Faith, reason, and the educated Christian Creationism - College and ...

First Person
by Ivan T. Blazen
The stranger
in the road
The parable of the Good Samaritan
(Luke 10:25-37) calls us to minister
in love and compassion to
those suffering strangers who lie in our
pathway. My father was once one of
these. Here is his story.
Born in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia,
my father’s mother brought him
to the United States as a boy. All his life
he had wanted to return to his homeland,
and now, with ticket in hand, he
was set to go.
The departure date was approaching
when he called me one morning. I
was a teacher at Andrews University at
the time. He told me he had experienced
something like an explosion in
his head the night before, and now felt
weak and could not walk a straight line.
I surmised that my father had suffered a
mini-stroke. I urgently admonished him,
“Do not go to Yugoslavia, Father, but to a
doctor.” He was a very strong-willed person,
but acceded to my appeal. The physician
examined him, took tests, and released
him with instructions to return
in a couple of days to discuss his test results.
The time came but, instead of returning,
my father announced, “I feel
O.K. I’m going to Yugoslavia.” And he
did.
While he was there, I received a postcard
from him. He was in Split, a city on
the coast of the Adriatic. He described
the area as being beautiful beyond
words. But, he said, the pace was fast—
he was traveling with friends—and he
felt so…The sentence was not completed.
There was only a drooping line
where his pen had run down the card.
This unsettled me.
The date came when he was to return
home. My brother waited for him at the
airport in Detroit. A long line of people
got off the plane, but Dad was not
among them. My brother called me
right away. Two words flashed before
my mind, “Heart attack.” I assumed I
would receive some word about my father,
but no word came until two days
had elapsed! Then a telegram arrived
with a very short message, “Father in
hospital. Heart attack.” Nothing was
said about how or where he was. I
thought I would surely receive another
message telling me more, but no further
word came.
Finally I decided to call the United
States embassy in Zagreb, the capital of
Croatia. A soft-spoken Yugoslavian woman
came on the line. She kindly responded
to my story with the promise to look
for my father and telephone me. The
next day she called. “I am so sorry, Mr.
Blazen. Your father has had a massive
heart attack and is in the hospital critically
ill.” She spoke tender words of
comfort to me.
I realized my father was going to die
and fervently desired to be with him before
that happened. I had never been to
Yugoslavia and needed some advice on
staying there, perhaps for an extended
time. I procured a substantial list of Yugoslav
students studying at Andrews.
My fingers ran down the list, and I randomly
picked the name of a married
seminary student. During my visit, he
gave me many good tips and said he
would make certain preparations for
me. In a short time, I was on a plane to
Yugoslavia. Would I get there in time?
I later learned what had happened to
my father. On the day before he was to
return, he visited the birthplace of Marshal
Tito, the former president of Yugoslavia.
My father had admired Tito very
much because of his fight against the
Nazi invaders during World War II. The
birthplace was at the foot of a very high,
steep hill. At the top was a souvenir
shop and restaurant. My father was
about two-thirds of the way up the hill
when he felt a massive pain in his chest.
It was a heart attack. Nevertheless, he
climbed the last third of the hill. Staggering
to the top, he collapsed.
It was then that unanticipated things
began to take place. I had grown up in a
Catholic family. When, as a teenager, I
became an Adventist, much to the consternation
of my parents, this inaugurated
an extremely difficult time with
my father. He was angry beyond measure
and rejected me as his son.
Little did I know that from the time
of his collapse on that Croatian hill to
the end of his life he would be very
much involved with Adventists. From
the hilltop, my father was rushed to a
clinic seven kilometers away. There a
Seventh-day Adventist doctor gave him
a shot in the heart that kept him alive
until he got to the hospital in Zagreb.
Her sister, also an Adventist physician,
worked in that very hospital. She began
to visit my father, as did an Adventist
nurse on staff.
Unbelievably, the parents of the wife
of the Yugoslav seminarian I had called
upon for help lived next door to the
hospital! This Adventist couple visited
my father every day. They brought him
food, which he was too weak to eat, and
juice, some of which he could drink.
They touched his very pained body.
26 Dialogue 15:3 2003