“You are no longer my son,” Ivan Blazen’s father scolded him when was just old enough to start college. You have no place in this home.”
His father was furious because he had just become a Seventh-day Adventist even though his family had been Roman Catholics, first in Croatia and then in the United States, as far back as anyone could remember.
So, on a cold, cold, cold Detroit February morning, he left his home with a few belongings and a broken heart. He moved in with the family of the SDA pastor who had baptized him. They swiftly purchased clothes and other supplies for him and dropped him off in Berrien Springs, a village 197 miles westward of the metropolis that is Detroit. They left him on the sprawling campus of what later became Andrews University where at first he believed that he would never have any friends. He was wrong.
This was the beginning of Ivan Blazen’s journey that continued for decades until he died in Loma Linda this past December 4 at eighty-nine years of age. He had suffered for years from severe back pain which the MDs had been unable sufficiently to lessen despite many attempts.
Ivan’s journey would have him earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in theology at Andrews University. It would have him continue his studies in Germany and then return to the United States and earn a PhD in New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.
It would have him publish articles and books and teach thousands of grateful students in the undergraduate Department of Religion and Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University and the School of Religion at Loma Linda University. It would have him conduct seminars and workshops all over the world. It would have him frequently appear on television and on the Internet at Loma Linda Broadcasting Network and elsewhere.
Although I never took a course from him, as a senior colleague at Loma Linda he taught me many things. One of them is that happiness is not the absence of pain but gradually learning how to live with it.
Being expelled from his childhood home was just the first of Ivan’s many heartaches and losses They were so frequent and so severe that in private my nick name for him was “Job.” Unlike Job, though, in public he didn’t complain. (I hope he felt free to do so in private.) With a twinkle in his eyes, and frequently with a good story, he softly laughed. He helped us all to laugh too!
Ivan’s sense of humor, sensitive imagination and mastery of Scripture are all evident in a LLBN interview about his early life that RBLSS will view this coming Sabbath (December 9) and a subsequent one. It will subsequently be available at YouTube and Facebook.