The Fire Will Not Consume You—Isaiah 43:2B: A Journal of Prayer—A Search for God

By James David Parker

Author James David Parkers once thriving professional career was in a nosedive to disaster. His once-profitable investments dragged him to the precipice of financial ruin. The stress of the battle for survival wasted his will. Mental depression trashed his intellect. As a nominal, but skeptical, Christian, he asked: Can Jesus rescue me? Will Jesus deliver me from my earthly hell? And thus began his journeya search for truth.

In The Fire Will Not Consume YouIsaiah 43:2b, Parker shares his progression from successful engineer to cynicism, to financial disaster and stress-induced illness, to the spirit-led process of prayer and recovery, and finally, to acknowledgement of his intimate relationship with his creator God. Each chapter in the core of the book begins with a prayer addressing a specific deficit in character or perception.

The Fire Will Not Consume YouIsaiah 43:2b chronicles Parkers recovery from mental depression through introspective prayer and Bible study. He offers a guidebook to unleash the unlimited power of God to bring personal peace in prayerful communication with him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Voices
• Release date: Jan 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781462410866

James David Parker

James David Parker graduated from UC Berkeley. He worked in engineering positions with Dow, Shell, and IBM. A Lutheran, he’s held offices in his local church and synod, is a consultant to local nonprofits and served, with wife Sarah, on the President’s Council of Advisers at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. In 2003 they were awarded “Honorary Alumni” of the seminary.

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THE PROLOGUE

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CHAPTER 1

Service, Compassion, Achievement

I’m not climbing any more poles today! I shouted to the foreman of the line crew, pressing to be heard over the howl of the wind, my words bolting south toward Oklahoma.

As I stomped the snow from my boots, his response was predictable and to the point. You’ll get back up there or go to town and collect your pay!

The REA transmission line paralleled Highway 96 running east from town. We had been converting two phase to three phase since early that morning. In Western Kansas it is said that the wind blows thirty miles an hour from the south all summer and thirty miles an hour from the north all winter.

It was eighteen degrees. A half inch of ice had built up on the north side of everything vertical, residue from a storm the night before. If the climber didn’t keep his back squarely into the north wind as he ascended, he ran the risk of being blown around the power line pole. You had to jamb your hooks (a two inch spike buckled to the inner side of each lineman’s boot) hard through the ice to set solidly in the wood as you stepped up the pole. I had not spiked the round surface squarely as I approached the top; and I slid down (skinned, in lineman’s language) the first two poles.

In two weeks, I was due at the Coast Guard receiving station at Alameda. I took the foreman up on the second half of his offer. Years later, when arguing to our children for the freedom of choice that a college education and marketable skills provide, I would say, Nothing quite equals the satisfaction of telling a boss that you’re having trouble with to take his job and ‘stuff it,’ and then walking down the street to another employer.

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Earlier, Gary Kale and I, twenty year old high school classmates, had driven out to Denver to enlist—the other option, being drafted for infantry duty against the North Koreans and Chinese.

I, having stated that I had been a pre-med major, was soon pulled out of boot camp to help attend the twin epidemics of measles and pneumonia preying on the new recruits. Shortly, day after day, I found myself looking at one arm after another on the stream of new arrivals, giving shots and drawing blood samples.

The experience served me well later when, at hospital corpsman school in Groton, Eugene O’Dell, an embalmer from Cleveland (tagged Digger after the radio character of years before), and I found that we were the only two people in our group with needle experience. Needless to say, while the rest of the guys were painfully bending those too flimsy hollow slivers of metal on each other, Digger and I were taking our turns together, thankful for our previously acquired skills.

I had first served under Chief Hospital Corpsman Harry Corey at Alameda. He had seen duty over half the world, and, to pass the time between emergencies, Harry would hold forth while the rest of us listened. He was half philosopher, half prophet, half spiritualist (sometimes quoting Edgar Casey), and all physician.

