The Hope of the Believer . . .
Restoration Review · 1988-89
(Volumes 31, 32)
PREFACE
Having
grown up in a golfing family, I was interested in a new book about golf and
golfers by Sam Sneed, one of the game's all-time greats who won more PGA
sponsored
tournaments than any other player. While I never played the game as did several
of my brothers, one of whom became a professional, I came to see in reading
Sneed's book, entitled Lessons I have Learned, that
there are interesting similarities between playing golf and being an editor.
Sneed
tells anecdotes about some of the greats he knew, one being when a TV producer
offered him, Ben Hogan, and Byron Nelson $50,000 each for a joint interview. It
was the year they all turned 75, all three of them having been born the same
year. When Hogan turned it down, Sneed called him and said, "Ben, you must
not have read the contract. There's fifty grand for each of us, and its less
than a day's work." But Hogan could not be persuaded. It was too much
trouble! Sneed told that story to illustrate how stubborn Hogan could be, on or
off the golf course.
That
anecdote does not particularly reflect a likeness between golfing and editing
except that editors too can be very self-willed to their own hurt, but this
next story does. Sneed tells how when he was fishing with Ted Williams, the
great baseball slugger, the question came up as to which ball is harder to hit,
a golf ball or a baseball. Williams insisted that a baseball is the hardest
ball of all sports to hit, for one has to hit a round ball with a round stick.
Sneed responded with, "Yes, Ted, but we golfers have to play our foul
balls!"
We have to play our foul balls! That is a classic description
not only of golfing and editing but of the whole of life. Golfers and editors
know that their best efforts sometimes go awry, and, unlike baseball players,
they know they can't hit foul after foul and survive. They have to play their
shots where they lie. An editor has to live today with what he said yesterday.
if he hits a foul he has to play it, even if it means taking it back and
eating crow. Even more than the golfer he has to live with his handiwork, for
it is there on the printed page staring him in the face, and it will never go
away.
But
this also has a great advantage in that the editor's work lives on long after
he has departed from the scene, deposited, perhaps in bound volumes, in innumerable
homes and libraries across the nation and around the world. I often wonder when
I read an editor of the distant past if he would not be delightfully surprised
that he is being read by generations long alter his own time.
This
is the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth volumes that we have presented to the
public, which means that our time is running out. That is reason enough, though
not the only reason, to be writing on hope, the hope of the believer being the
theme of this two-year volume. Alexander Pope's memorable line, "Hope
springs eternal in the human breast," is true only where there is faith.
The Bible assures us that "Faith is the
substance of things hoped for." To speak of the hope of the believer is
redundant, for only the believer has hope.
These
pungent lines from Oscar Wilde could apply to churches as well as individuals:
"Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was Hope." If
hope is dead it is because faith is dead. The Bible speaks of "the blessed
hope" and of "a living hope." We are assured that such a hope is
grounded in a blessed, living faith. If today's church member has less hope it
is because he has less faith. What joy there is in being a true believer,
"being much more precious than gold which perishes," and we would
that every church could have a few real believers so that all could see the
beauty and power of the blessed hope.
There
are as many essays in this volume on "Visiting Other Churches" as
there are on hope, which proved to be the most popular series in the history of
this journal. This indicates that our people have a deep hunger not only to
know more about other believers but to have more to do with them. Nothing is
more contrary to the Spirit of the Body of Christ than for its members to be
isolated from each other. Most members do not want it that way, but they are
trapped in sectarian traditions and don't know how to break free.
We send this volume forth on the hope of the believer, along with the attending essays, confident that honest and good hearts will see in our efforts a sincere desire to identify not only that joyous hope that never disappoints but a broader view of the fellowship of the Spirit in the one, holy, apostolic, catholic church.—Leroy Garrett, Editor