When Heaven Weeps
A MARTYR'S SONG
WHEN
HEAVEN
WEEPS
TED DEK
K
ER
WHEN HEAVEN WEEPS
© Copyright 2001
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansâelectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherâexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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Scripture quotations noted NIV are from
The Holy Bible,
New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dekker, Ted, 1962â
When heaven weeps / Ted R. Dekker.
p. cm. (A martyr's song; bk. 2)
ISBN 978-0-8499-4516-8 (repak)
1. World War, 1939â1945âVeteransâFiction. 2. Evangelicalismâ Fiction. 3. ClergyâFiction. I. Title
PS3554.E43 W48 2001
813'6âdc21
2001017609
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
07 08 09 10 11 RRD 10 9 8 7 6
CONTENTS
The story you are about to read begins with some of the events told in Ted's novel,
The Martyr's Song
, and then continues with Jan's incredible tale of betrayal and love that many claim is Ted's most powerful story to date.
There is no order to the Martyr's Song novels, you may read any in any order. Each is a stand alone story that in no way depends on the others. Nevertheless, if there is one book we recommend you start with, it is
The Martyr's Song
, the story that started it all.
For LeeAnn, my wife,
without whose love I
would be only a shadow
of myself. I will never
forget the day you saw heaven.
“Christians who refuse
To look squarely into the suffering of Christ
Are not Christians at all.
They are a breed of pretenders,
Who would turn their backs on the Cross,
And shame his death.
You cannot hold up the Cross,
Nor drink of the cup
Without embracing the death.
And you cannot understand love,
Unless you first die.”
T
HE
D
ANCE OF THE
D
EAD
1959
Atlanta, Georgia, 1964
IVENA STOOD in the small greenhouse attached to her home and frowned at the failing rosebush. The other bushes had not been affectedâthey flourished around her, glistening with a sprinkling of dewdrops. A bed of Darwin tulip hybrids blossomed bright red and yellow along her greenhouse's glass shell. Behind her, against the solid wall of her house, a flat of purple orchids filled the air with their sweet aroma. A dozen other species of roses grew in neat boxes, none of them infected.
But this bush had lost its leaves and shriveled in the space of five days, and that was a problem because this wasn't just another rosebush. This was Nadia's rosebush.
Ivena delicately pried through the dried thorny stems, searching for signs of disease or insects. She'd already tried a host of remedies, from pesticides to a variety of growth agents, all to no avail. It was a Serbian Red from the saxifrage family, snipped from the bush that she and Sister Flouta had planted by the cross.
When Ivena had left Bosnia for Atlanta, she'd insisted on a greenhouse; it was the one unbreakable link to her past. She made a fine little business selling the flowers to local floral shops in Atlanta, but the real purpose for the greenhouse was this one rosebush, wasn't it? Yes, she knew that as surely as she knew that blood flowed in her veins.
And now Nadia's rose was dying. Or dead.
Ivena put one hand on her hip and ran the other through her gray curls. She'd cared for a hundred species of roses over her sixty years and never, never had she seen such a thing. Each bud from Nadia's bush was priceless. If there was a graftable branch alive she would snip it off and nurse it back to health. But every branch seemed affected.
“Oh, dear Nadia, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
She couldn't answer herself for the simple reason that she had no clue what she would do. She had never considered the possibility that this, the crown of her flower garden, might one day die for no apparent reason at all. It was a travesty.
Ivena picked through the branches again, hoping that she was wrong. Dried dirt grayed her fingers. They weren't as young or as smooth as they once had been, but years of working delicately around thorns had kept them nimble. Graceful. She could walk her way through a rosebush blindfolded without so much as touching a thorn. But today she felt clumsy and old.
The stalk between her fingers suddenly snapped. Ivena blinked. It was as dry as tinder. How could it fail so fast? She tsked and shook her head. But then something caught her eye and she stopped.
Immediately beneath the branch that had broken, a very small shoot of green angled from the main stalk. That was odd. She lowered her head for a closer look.
The shoot grew out a mere centimeter, almost like a stalk of grass. She touched it gently, afraid to break it. And as she did she saw the tiny split in the bark along the base of that shoot.