Nine months after a North Atlantic weather patrol and Corpsman School, it was a joy to work with Harry again. Boy am I glad to see you, he said wearily, as my seabag dropped to the floor of his office. Alone, he had been handling the air-sea rescue calls of a normal three-man billet. And I was glad to see Harry. He was a limitless extension of the Hospital Corpsman Handbook, Physicians’ Desk Reference and Materia Medica.

For the next eleven months he was my tutor and mentor. This was to be a period of discovery for me, and I loved every minute of it.

The Coast Guard Air Station at Port Angeles, Washington, sits on a sliver of sand across the harbor from the boat docks, paper mill, and fiberboard plant that provides employment for the locals. Behind the town, the forests covering the flanks of the Olympic Mountains eventually give way to glistening white glaciers covering the peaks. I often thought that God had one of His most artistic moments when He created that wondrous combination of mountain and sea.

The air-sea rescue operations employed PBY’s (the 1930’s designed Catalina Flying Boat), large water-landing PBM’s and helicopters. There was a WWII B-17, for shepherding troubled commercial airliners in from the Pacific. The four-engine Flying Fortress carried a large lifeboat on the underside that could be dropped into the water. The PBY’s although noisy in the air and sounding like a burlap sack of empty tin cans when dropping onto the runway, gave us all a feeling of security and reliability.

While there, one special learning experience has stayed peculiarly with me: It was well past the darkness that comes slowly after summer sundowns in the Pacific Northwest. We had taken a PBY to Sea Island Naval Air Station, near Vancouver, Canada, to pick up a couple of injured Americans who had flown their little Grumman amphibian into the side of a mountain in remote British Columbia. The RCAF had parachuted in, cleared a helicopter landing area, and brought them out.

As we were transferring the litters carrying the men to our aircraft, I caught the attention of one of the two flight-geared female attendants.

Can I talk to the corpsman that brought them out? I asked, looking past her for someone who looked ruggedly capable.

I’m one of the nurses that brought them out. She said politely. I detected some amusement there.

As we exchanged the necessary medical information, I was thankful that the night hid my embarrassment, hoping that my early stammering hadn’t betrayed my surprise. In this primarily male-only environment, here was another female cut from the same cloth as Mom—wise, capable, self-sufficient. False impressions, I learned for the first time, usually die without warning and with some discomfort.

I was due one other surprise before the night’s work was finished. I had secured the litters of both patients, with their IV’s hung overhead, beside the big bulging glass bubble windows on either side of the fuselage, and we were airborne. One, with a wire frame splint protecting the compound fracture of his femur, motioned me over.

As I leaned close to hear him above the din of the twin engines above us, he demanded, Loosen the splint!

I started to explain that the broken ends of the upper leg bone would then likely slide past each other, causing him unbelievable pain and doing further damage; but he quickly interrupted.

I’m a doctor! I’ve got to urinate! Loosen the damn splint!

Somehow, I got the immobile doctor taken care of without further damaging the leg. Sometimes it’s hard, in the middle of immediacy, before making a judgment, to simply ask—why?

Air-sea rescue was a frequent mélange of organized chaos, much appealing to my nature. The toughness and resilience of people in intense physical pain (which, thank God, I had not yet known) amazed and puzzled me. Those with terrible injuries would sometimes even refuse my offering of morphine or Demerol.

Often pushing the very limits of my skills, I enjoyed the constant demands to respond, the battles for life and health, and the conviction that what I was doing was terribly important. Addiction to the adrenaline rush of crisis intervention seemed like a good thing. And, I learned how to pray—for those in my care.

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I found a bride in Port Angeles. We were married, it seems, before we had a chance to think about it. We first met when she, a nurse, accompanied a burn patient that needed an emergency flight to better medical facilities in Seattle.

Much earlier, I had applied for an overseas assignment and—with amazingly poor timing—my application was honored shortly after we started seeing each other. I was soon on my way to a new station, a pinpoint of an island in the North China Sea.

Miyako Jima is the southernmost island in the Ryukan Chain. It was said that the island had known eight different flags; the latest, U.S. occupied Japan. I was to provide medical assistance to the twenty Coast Guardsmen who built and operated the radio navigation (LORAN) station on the south side of the island. Okinawa, an hour flying time to the north, held the nearest military doctor.

