I stepped off the train in London, holding the piece of paper on which I had written the address of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade headquarters.
Outside the train station, tall red buses and high black taxicabs spun dizzily past on the wrong sides of the street. I walked up to a policeman, held out the paper, and asked how I might get to this address. The officer took the paper and looked at it. Then, nodding, he stretched out his arm and for several minutes rattled off directions. I stared at him dumbfounded; I could not understand one single word. In embarrassment I took back the paper, said “Dank ou,” and walked away in the direction of his first arm wave.
I tried several other policemen, with no better results. At last there was nothing for it: I had to spend a bit of precious cash on a taxi. I found one parked at the curb, handed the driver the piece of paper, and closed my eyes as we whirled off in the left-hand lane. A few moments later he stopped. He pointed to my piece of paper, then to a large building badly in need of paint.
I picked up my suitcase, made my way up the steps, and rang the doorbell. A woman opened the door. I explained as carefully as I could who I was and why I was here. The lady looked at me with a vacant stare that assured me that she had not caught even the drift of my remarks. She signaled with her hand that I was to come in, showed me a straight chair in the hallway, and then disappeared. When she came back she had in tow a man who spoke some Dutch. Once again I explained who I was and where I was headed.
“Ah, yes, of course. But didn’t you get our cable? We wired you three days ago that there was no room up in Glasgow just now.”
“I got the cable, yes.”
“And you came anyhow?”
I was happy to see that the man was smiling.
“A place will open for me when the time comes,” I said. “I am certain of it. I want to be ready.”
The man smiled again and told me to wait a moment. When he returned, he had the news I was hoping for. It would be all right for me to stay here at headquarters for a short while, provided I was willing to work.
And so began one of the hardest two-month periods of my life.
The physical work I was required to do was not difficult: I was to paint the WEC headquarters building. As soon as I got used to the ladder, I enjoyed the job tremendously. I didn’t even take a holiday for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. The staff members kept shouting up to me to come down and see the events on television. But I preferred my perch high above the street where I could see flags on every roof and watch the plane formations flying over.
What made the two months difficult was learning English. I worked so hard on the language that my head continually ached. The people at WEC all practiced what they called Morning Quiet Time—they got up long before breakfast to read their Bibles and pray before the business of the day began or any words were spoken. I liked the idea immediately. I was up with the first bird song, dressed, and out in the garden with two books in my hand. One was an English Bible; the other was a dictionary. It was doubtless an excellent technique, but it did have some disadvantages. My English during that period was filled with thees, thous, and verilys. One time I passed on a request for butter by saying, “Thus sayeth the neighbor of Andrew, that thou wouldst be pleased to pass the butter.”
But I was learning. After I had been in England six weeks I was asked by the director to lead the evening devotional. At the end of seven minutes I ran out of English words and sat down. Two weeks later I was asked to speak again. This time I chose as my text Christ’s words to the blind man on the road to Jericho. “Thy faith hath saved thee.” It was a foolish choice, because the sound “th” for a Dutchman is anathema.
“Dy fade had saved dee,” I announced, and then for fourteen minutes by the clock I tried to prove my point to the grand amusement of the other workers.
At the close of my little sermon they all gathered around. “You’re getting better, Andy,” they said, pounding me joyously on the back. “We could almost understand what you said! And fourteen minutes! That makes you twice as good as when you spoke for seven!”
“So this is our Dutchman. . . . I think his sermon was very fine indeed.”
The voice came from the back of the room. Standing in the doorway was a middle-aged, balding, plumpish, pink-faced man I had not seen before. I was struck instantly by the sparkle in his eyes: They were half closed as if he were thinking of some mischief to do.
“Andrew, I don’t believe you’ve met William Hopkins,” the WEC director said. I walked to the rear of the room and extended my hand. William Hopkins took it in both of his own large hands, and when he was through, I knew that I had been thoroughly greeted.
“He looks strong enough,” Mr. Hopkins said. “If we can get him the papers, I think he will do very well.”
I must have looked puzzled, because the director explained that the time had come when I would have to leave the headquarters building. The painting job was finished, and my bed was needed for a returning missionary. But if Mr. Hopkins could get me British working papers, I could get a job in London and start saving money toward books and other expenses in Glasgow. Whenever practical matters of this kind arose, I learned, people always turned to William Hopkins.
“Go get your things, Andrew m’boy,” Mr. Hopkins said. “You’re invited to come live with Mrs. Hopkins and meself for a few days until we find some work.”
It didn’t take long to pack one suitcase. While I was putting away my toothbrush and razor, one of the WEC workers told me a little about Mr. Hopkins. He was a successful contractor, yet he lived in penury. Nine-tenths of his income he gave away to various missions. WEC was only one of his great-hearted concerns.
