Here are a few thoughts that have come as a result of my work on this family history project. This is an essay that I wrote back in April, in the middle of digitizing the book, "Survived: How and Why?" by Hripsime Kassarjian.
I
have taken it upon myself to preserve and circulate some important
family history. I am creating a new (digital) edition of a little
booklet written by my great-great-grandmother, Hripsime Kassarjian.
She was an incredible woman of God. Her book is my window into her
world ... and it satisfies my grief at having been born after she had
gone to be with our LORD. Here is a piece of her life, in my hands.
Life
can cloud us, can't it? The sludge of negativity and discontentment
slows us down. That moment-by-moment comparison game always yields a
winner and a loser. I get so quickly sludged down into a kind of
'slough of despondence' as in Pilgrim's Progress. It starts out
innocently enough, and then turns fatal. The lies which draw me
deeper into myself, my pity, my heavily-guarded pride ... will sludge
me into the bottom of the slough, unless a hand reaches out to pull
me back to the grassy banks.
Sometimes,
that hand is reaching out from eternity. As I transcribe her story, I
cannot help but see how small and ugly my attitude and problems
really are. She survived four wars - and the Armenian genocide. She
was separated from her brother for forty long years, believing him to
be dead. Her years as a school girl were spent as an orphan, not sure
of her birthday, without the comfort of parents to love and support
her. She and her classmates spent their days between class and hiding
in barricades from the Turkish soldiers who came to kill. When the
Muslim Turks sought to obliterate the entire race of Armenian people
[due to a primarily religious conflict], she kept her faith. She
understood that her very life rested in the hand of God. He kept
giving it back to her. She kept praising His name. Her hand reaches
out to me even now ... pulling me out of the dirty mire of self-pity
and into the light.
You
may be wondering about her name. What does it mean? Here are her
words, from the preface:
"I was named after an
Armenian princess (the daughter of an Armenian King). She was a very
beautiful young girl, eighteen years old, who had become a Christian
at the end of the third century, A.D.
There was a prince, the son of
a Gentile king, who intended to marry her, if she would give up her
faith in Jesus Christ. He tried to persuade her for some time, but
without any result; so she was put in jail. Everyday this prince
would visit her to find out if she had changed her mind; her answer
was always the same. She would say, “It is far better to die for my
dear Savior, Jesus Christ, than to marry a Gentile prince.”
Finally, she died in jail. She was called a saint. Of course, I am
not worthy to bear her name, but many parents like to name their
daughters in memory of that dear princess, who held fast her faith
and her deep love for Jesus Christ, her Savior."
All
worthiness aside, it is a fitting name for a woman who held so
strongly to her faith and her Lord in spite of all obstacles, a
lifetime of suffering, and overwhelming grief. Between the lines of
her story, there is a deep love for Jesus. May that love speak to me
right now, today, and tomorrow, and into eternity.
