on the site of an about-to-be-demolished Army hospital.

Sixty years after poring over that International Correspondence School syllabus, that same school gave the 8^th grade dropout an honorary Doctorate, one of five such honors he received in his lifetime.  R.G. LeTourneau passed away in 1969.  His autobiography, Mover of Men and Mountains, is still in print.

https://www.letu.edu/library/rg-museum.html#ContentBlock-1-3

http://www.giantsforgod.com/rg-letourneau/

https://centerforfaithandwork.com/article/who-was-rg-letourneau

https://thebestschools.org/magazine/rg-letourneau/