She caught her breath. Strange! It looked like a small graft!
But she hadn't grafted anything into the plant, had she? No, of course not. She remembered every step of care she'd given this plant over the last five years and none of them included a graft.
It looked like someone had slit the base of the rosebush open and grafted in this green shoot. And it didn't look like a rose graft either. The stalk was a lighter green. So then maybe it wasn't a graft. Maybe it was a parasite of some kind.
Ivena let her breath out slowly and touched it again. It was already healed at the insertion point.
“Hmmm.”
She straightened and walked to the round table where a white porcelain cup still steamed with tea. She lifted it to her lips. The rich aroma of spice warmed her nostrils and she paused, staring through the wisps of steam.
From this distance of ten feet Nadia's rosebush looked like Moses's burning bush, but consumed by the flame and burned black. Dead branches reached up from the soil like claws from a grave. Dead.
Except for that one tiny shoot of green at its base.
It was very strange indeed.
Ivena lowered herself into the old wood-spindle chair beside the table, still looking over the teacup to the rosebush. She sat here every morning, humming and sipping her tea and whispering her words to the Father. But today the sight before her was turning things on their heads.
She lowered the cup without drinking. “Father, what are you doing here?” she said softly.
Not that he was necessarily doing anything. Rosebushes died, after all. Perhaps with less encouragement than other plants. But an air of consequence had settled on Ivena, and she couldn't ignore it.
Across the beds of flourishing flowers before her sat this one dead bushâan ugly black scar on a landscape of bright color. But then from the blackened stalk that impossible graft.
“What are you saying here, Father?”
She did not hear his answer, but that didn't mean he wasn't talking. He could be yelling for all she knew. Here on Earth it might come through as a distant whisper, easily mistaken for the sound of a gentle breeze. Actually the greenhouse was dead silent. She more felt something, and it could just as easily have been a draft that tickled her hair, or a finger of emotion from the past, as the voice of God.
Still the scene before her began to massage her heart with fingers of meaning. She just didn't know what that meaning was yet.
Ivena hummed and a blanket of peace settled over her. She whispered, “Lover of my soul, I worship you. I kiss your feet. Don't ever let me forget.” Her words echoed softly through the quiet greenhouse, and she smiled.
The Creator was a mischievous one,
she often thought. At least playful and easily delighted. And he was up to something, wasn't he?
A splash of red at her elbow caught her eye. It was her copy of the book.
The Dance of the Dead.
Its surreal cover showed a man's face wide open with laughter, tears leaking down his cheek.
Still smiling, Ivena set down her teacup and lifted the book from the table. She ran a hand over the tattered cover. She'd read it a hundred times, of course. But it never lost its edge. Its pages oozed with love and laughter and the heart of the Creator.
She opened the book and brushed through a few dozen dog-eared pages. He had written a masterpiece, and in some ways it was as much God's words as his. She could begin in the middle or at the beginning or the end and it wouldn't hardly matter. The meaning would not be lost. She opened to the middle and read a few sentences.
It was odd how such a story could bring this warmth to her heart. But it did, it really did, and that was because her eyes had been opened a little as well. She'd seen a few things through God's eyes.
Ivena glanced up at the dying rosebush with its impossible graft. Something new was beginning today. But everything had really started with the story in her hands, hadn't it?
A small spark of delight ran through her bones. She smoothed her dress, crossed her legs and lowered her eyes to the page.
Yes, this was how it all started.
Twenty years ago in Bosnia. At the end of the war with the Nazis.
She read.
THE SOLDIERS stood unmoving on the hill's crest, leaning on battered rifles, five dark silhouettes against a white Bosnian sky, like a row of trees razed by the war. They stared down at the small village, oblivious to the sweat caked beneath their tattered army fatigues, unaware of the dirt streaking down their faces like long black claws.
Their condition wasn't unique. Any soldier who managed to survive the brutal fighting that ravaged Yugoslavia during its liberation from the Nazis looked the same. Or worse. A severed arm perhaps. Or bloody stumps below the waist. The country was strewn with dying woundedâtestaments to Bosnia's routing of the enemy.