Losing Rachel — Ernest Witmer — Ep. 039

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Ernest Whitmer. We're in Los Angeles, California, and Ernest and his family would have moved here 10 years ago, something like that. Planted a church here, been involved in ministry here, and you wrote a book here recently. Actually, I don't even know what year—what year did you make this? 16, 2016. 2016. So yeah, I want to hear a little more about that, the process of what brought you to writing this book, the story behind that, and yeah, just share a little bit of the context of how this happened. For many years as a pastor, I thought about writing a book. My passion is the church, the bride of Christ, the body of Christ, the family of God, and so often what we see happening in the name of church doesn't really sound that family-like or beautiful as brides would be.

And so I just felt like I'd like to kind of put down in writing some of what I believe the Lord is calling us to as His people. But I thought, you know, it should probably be at least 40 years old before you write a book about the church, you know, as a pastor, you know. Well, then I turned 40 and, well, I probably should be 50, you know, actually thinking.

Well, then when I was 51 years old, my wife was killed in a car accident four and a half years after moving to Los Angeles here, and it wasn't long after her death that I knew that I couldn't just let someone so significant in my life just kind of fade into history. But I wanted to document it, if for no other reason, to document her life for the sake of my kids, her kids, our children. And so I was talking with a friend one time about that and also talking with him about this other book that I wanted to write, and he said, "Maybe it's the same book."

And I thought, "Wow, that's an idea," because I've always thought Rachel was a beautiful picture of the bride of Christ, the way in which she loved him and the way in which she loved me, the way in which she honored him and the way in which she honored me. I went to a restaurant within the first year after Rachel's death, sat down at a restaurant in Hollywood, just kind of got away from—and I'll just say part of the explanation of why I did that is I do my best writing in an active, live environment. Oh, okay. I don't do well to go off to some quiet corner, like a park or a restaurant or something.

I was actually fasting at the time, so I didn't even eat in the restaurant. I think I had something to drink or something several times through those four or five hours that I was there that day. And within, yeah, the four or five hours that I was there, I had the entire book outlined. That's a—wait a second. This book is like 200 pages. You outlined that whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And I expected to tweak it along the way, but it really—that was basically my—that's the format I used then.

And really what it is, I take the primary phases of Rachel's life. It's a bit of a biographical sketch of her life, and I introduce each chapter with what I call Rachel's story. So every chapter begins with a piece of Rachel's story, and then the second section of each chapter is her inspiration, how she inspired other people. It includes some of her own writings. She wrote a piece years back called "When God Wants to Hug Me, He Sends a Rainbow." God did that many times throughout Rachel's life, and she—so that's the second section. The middle section of each chapter is where I simply call that section the bride of Christ. I just take different phases of her life and work my way through her life, introducing each chapter with her story.

And then so the middle section then is the bride of Christ. That's where I bring in the concept of the church and how God uses marriage as a picture of the relationship He wants to have with everyone. He wants to be the bridegroom to all of us, the church, the bride of Christ.

And so I do some teaching on the church, what the church is and how it should function. And then the fourth section of each chapter is simply called Reflections in Marriage. And what I do is I take a sermon that I preach on marriage with that title, Reflections in Marriage, and I just divide it up through the whole book. And it was Rachel's favorite sermon that she always liked when I would preach. I don't think it was because she thought I was necessarily that perfect as a husband. I think maybe it was because maybe I got a little better each time I preached the sermon. And then the concluding section, the fifth section of each book, the last section, is called How-Tos for Couples.

And in the first half, I address men, us men, how to cherish your wife. And of course, having loved, lived with, and lost my wife, it has given me a whole new perspective on how to cherish your wife while you have her.

So the question is then, who is this book for specifically? The answer is yes.

It's for everyone. Good. No, it would be—it's a wonderful gift for couples, but for anybody that cares about the church, the bride of Christ, yeah, evangelism, family, family life. Not only does this facilitate me and my teaching as I itinerate some, but I was in Asia soon after the publishing of this book, and Raymond Burkholder there with Macedonian Ministries invited me to—well, I had been invited to teach at IGO in Thailand, Chiang Mai.

And then since I was there, Raymond Burkholder says, "Hey, you should join me on this ministry trip into India." It was a pastor's environment, pastor's conferences. Of course, they're going to know some of the basics, but they need a lot of teaching. So I just had just recently published this book, and I thought, "Oh, I'm going to take it with me," and obviously I'll need a translator, but I'll teach the content. The pastor that had invited Raymond and the ministry and I'm the tagalong, he said, "Wow," he said, "Is there any way we could have that translated into Marathi, the native language, one of the many languages they speak there in that state?" And so to make a long story short, I came back and we were able to raise some funds and printed 15,000 copies, five times as many copies now printed in Marathi, which was what are in English.

And he's passing them around over there, and he sent me a picture of this whole warehouse stacked full of boxes of my book over there. One of these times I'd love to go over and just use it in teaching now that they have it in their own language.

