Several years ago during the Lenten season, I experienced a research surprise.
Hard at work on my novel, A Poppy in Remembrance, I spent Mardi Gras that year at my writing desk trying to compose a difficult chapter.
I’d reached the point in my story that noted Bible teacher Oswald Chambers–a real person in my historical novel–was going to die.
I knew how he died–David McCasland explained it in his fine biography Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God–-but since I was writing a novel, I needed to expand the scene.
Told from the point of view of my heroine Claire, the novel needed description, emotion, tension and truth.
Getting the scene right
To help describe what took place that dreadful November 15 and 16, 1917, I studied three photos from Wheaton College’s Oswald Chambers papers from the Special Collection Library.
The photos had come from his student Eva Spink Pulford’s personal collection and her daughter, who donated them to the library, thought the pictures were from Oswald Chamber’s burial service.
But no one knew for sure.
Nearly 100 years after the burial, I tried to picture the scene represented in those old black and white photos on the day they were taken.
Was it a gray day? Did the sky ever get gray in 1917 Cairo, Egypt?
I wrote the story of Oswald’s death and his burial as Claire would have experienced it.
When I finished the chapter, I turned off the computer feeling so very, very sad.
Oswald Chambers was dead.
It wasn’t a surprise, but in the fifteen months I’d spent up to that time writing A Poppy in Remembrance, he’d become real.
With his death, I felt black grief.1
Ash Wednesday’s surprise
The day following Mardis Gras, of course, is Ash Wednesday–the first day of the Lenten season in my Lutheran Church.
All the emotions I’d expended the day before writing about Oswald’s death and burial remained with me that morning–so I dressed completely in black.
I went to work and then to the church Lenten dinner.
But I still mourned. I couldn’t shake it. So, I excused myself early from dinner and went up to the choir loft. There, I could be quiet, think and prepare for the service to come.
However, I could also check my email.
And there I saw a surprise from bigpond.au–which I knew meant a correspondent from Australia.
The subject line: “Looking for Information about Oswald Chambers in Egypt.”
Are you as surprised as I am to get an email like that out of the blue–the very day after I wrote about Oswald Chambers’ death in Egypt?
Of course I read it!
My correspondent, Peter, is the grandson of a man who served as a YMCA chaplain in Egypt during World War I.
His grandparents married in Egypt during the war and his aunt was born there. The family used to call her Biddy.
Peter wondered if his grandparents might have known Biddy Chambers.
He knew they didn’t know Oswald because his grandfather arrived in Egypt three days before Oswald died.
His grandfather did, however, attend Oswald Chambers’ burial and he had photos.
Eight photos.
Research Serendipity, yet again
I’ve been the recipient of research serendipities before. You can read about several here, here and here.
(If you have something you think I’d like to see, send it along!)
But this serendipity, eight photos of Oswald Chambers’ burial out of the blue, was the most shocking of all.
If you’ve read my posts and Mrs. Oswald Chambers, you’ve seen some of those photos.
But they were brand new to all of us that Lenten season several years ago.
Indeed, when journalist Eric Metaxas heard the story, he declared it “a miracle, Michelle.”
As I wrote here, when I blew up the high-resolution photos–Peter found them in the WWI YMCA collection at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, England–I saw what I believe is a photo of Biddy Chambers at her husband’s graveside dressed in black.
Peter pointed out his grandfather on the right side behind a cross. I know that’s Lord Radford with white hair standing beside Biddy.
The other photos don’t shed a great deal of new information on what I knew, but I returned to my manuscript and made a few
A Mardi Gras surprise, a Lenten miracle, research serendipity?
Or maybe the reverse?
That year, Mardi Gras was the sad and sober day, with Ash Wednesday bringing a surprising joy.
Perhaps it’s more true to say, that’s the life of a writer trying her best to honor God with her computer keys.
And to tell and honest story on a curious day in the liturgical year.
Regardless, thanks be to God–and to Peter, too!
Tweetables
A shocking research serendipity on Ash Wednesday. Click to Tweet
Previously unseen photos of Oswald Chambers’ burial turn up the day after a writer describes his death. Click to Tweet
All told, some dozen research serendipities occurred while I wrote Mrs. Oswald Chambers and A Poppy in Remembrance
I wrote about them in my Ebook Writing about Biddy and Oswald Chambers: Stories and Serendipities–available for free when you sign up for my monthly newsletter here.
Thoughts? Reactions? Lurker?