One sunny afternoon, a few weeks after bringing our equipment ashore from the LST, a few of us took the captain’s jeep sightseeing to a small village a couple of miles from our base. The Red Cross on my helmet was recognized, and thus began my thriving medical practice with the natives.

Mornings, a line would form outside my tent-housed infirmary; some of the stuff I hadn’t seen before. Most insisted that I accept compensation for the soaks, bandages and sulfa bactericide. They would often bring me bananas or a newborn puppy which, when mostly grown and fat would mysteriously disappear, providing a feast, we guessed, for some special occasion.

They were gentle people, barely subsisting and yet seemingly happy. The men fished the sea from dawn to dusk while the women, infants on their backs, tilled the fields with large, wide hoes. I grew fond of them and the feeling seemed to be reciprocal. Here, I truly felt needed.

Sometimes, I would jeep the afflicted native to the lone Japanese doctor, some twelve miles distant, on the other side of the island. He and I discovered a communication methodology by accident. Early in our association I had taken an elderly gentleman with a broken leg to the doctor for retention in his crude but serviceable hospital.

We were having difficulty understanding each other. His English was limited and my Japanese was non-existent.

Finally, he pointed to the man and said, Nicht arbeiten.

Surprised, I replied, Der Mann zu krank, nicht reisen. Our German was crude, but some way, using a vehicle foreign to each, we achieved understanding.

In later years in group problem-solving situations, when I would become exasperated with people talking past each other, each with his own self-serving agenda, I often thought of the Japanese doctor and me. All parties, I would then remind myself, must first desire to solve the same set of problems.

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CHAPTER 2

The Genesis of A Philosophy

Thank God (by way of the American taxpayer) for the Korean GI Bill. Veterans housing, a cluster of green, two story converted barracks in Albany, sitting between San Francisco Bay and the Berkeley campus, was crowded but functional, and most importantly, cheap. Ten families in each building, four up and six down, called it home while at the university.

Conveniently, the back to back bathrooms had a common vent placed strategically, head-high just above the toilet, allowing neighborly (and not so neighborly) communication. There was lots of camaraderie. We often joked that, within our small group, there were fifty-six different recipes to fix the three-pounds-for-a-dollar hamburger from the local supermarket.

Jerry Paley, Doug Albert, Bill Obrien, and I commuted to the campus each day, doing our bit to relieve the student-parking problem, endemic, it seems, to large universities. Jerry, later to become president of Denver’s Metropolitan State College, was the serious voice of reason in the group; Doug, short and roly-poly, the comedian; and lanky, bespectacled Bill, the philosopher.

Bill was older than the rest and a year my senior in school. Early on, when I was having difficulty with my academics, looking like Einstein over his always drooping lenses, he advised me, Don’t try to learn everything; just get A’s on the tests.

Good advice for life, I thought. Don’t try to do everything; just get A’s.

And so, it seemed, a lifetime personal philosophy was born: discipline and hard work; focus on the things that those in authority feel are important; pay particular attention to the unspoken rules of the game; adapt to the reward system. And finally, make the most of those skills that God gave you; and so I learned to pray—expectantly—for me.

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Graduation, and the year following, brought twin, but quite opposite, surprises. As new engineering graduates, we could talk to fifty potential employers and get forty-nine job offers. Here was the security, the ego gratification, that years earlier I had worried might forever elude me.

Eleven months later, in the midst of a deep, nationwide business downturn, the company with which I had decided to spend the rest of my working life dumped its entire crop of just recruited engineers. I was expendable! Is anything, I asked, worthy of trust and total commitment?

I wasn’t angry with my employer. After all, I reasoned, the company exists to maximize profit, not to provide employment. They don’t owe me anything. But my idealism had been dealt a serious blow. Loyalty, it seemed at that time of my ambivalent feelings toward the company, had no home in the world of commerce.