And he's invited me to do that. It's just a matter of me being able to afford the time and the resources to do that. Wow. All the work you put into this, I'm guessing it probably took you a couple of years to write this. And just to see it getting out there and having a positive effect on people, that's really neat. Well, and the thing that makes me happy about it is it was the impetus of my wife's life that produced this book, and it's her life living on. And you know, she was—anyone who knew Rachel knew that she was not a bold, outspoken type of person. She was more quiet, more reserved, and she would probably be totally embarrassed if she knew how much I promoted her life and so forth.

And I need to remember, my kids told me when I was writing the book, "Now, you know, remember, mom wasn't perfect. You know, you don't need to make her sound like she was perfect." And she wasn't. So I tell some stories in here about some ways in which she demonstrated her fallibility.

But yeah, so that's the thing that blesses me. You know, if you lose a loved one, the veil between heaven and earth is a lot thinner than it used to be. And any husband, any good husband is happiest when his wife is happy.

And I know my wife is happy. She is having the time of her life. And so in the meantime, I'll work away a while longer here. And so yeah, I'm just—that blesses me to know that her life is living on. Three critical concepts that are borne out in terms of the church in this book that I might just talk about a little bit.

And that is they're found in the last three chapters of the book. They kind of summarize what I believe the church should be about. And the first one I call sequence, putting first things first and keeping them there.

Second one is focus, keeping your eyes on Jesus and allowing all the other peripheral issues simply to be in the periphery. You know, and anytime we start focusing on, "Oh, what is baptism?" or "How should baptism be?" or many other wonderful things about living the Christian life, we've pulled our focus off of Jesus Christ and him crucified. Paul said he refused to know anything among the believers save Jesus Christ and him crucified. He obviously went on to write nearly half the New Testament, but it all centered around Jesus Christ and him crucified. And so that's what I mean by sequence, putting first things first, focus, keeping your eyes on Jesus, and then balance, this kind of holding it all together.

And there's a lot of—if you've been a part of the church, the bride of Christ, you know there's a lot of tension involved in what it means to be a part of the body of Christ. Well, that tension is a healthy thing.

It speaks to balance. If you were to talk to the crossbeam on a balancing scale, that crossbeam would say, "I feel a lot of pressure. I feel a lot of tension. I've got 10 pounds of potatoes over here. I've got this 10-pound weight over here. And ooh, I feel something." And that's the way so much of the truth of scripture is, is you need to hold it all together. Now, I'm not saying—and I use examples—and one of the examples I use is faith and works. And I'm not saying that you balance faith and works, and the balance of faith and works is what produces the life of Christ. I'm saying they both are involved.

And so we are saved by grace through faith. Done deal. We don't work our way into salvation. We don't work our way into sanctification. But I'm saying that it's there. If our faith is real and alive, it's going to work.

You know? And one of the ways to know if you have real faith, James said, is for it to come alive in action. So show me your faith without your works, and I'll show you my faith by my works.

So I look at the sovereignty of God versus the free will of man, faith and works. And there's so many things in scripture. One verse in scripture says, "Let every man bear his own burden." Well, they're not too far away from that passage. There's another one in the same book that says, "Bear you one another's burdens."

What's that mean? Are they contradicting? No. We hold it all together. We don't always understand it all, but that's not God's problem. That's just our problem. Some people treat the scriptures as though God were some old man upstairs with Alzheimer's that doesn't quite know what he means or what he's talking about.

That's not God. He knows what he's talking about. He knows what he intended to convey and communicate to us. Sometimes we struggle to understand. And it just helps by taking all of scripture and holding it together. So sequence, focus, balance. So much about life and the Christian life and the life of the church can be helped if we understand those three critical concepts. Yeah. No, that's really good. Yeah. Wow.

Well, hopefully we've given people enough of a taste of it to maybe go out and buy a copy of your book. Yeah. Good. Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you for taking the time to share. This is what it looks like. So if you're looking it up on Amazon. This is Asher and Teresa. It was at their wedding where Rachel was killed just four days before their wedding.

And so we ended up having a funeral on Friday and then their wedding on Saturday. None of us ever want to imagine losing our mother or a dear family member just four days before your wedding. But God's hand has been on this couple, and God is using them in beautiful ways. And that's what God does with the difficulties of our lives. He uses them for his glory if we're willing to allow him.

This is a picture of the accident, the van that was broadsided by a huge Dodge four-wheel drive pickup truck. And then the picture of the life flight. I just had a little smartphone at the time. I had just kissed her on the cheek and said, "I'll see you soon," thinking that she was going to be okay.

And soon after takeoff, I just snapped that picture and think, "I'll show this to Rachel sometime." Soon after takeoff, her heart stopped, and they weren't able to start it again. So she just went on up into heaven with Jesus.

I'm happy about that. Wow. That is quite the story. I'm not sure what to say. Yeah. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for sharing that and for taking the time to share with the rest of us what you've learned through that experience. And thank you all for watching.

I really highly recommend you check out Ernest's book and the work that's being done here in LA too. It's really powerful what's happening here. So yeah, thank you all for watching. We release new videos each week, new podcasts each week. So come back for more content like this. Let us know what you think. And yeah, we will see you in the next episode.