A letter from Rebecca Young in Indonesia
June 24, 2010
Dear friends in Christ,
During the past academic year we had a unique situation at Jakarta Seminary. Two of our 350 students were a father-daughter pair. The father, Nelman, is working on his doctorate in theology while his 18-year-old daughter Wieke (pronounced “Wee-kay”) had just completed her second year as an undergraduate. This past semester I taught Wieke in an introductory theology course, and I am one of Nelman’s advisors on his dissertation.
One day last fall Nelman sent me a copy his proposal, in which he wants to apply Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope to the Indonesian context. The day I received the proposal I think I was having a bad day. I can’t remember why, but the upshot was that I was far too hard on Nelman and wrote quite a few criticisms of the proposal. I haven’t heard from him since he got my response. He is probably scared to show me his most recent work, and I don’t blame him.
Thankfully his daughter Wieke and I had a much better relationship. She was one of those students who is a joy to have in class. She paid attention, made eye contact during my lectures, and asked lots of questions during discussion times. If I wasn’t able to explain something to her satisfaction during class, she came up after the other students had left and asked me to clarify the issue for her.
Wieke Gresiany Theodora Weny, October 14, 1991 – June 22, 2010
It is with a heavy heart that I must report that in mid-May Wieke entered a hospital in Jakarta and was diagnosed with lupus. On Tuesday, June 22, after 10 days in and out of consciousness in ICU, Wieke passed away.
Last night, June 23, I went to the hospital and sat with the family next to the open casket. The mother, Bu Ina, a 39-year-old elementary schoolteacher, poured out her heart to me about the pain of losing her only child. By sad coincidence, the mother had a hysterectomy at the end of May in the same hospital as her daughter.
But Ina insisted that her daughter had helped her get through the painful ordeal. Before she lost consciousness, Wieke began to prepare her parents for her departure. “It is time for me to go to live in the house of the Lord, all the days of my life,” she told them. Although they were a bit baffled by her choice of words, they tried to accept them.
After Wieke lost the ability to speak she was still conscious and her mother communicated with her in other ways. Ina asked Wieke, “Sweetheart, are you going to get well? If you are, blink your eyes.” Wieke’s eyes stayed wide open. Ina tried another question, “Sweetheart, are you going to go be with God?” Wieke’s mouth broke into a big grin and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Early on Tuesday morning, just hours before Wieke died, Ina awoke in the hospital and looked at her sleeping daughter. Desperate for some sort of comfort, she picked up the Gideon Bible from the bedside table. It didn’t have an index for her to look up themes of comfort, so she decided to let the book fall open and see what she found.
The Bible opened to Psalm 27, and Ina’s eyes lighted on verse 4: “One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.”
Ina couldn’t help but remember the words of Wieke, just days before, about how she felt called to go home to God.
After Ina had finished talking about her experiences of the past few days, her husband Nelman came and told me of his daughter’s regular reports about the class I had taught her. At the beginning of the semester Wieke came home from seminary saying, “Miss Rebecca is so frustrating and I disagree with everything she says!”
By the middle of the semester, she had changed her tune a bit. “When I don’t agree with Miss Rebecca, it makes me very frustrated because I just can’t follow the things she is saying. But when I agree her, I really agree because what she is saying is so true.”
Just a few short weeks ago Wieke came home and announced to her father, “Now that I understand what Miss Rebecca is trying to explain to us about God, I see that she is right and I agree with her.”
Of course Nelman wanted to know just what it was that “Miss Rebecca” was saying. According to Nelman, at this point Wieke came out with a type of theology that he had never heard before, and he declared that she was “a theologian without a degree.”
God can’t be studied, but only experienced.
God can’t be studied because God is a mystery.
God isn’t an object for theology. We can only know God by experiencing life with and through God.
All of this means that we have to face bad times as well as good, Wieke told her father. She said he can’t expect that because he believes in God he will be exempt from suffering. If he wants to know God, he won’t do it by writing a clever dissertation in theology. He will only know God by experiencing God. “You’ll never get along with Miss Rebecca as a professor, Dad, because you want to write about God without experiencing God.” Wieke’s wise words helped her dad understand my criticisms of his writing.
Beaming with a father’s pride as he recalled his daughter’s wisdom, Nelman said that Wieke had been preparing him for the experience of losing her. He said that the closest he has come to knowing God is in the past few days—seeing his daughter go so gracefully and happily to live in the house of the Lord all the days of her life.
Becca
The 2010 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 132