New job opportunities were plentiful for us young guys just out of school. But the fear in the voice and eyes of the fired fifty-year-olds, many with a single skill who had given much of their working lives to the company, continues in my memory to this day.

The lesson was not lost on me. It was a reminder of my dad’s situation—where do you turn when you are old, worn out, and with skills that nobody wants?

I secured new employment immediately, but with a new skepticism that demanded that Jim’s long term interests be given priority.

A few months later, Tim Holt, Dick Kern and I, all engineers at Shell Development in Emeryville, decided to grab the entrepreneurial brass ring. We observed a hot market for plastics-based automobile body solder, replacing the old process using lead, to repair the often dented fenders of California’s Bay Area drivers. Recent discoveries of fast setting resins had created this possibility.

The start-up process was a horrific mélange of equipment, mostly acquired from used food-processing machinery dealers—a huge dough mixer feeding a sausage extruder that fed the putty-like material into gallon cans. The labeling and packing was by hand, the three of us providing the hands. We were soon looking at expansion into paints, primers, and janitorial supplies. Business was good and the unlimited energy and enthusiasm of youth allowed us to easily manage the sixteen-hour days.

Typically, I suppose, the three of us soon had a disagreement over product distribution. I voted for using resellers, reasoning that development and high volume manufacturing were our expertise; they, for direct sales to repair shops where the profit margins were better. The impasse was unresolvable and I quickly sold my interest—to move on. Cut your losses quickly. I reasoned. A breadwinner has to act in his own best interests.

The respite was short. My peak earning years are limited and I must hurry, I often told myself. I could justify almost anything with this argument.

Some associates from earlier years were starting a new company in Santa Clara. Magnetic recording tape for computers sounded exciting. I was to supply the formulation expertise.

The workdays were long. The homes of the development group, in the valley east of Oakland, were seventy miles from work. This created both a problem and an opportunity. Daily commuting was not practical, so we stayed in a cheap motel three blocks from the plant from Monday through Friday, working from dawn until well into the night, five days a week and Saturday. Saturday night, Sunday, and Sunday night was allocated to family. This schedule continued for months while acceptable product was being developed.

I came into the group with supreme confidence in my chemistry skills and had a couple of patents to prove it. When my boss took personal credit for every contribution I made, I was frustrated, didn’t know how to cope, and handled my response badly.

I was soon, in my thirty-fifth year, with still another employer in Southern California, due for a major change in my attitudes; but I didn’t notice the effect, didn’t realize what had happened, until it was uncovered in the psychotherapist’s office years later.

It was mid-morning. I was in the lab observing some experiments when the call came. Brother Jack was on the line. Dad had died! As I fought, and lost, the battle to hold back the tears, I tried to convince myself that it was for the best. Mom had nursed him through two years of ill health—first a seemingly innocuous stomach operation, then a fall while working on the Oakland airport terminal, then, the months of semi-invalid, roller-coaster health.

My step-dad, whom I loved dearly, had been claimed by a malignancy at age fifty-seven. He was a generous, loud, gregarious, profane Irishman, frequently subject to impulse and occasionally to excess. He had suffered many reverses in his life and, it seemed to me at the time, left few accomplishments to show that he had lived, worked hard, suffered more than most, and died of a terribly vile and degrading disease.

I was puzzled and hurt by the seeming injustice of his materially unrewarded good nature and his unvoiced but, I was sure, deeply felt frustration over his inability to free himself from overbearing financial burdens throughout his years. His manner of life and premature death deeply affected my own philosophy of living. I knew that I couldn’t control how I would die; but I would spit in the grim reaper’s eye and by my own will leave a legacy of visible accomplishment for others to approve (both while I lived and) when I passed to my Valhalla.

And so for me, the god of financial security was added to my other gods of peer approval and visible material accumulation. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was angry; and, I was driven.