Within a few moments I was standing at the front door saying good-bye to the staff.
“The building looks beautiful, Andy,” the director said, shaking hands.
“Dank ou.”
“Let’s hear that ‘th.’”
“Thee-ank ee-ou.”
Everyone laughed as William Hopkins and I walked down the steps to his truck. The Hopkinses’ living quarters on the Thames River were about what I would have expected: simple, warm, homey. Mrs. Hopkins was an invalid. She spent most days in bed, but she did not object to my intrusion.
“You make yourself to home here,” she greeted me. “You’ll discover where the cupboard is, and you’ll learn that the front door is never on the latch.” Then she turned to her husband, and I saw in her eyes the same sparkle I had seen in his. “And don’t be surprised should you find a stray in your bed some night. It has happened. If by chance it happens again, there’s blankets and pillows in the living room, and you can make a bedroll by the fire.”
Before the week was over I was to discover how literally these words were meant. One evening when I came back to the house, after another long and fruitless wait at the work-permit office, I found both Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins sitting in the living room.
“Don’t bother to go up to your room, Andrew,” Mrs. Hopkins said. “There’s a drunk in your bed. We’ve had our tea, but we saved you some.”
As I ate my meal in front of the fire, she told me about the man in my bed. Chiefly to get out of the rain, he had come into the little store-front mission Mr. Hopkins ran, and Mr. Hopkins had brought him home. “When he wakes up, we’ll find him some food and some clothes,” Mrs. Hopkins said. “I don’t know where they’ll come from, but God will supply.”
And God did. On this and on dozens of similar occasions while I stayed with the Hopkinses, I saw God meet their practical needs in the most unusual ways. Never once did I see anyone go hungry or coatless from their house. It wasn’t that they had money. From the profits of Mr. Hopkins’ construction business they kept just enough to supply their own modest needs. Strangers—such as myself and the beggars and streetwalkers and drunks who passed continually through their doors—had to be fed by God. And He never failed. Perhaps it was a neighbor dropping by with a casserole, “Just in case you’re not feeling up to cooking tonight, ducky.” Perhaps it was an old debt unexpectedly paid, or one of the previous bed-tenants returning to see if he could help. “Yes, son, you can. We have an old man in the bed upstairs tonight who has no shoes. Do you think if we measured his feet you might find him a pair?”
I had intended to stay with the Hopkinses only a day or two, until I got my working papers and found a job. But though Mr. Hopkins and I went back to the labor ministry again and again, the work permit was never granted.
And meanwhile, I had been asked by the Hopkinses to stay on in their home, and it happened like this. The first morning after I arrived there Mr. Hopkins went off to work early, Mrs. Hopkins had to stay in bed, and I was left to myself. And so I found a mop and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Mopping the bathroom, I found the soiled clothes bin and did the washing. By afternoon the clothes were dry, so I ironed them. Then when Mr. Hopkins was still not back, I cooked dinner.
I was used to doing these things at home; anyone in my family, male or female, would have done the same. But the Hopkinses, when they discovered what I had done, were thunderstruck. Either they were not used to the practical Dutch, or they were not used to having their own needs noticed, but at any rate they acted as though I had done something remarkable and asked me then and there to stay on as one of the family.
And so I did. I became chief cook and bottlewasher, and they became my English mother and father. Like many, many others, I was soon calling them Uncle Hoppy and Mother Hoppy. Indeed, in many ways Mrs. Hopkins reminded me of my own mother, both in her uncomplaining acceptance of pain and ill health, and in the door “never on the latch” to the needy.
As for Uncle Hoppy, knowing him was an education all by itself. He was a man utterly without self-consciousness. Sometimes when I drove with him in his truck to various construction sites around the city, I would beg him—since he was president of the company—at least to put on a tie and buy himself a coat with elbows in it.
But Uncle Hoppy would laugh at my embarrassment. “Why, Andy, nobody knows me here!”
In his own neighborhood, though, it was no better. I would catch him at the door heading for church in work-boots and a two-days’ growth of beard. But when I would scold him, he would fix me with reproachful eyes. “Andy, m’boy! Everybody knows me here!”
Uncle Hoppy’s own store-front mission was something of a puzzle to me. Its doors were always open, and occasionally a stray derelict would wander in, but only for a snooze or a bit of warmth; when it came time for services, Uncle Hoppy usually found the chairs empty. This didn’t stop him. I remember one day hearing him preach an entire sermon to the empty chairs.
“You missed our appointment this time,” Uncle Hoppy said to the people who somehow had not found their way in. “But I’ll meet you out on the street, and when I do, I’ll know you. Now listen to what God has to say to you. . . .”
