Interview with Nancy Guthrie

Well acquainted with suffering, Guthrie offers Jesus’ words of comfort in her most recent work.

by Ruth Moon

Nancy Guthrie is no stranger to suffering. After her second child, Hope, died within a year of birth from Zellweger syndrome, a rare, fatal genetic abnormality, Guthrie began writing Holding On to Hope, a book about coping with loss and grief. She was in the final stages of writing when she became pregnant with a third child, Gabriel, who was also diagnosed with Zellweger. Gabriel lived for six months.

Since Gabriel’s death, Guthrie has written many books and articles, and has traveled around the country speaking at conferences about the Christian response to suffering. Her latest work, Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow (Tyndale), which came out last month, is an expansion of themes introduced in her previous books, adding, as Nancy writes in the introduction, “the perspective of years and further understanding of the Scriptures.” Her.meneutics contributor Ruth Moon talked to Guthrie about the health-and-wealth gospel and how to comfort friends who are grieving.

What place do you want Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow to have on the bookshelf of Christian books about suffering? What niche does it fill?

I hope this book is not a “grief” book. It speaks to people who are grieving, but I hope people see it as a theological book. I hope that the book would be that theological thinking through of suffering, but also an invitation to those of us who say that Jesus means everything to us and that we want to follow him, to live that out in the hardest, lowest places of life, that when we enter into unimaginable suffering, it’s obvious that Jesus is still everything to us, that he is still the solid ground beneath our feet, and that he is who we’re grabbing hold of and depending on and whom we love and treasure and trust.

You organize this book around 11 statements from Jesus on suffering, such as, “I, Too, Have Heard God Tell Me No,” and “I Am Giving Life to Those Who Believe in Me.” Do you feel you learned anything while writing those statements?

Absolutely. One of the things I have struggled with is that when we look at the Gospels, they overflow with stories of Jesus’ visible healing of people. That creates a struggle for modern-day believers: Okay, Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So can I, should I, expect that he wants to do that, will do that, in my life? The most significant step was pursuing an understanding of what Jesus’ healing ministry’s purpose was, what he wanted us to see about himself.

A lot of believers assume that what Jesus was saying about himself was that he wants to heal our bodies. What I’ve seen is that he was giving us a picture of his healing power in the way that he healed bodies, but the more significant message he had is about his character, his ability to bring healing, not only to our bodies but to our souls as well.

I interviewed Guthrie for Christianity Today’s women’s blog, Her.meneutics. You can read the rest and comment here.

Jazz it up

Event preview for the Glen Ellyn Sun.

July 10, 2009

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

Jazz singer Tammy McCann has performed jazz and classical music across the U.S. and worldwide.

She will bring her sound to Glen Ellyn Saturday.

McCann is returning for her second year of performing at Glen Ellyn’s Jazz Fest, an event which will transform part of downtown Glen Ellyn into a jazz garden and performance stage July 11.

The gates for the free event will open at 2 p.m., with the music beginning at 3 p.m. The event will feature five jazz bands, food and drinks, and will run to 10 p.m. A transformed block of Main Street just north of the Metra train tracks will become an audience seating area.

McCann said her musical style is standard, “straight-ahead” jazz. She uses jazz pieces originally created by George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and the like, and then gives them her own style.

She performed with another band at last year’s festival and will be back this summer with her own band. She said she is looking forward to her second performance in Glen Ellyn.

The most important part of performing, she said, is building a relationship with the audience.

“I’m not talking about being shticky or campy, but really using my music. What’s important to me is using my music to make a conduit with the audience. I don’t want to go on a musical journey by myself. I want the audience to come with me,” she said. “For me, all these songs are like stories, and my goal is to share these stories and kind of bring some memories out of people who hear these songs.”

The Tammy McCann Quartet is one of five jazz bands from the Chicago area that will perform during the fest, including the Chicago Hot Five band, the Kelly Brand Trio, the Mark Colby Quartet and the Deep Blue Organ Trio.

The festival is sponsored and partially funded by the Glen Ellyn Chamber of Commerce, the Village of Glen Ellyn, the McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage Public Radio and Karnes Prickett Design. Part of the event’s estimated $30,000 price tag will be covered by food and beer sales and donations, and sponsors are donating time and materials, event marketing director Roland Raffle said.

Raffle hopes the festival will bring a taste of Chicago jazz to the suburbs. Musicians have rotated through and the festival committee tries to bring a variety of new bands each year, he said.

“I’m not looking at any of them and saying this is the one I have to hear,” he said. “I just think it’s going to be a good variety.”

Sue Cleary owns Paisley on Main in downtown Glen Ellyn. She went to last year’s fest and will be there this Saturday as well.