Introspection and a review of priorities were in order. Those early years spent in the business start-up environment, either in a new venture or in an autonomous unit of a large company, had been both a blessing and a curse. I loved the seclusion and technical demands of the laboratory but had a knack for organization, leadership, and motivating people. I responded well to the life or death demands of functioning in a limited resource environment but longed for the security and collegiality of the big corporation. I could really get pumped up with the pace and vitality of the California business scene but my heart longed for the quieter rural times of my youth.

It was said, in those days and the years that immediately followed, that a guy with a technical degree could, leave the back door of a company and return by the front door and gain a salary increase of fifty bucks. It was a common complaint of operating managers that the demand for quality technical labor had caused starting salaries to outrun the in-house compensation guidelines. The low birth rates of the Thirties coupled with the growth of high-tech in the Sixties saw an unprecedented demand for skilled people; and I made the most of it.

At the end of my short but busy company to company trek, on my application for a job at IBM in Boulder, Miles Cable, the hiring manager observed, It looks to me like you’re a job hopper.

This is my last one, was my quick and confident reply.

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CHAPTER 3

Sorting Priorities

You’ll go to Armonk with us tomorrow. When big, fast-talking Jake Ross, IBM Director of Office Products said something, people paid attention. Jake, as with most senior executives in the corporation, had come up through sales. It was rumored that he had once been a Chicago cab driver, and, with a good part of him hanging over his belt in front and the permanent cigar in his ruddy face, he looked the part. We will be meeting with the Chief Scientist, then the Management Committee, to get approval to announce the product, he continued.

It had been less than a year since I opted to move our little family to this rural community at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Getting lost in the laboratory of a big company, out of the hustle and hassle, had been my objective.

Getting the new magnetic recording media formulation and process rock solid in the plant had been my first assignment; and it had been a long and tedious effort with many false starts and restarts. Months earlier, agreement had been reached with a Japanese company to supply the expertise. Converting to our process measurements and achieving batch to batch consistency had been tough.

Dr. Ty Kane, chemical engineer and a bottomless vessel of vitality and good humor, was first to articulate the difficulty. We were on the manufacturing floor to observe the start of a new batch.

How do they expect us to get a handle on this process? Ty’s words were more a statement than a question.

What do you mean? was my reply.

Well, just look! Consternation was his unspoken tone as he pointed to one of the Japanese engineers standing over the open mouth of a huge Banbury mixer.

The guy was taking a pinch of the plastic material from the mixing chamber, sniffing it at length, pulling and kneading it repeatedly in his hands, adding an unidentified liquid, closing the chamber and restarting the mixer. This routine was repeated until it was determined that the material was right to charge to the next step in the process.

How are we going to duplicate this guy’s ‘nasal’ chromatography and ‘manual’ viscosity measurements when he goes back to Japan? Ty’s tone was half humor, half complaint. He viewed a technical problem the same as I, as something to be attacked, vigorously, and quickly brought to submission. For us, and most of the team, the constant challenge gave meaning to life.

We had spent months setting up the laboratories and getting the manufacturing equipment in place. Then came the process optimization runs to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the product and establish repeatability for the process and materials quality measurements.

And so, having qualified the process and the product, we were now ready for First Customer Ship. But before doing that, the folks at corporate had to have one last look and give their blessings.

Although the Director was much given to humor, it didn’t seem as though he would joke about my joining his entourage to those powers in the East that guided the destiny of the corporation. I was elated at the prospect of exposure to such mysteries but replied, How will I be able to help you? I didn’t really mean it as a question but he answered anyway.

Jake rolled his eyes around the room, purposefully addressing his next comment to his assembled management team. His half smile was partially obscured by the big cigar that seemed a constant companion. There was a not-so-subtle message about to be given. You’re the only one of us who hasn’t lied to them yet. Jake replied ruefully, referring to the bumpy road we had traveled to finally arrive at this point of decision.

My early exposure to the IBM environment—this business colossus which, at that time, cast a giant shadow over the computing industry—presented me with a peculiar anomaly. The professionalism was impressive; the adherence to protocols and the absence of urgency, I found puzzling and hard to get used to.

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But the promotions came easily and quickly. The workdays, and sometimes the working weekends, were long. When