Crazy for God

Crazy for God A memoir by Frank Schaeffer I got this book for Christmas, though Jane had a hard time getting it. Everyone she tried ordering from took the order, then a few days later said, “Sorry, it is out of stock.” I got a note promising it would come. That piqued my interest. So I read some online reviews of the book and wondered what I was getting into. Some loved the book, some hated it. Some spoke of Frank’s crassness and vulgarity. I spent almost two months at L’Abri in 1973, after I graduated from college, so I was familiar with the setting and the characters. Along with the promos and the reviews I began to think back to my time as a Farel House student and my fleeting personal encounters with Francis and Edith and Frank (he was Franky, then). I remember sitting at a table with Franky and Debbie and several others for a Friday evening meal. There were probably 12 people at our table and there were two other tables as well. The table with Franky and Debbie had priority for conversation. If the conversations at the other tables intruded on the ‘main table’ the others were shushed. (I had that experience on at least two other occasions.) I don’t remember much of the content of the conversation, just that at one point both Franky and Debbie were talking to (at?) each other at the same time and carrying on the kind of conversation that would make a high speed modem faint. I don’t know if it was impressive or not, I could keep up with either Frank or Debbi but not both, at the same time! I finally got the book and it was a good read. I can tell because I stayed up later than normal and didn’t do some other sort of required work when I should have…you know the drill. Franky goes by Frank now. Not Franky, not Francis Schaeffer’s son. Frank. My read was full of illumination. I got pictures that made sense from Frank’s point of view and certainly fit what I knew first hand and at a distance about L’Abri and the Schaeffers. I also got my eyes opened quite a few times. Some were hilarious, some very, very sad. Many were understandable—Frank was a caboose baby with a wide gap in age to his next oldest sister. They were already marrying and leaving (and returning) to the work as he was really growing up. Frank got polio. He got some questionable physical treatment and some damaging spiritual treatment. (He was taught to wonder if his polio was part of Satan’s attack on his mom and dad’s ministry for the Lord. Imagine the grief and anger that would smolder under such a weight.) He felt it. He expressed it. He lived it out. He came to understand much of it, from a far different point of view than it was originally explained to him by his mom. His life analysis is both insightful and incomplete. I got the picture of one person seeing another’s blind spot pretty clearly, but not realizing that his parents, for example, were blind to their blind spots. We all are. And when we see the weaknesses and frailties and mistakes and sins of others at times we forget that we too are partially blind. And maybe that should temper our judgments of others, and give us pause to reconsider ourselves. I’d like to say that marriage should help in this area. And family. And church. But those same relationships can be arenas of fear, and few there be who tread them well. Frank’s story is of a family who hasn’t done this well. Maybe it is a common plague of the powerful and important. Somehow I think the grace of Jesus should help us do better. Maybe somewhere in the locus of His work, laying aside the prominence and the power and taking upon himself the frailties and sin, maybe somewhere in that great center of life, we can find hope to face the follies of our own.