“I think even if you weren’t a jazz fan, you would really enjoy the music. It was just great. Everyone was having a good time, from children to grandparents and everyone in between,” she said.

She’ll be bringing friends to this year’s show.

“We’ll really make a day of it and enjoy it, listening to great music and enjoying the summer in Glen Ellyn,” she said.

Crowding, bus traffic among 5th Avenue concerns

Meeting coverage for the Naperville Sun.

July 16, 2009

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

David Shaftman, who lives in an apartment at 1821 S. Washington St., does not want the Fifth Avenue plan to turn Naperville into a crowded city.

“I do not think it is necessary for Naperville to try to become a metropolis,” Shaftman said. “We don’t have to become a metropolis of high-rise buildings to continue to be a wonderful city.”

Shaftman was one of about 10 people who commented Wednesday on the Fifth Avenue plan, a project to plan future property use on a stretch of Fifth Avenue. At the meeting, the Naperville Plan Commission gave area residents a chance to have input on a map with recommendations for density zonings for future land use on Fifth Avenue, which is currently under consideration for development.

Dave Wilson, who lives at 152 N. Ellsworth St., approved of plans to develop a bus depot on Washington St. but was concerned at the level of bus traffic — nearly 2,000 buses per month, he said — through his neighborhood.

“The access to the train station from these buses is something of a chicken wire and duct tape plan that has never been fixed,” Wilson said. “If only one thing is done it should be building a genuine bus depot.”

Planning commission staff said Wilson’s concerns are addressed in a plan from the Transportation Advisory Board that a bus depot will be built on Washington Street only if bus traffic can be rerouted from current neighborhood routes.

Russ Whitaker, an attorney with Dommermuth, Brestal, Cobine & West, spoke for a client who owns property between North Avenue and Fourth Avenue. He expressed frustration that his client’s land is categorized as a medium-density residential property, which he said means they will be restricted to building fewer buildings than the amount of homes in the surrounding neighborhood.

Comments ranged wide, prompting Chairman Mike Brown to remind commentators several times of the meeting’s purpose.

“We’re here to talk about this map. Basically, what colors should be on this map, medium density or high density? What colors are on this map, and then these comments on the right side of the page,” Brown said. “We’re going to be here a long time if we talk about developments that are not on our docket.”

The collected input from Wednesday’s and other public meetings along with the recommendations of the Transportation Advisory Board will be presented to the Naperville City Council, which will discuss the development Aug. 18.

Edward Hospital sells home care unit

This is a breaking news story I reported for the Naperville Sun.

July 10, 2009

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

Edward Hospital in Naperville has sold its home care unit to Michigan-based Residential Home Health, the hospital announced Thursday.

The sale will be finalized by July 31. Edward Home Care, which provides in-home medical services to patients who are discharged from Edward Hospital, has been operating in the Naperville community for 14 years. Edward also purchased a stake in Residential Home Health’s Illinois operations.

All current employees at the home care unit will be kept on staff, and the Residential Home Health Web site lists job openings in Chicago’s western suburbs as well.

The recent economic downturn was not a factor in the decision to sell, hospital spokesperson Keith Hartenberger said. The hospital began the sale process last year before the economy plummeted.

“We sold it because home care is a highly regulated business, and it’s something that residential home health deals with every day in a much more highly specialized and focused way,” Hartenberger said. “We thought there was a good match.”

David Curtis, president of Residential Home Health, declined to state how much money Residential Home Health paid for the Edward unit, and the Edward CFO was not available for comment.

Residential Home Health will operate the unit out of current Edward offices for now, but is already looking into purchasing separate space in Naperville for a main office. That move should happen in the next few years, Curtis said.

Residential Home Health operates in 34 Michigan counties and has been named to a national list of leading Medicare-certified health care providers for the last two years. Naperville will be its first foray out of Michigan.

“We have reached a critical mass in Michigan, and Chicago is another great Midwestern market,” Curtis said. “It’s a logical extension. It is easy to get to and it’s a strong medical community with lots of great hospitals.”

Before the pomp, prove the circumstance

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

A proposed policy revision in the Indian Prairie school district would require many home school students to repeat years of school to graduate with an Indian Prairie diploma.

In Monday’s school board meeting, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Nancy Valenta and School Improvement and Planning Director Mike Popp presented a policy revision that would require home school and private school students in District 204 to present proof that the school they transfer from is accredited before they can apply transferred credits to graduate from the district.

The revision, which would affect section 702.05 of the policy manual, would cut the first two sentences of the current policy, which state the district will accept credits awarded by home or private school. Credits currently transfer as pass-fail unless they have been accredited by an external agency.

A new sentence would be introduced which reads: “Credits and grades awarded by home school will not be reflected on the high school transcript unless the grades are certified by a district-approved external accrediting agency.”

Losing credits

The policy would effectively prevent home schoolers from graduating in the district, said Chris Klicka, senior counsel at the Home School Legal Defense Association, a nonprofit home school advocacy organization. Many home schoolers choose to teach at home because they oppose the accreditation process, and accreditation is also an added difficulty for the parent.

“There’s a very small minority — maybe 2 percent — that are able to work with an accredited correspondence kind of program, but most correspondence programs, most curricula, most families are not accredited and can’t even get accredited,” Klicka said. “To create a policy like that would mean (the district is) just shooting themselves in the foot … people won’t be putting their kids back in public school, because they’ll be losing their credits for high school.”

Klicka estimates there are 50,000 home-schooling families in Illinois, and under Illinois state law, a home school that teaches a required set of subjects in the English language is considered a private school.

Home schooling mother of three and Naperville resident Wendy Montalbano has been home schooling for two years and does not plan on sending her children back to the public school system unless an emergency forces her to work to support the family. If that happened, credits such as an anatomy class taught by a medical doctor that her son took this year would not transfer to the district. Her son would have to repeat any classes he took while home schooled before graduating.

“It’s that fine line of accreditation that they’re holding onto versus testing the students’ abilities as they come into the school,” Montalbano said. “They’re saying that we would have to trust the parents, and we can’t do that — we can’t take the parents’ word for it if the parents have given these classes, kept transcripts, done everything by the book as we were suppose to do, in order for them to come into that school and at some point receive a diploma.”

Montalbano started home schooling when she realized her oldest son — whose name she withheld to protect his privacy as he finishes school — was entering sixth grade with straight As and Bs on his report card but was reading at a second grade level and had not quite mastered fifth grade math. She now home schools all her children, and her son is caught up to his seventh grade reading level.

Fairness needed

School board member Dawn DeSart, who questioned the policy revision in Monday’s meeting, said she would like the current policy to stand or else to have a standardized test administered to all students entering the district.

“Whatever the policy says I just want it to be fair,” DeSart said. “Even though people like Wendy don’t have children in the school system, they’re still in the district — they still get a property tax bill like the rest of us do, so they definitely need to have input.”

Valenta said the goal of the policy change is to ensure that every student graduating from Indian Prairie School District has met graduation standards.

“We want everybody that graduates from one of our schools to have some sense of the rigor and standards present in the school,” she said. “We want home school students to pass the same muster. We’re not insinuating that they aren’t now — we just want them to submit transcripts that are accredited, just as we would parochial schools.”

Valenta would not comment on the availability of accreditation for home school classes because she did not know enough about the subject.

At Monday’s meeting, the board asked Popp and Valenta to revise the policy and present it again at the next meeting.

Kids helping kids

By RUTH MOON For The Sun

Nine-year-old Sebastian Nimako-Boateng knows from watching TV that U.S. armed forces fighting in the Iraq War are putting their lives on the line. So he wrote a note to thank them.

“War is really, really bad stuff. They’re risking their lives and could die,” the brown-eyed boy said. “That’s why I wrote that, because it’s just a way to tell them I’m thankful for what they did.”

Sebastian, a Naperville resident and student at Peterson Elementary School, was one of 100 students and parents who turned out at the school Wednesday night to put together school kits for Iraqi children and write letters for soldiers and children.

Sebastian’s letter reads: “Dear soldgier: thank you for going to war and risking everything. From Sebastian.”

That note is one of a stack of colorfully drawn notes sporting hand-drawn photos of rainbows, flowers and butterflies with notes for soldiers and children. Many are signed with the Arabic phrase “as-salaam alaikum,” which means “peace be with you.”

Elsewhere in the school’s common room, 7-year-old Avalon Dufkis sat at a kid-sized bench table drawing a purple heart-shaped flower on a blue piece of paper for an Iraqi child.

“They have no school supplies, and we’re trying to make them happy,” she said. “It would be really hard (to have no supplies).”

One wall of the common room was lined with boxes of school kits — containing items like scissors, rulers, pencils and notebooks — and other donated items such as blankets, winter coats and shoes for Afghani children.

The children put the kits together from items donated by parents and others. Event coordinator Diane Esser estimates the children put together 200 school kits, each worth about $15, and wrote around 250 letters.

The items will be delivered by Operation Iraqi Children, a foundation started in 2004 to provide school supplies and other items to children in areas where the U.S. military is serving. Soldiers distribute the items to children in need.

Esser called the event a “service learning program.”

“The idea behind it is to teach our children that there are children in the world who are in so much need, and we can help them and should — it’s our responsibility,” she said. “They get to learn about geography, the region we’re helping and current events in a delicate way. They want to help, and this gives them an opportunity.”