When the sermon ended, I objected. “You’re too mystic for me,” I said. “When I get to preach someday, I want to see real people out there.”
Uncle Hoppy only laughed. “Just you wait,” he said. “Before we get home we will meet the man who was supposed to be in that chair. And when we do, his heart will be prepared. Time and place are our own limitations, Andy; we mustn’t impose them upon God.”
And sure enough, as we were walking home we were approached by a streetwalker, and Uncle Hoppy plunged into the conclusion of his sermon just as though she’d sat spellbound through the first forty minutes. That night I slept in front of the fire again, and by morning this indefatigable contractor and his wife had a new convert to Christianity.
At last one day came a letter from Glasgow: The long-awaited vacancy had opened up. I was to report in time for the fall term.
We did a triumphal march around Mother Hoppy’s bed—Uncle Hoppy, a stray vagabond, and I—until suddenly all of us at once realized that it meant saying good-bye. I left London in September 1953 for the missionary training school in Scotland.
———
This time I had no trouble finding my way to the address I wanted. I walked up the hill carrying my suitcase until I came to Number 10 Prince Albert Road. The building itself was a tall two-story house on the corner. A low stone wall ran around the property. I could see the stump-ends of iron railings in it, melted for scrap during the war no doubt. Over the entrance on a wooden archway were the words “Have Faith In God.”
This I knew was the main purpose of the two-year course at Glasgow: to help the student learn all he could about the nature of faith. To learn from books. To learn from others. To learn from his own encounters. With fresh enthusiasm I walked under the arch and up the white pebbled path to the door.
My knock was answered by Kees. How good it was to look into that solid Dutch face again. After we had slapped one another’s shoulders many times, he seized my bag and ushered me to my top-floor room. He introduced me to my three roommates, showed me the fire escape, and pointed out where the rest of the 45 young people slept—men in one of the attached houses, women in the other.
“And ne’er the twain shall meet,” Kees said. “We’re hardly supposed to talk to the girls. The only time we can see them is at dinner.”
Kees sat with me through the formal introduction to the director, Steward Dinnen. “The real purpose of this training,” Mr. Dinnen told me, “is to teach our students that they can trust God to do what He has said He would do. We don’t go from here into the traditional missionary fields, but into new territory. Our graduates are on their own. They cannot be effective if they are afraid or if they doubt that God really means what He says in His Word. So here we teach not so much ideas as trusting. I hope that this is what you are looking for in a school, Andrew.”
“As for finances—you know of course, Andy, that we charge no tuition. That’s because we have no paid staff. The teachers, the London people, myself—none of us receives a salary. Room and board and other physical costs for the year come to only ninety pounds—a little over two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s as low as this because the students do the cooking, cleaning, everything, themselves. But we do request the ninety pounds in advance. Now I understand you will not be able to do this.”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s also possible to pay in installments, thirty pounds at the start of each session. But for your sake and for ours we like to insist that the installments be paid on time.”
“Yes, sir. I altogether agree.”
I did agree too. This was going to be my first experiment in trusting God for the material needs of life. I had the thirty pounds I had brought from Holland for the first semester’s fee. After that I really looked forward to seeing how God was going to supply the money.
During the first few weeks, however, something kept happening that bothered me. At mealtimes the students would frequently discuss inadequate funds. Sometimes after a whole night in prayer for a certain need, half of the request would be granted, or three-quarters. If an old people’s home, for example, where students conducted services, needed ten blankets, the students would perhaps receive enough to buy them six. The Bible said that we were workers in God’s vineyard. Was this the way the Lord of the vineyard paid His hired men?
One night I went out for a long, solitary walk. On several occasions students had warned me not to “go into Patrick.” Patrick was the slum sitting at the bottom of our hill. It was, they said, the home of addicts, drunks, thieves, even murderers, and walking its streets was unsafe. And yet this area drew me now as if it had something to say.
All around me were the dirty gray streets of Patrick. Litter blew across the cobblestones. The September air was already raw. Before I had gone five blocks I was accosted two times by beggars. I gave them all the money I had in my pockets and watched as they moved without pretense toward the nearest pub. I knew that these drifters, begging in the streets of the Glasgow slums, would receive a better income than the missionaries-in-training at the top of the hill.
I could not understand why this bothered me so. Was I greedy? I didn’t think so. We had always been poor, and I had never worried about it. What was it then?
And suddenly, walking back up the hill toward the school, I had my answer.
The question was not one of money at all. What I was worried about was a relationship.
At the chocolate factory I trusted Mr. Ringers to pay me in full and on time. Surely I said to myself, if an ordinary factory worker could be financially secure, so could one of God’s workers.
I turned through the gate at the school. Above me was the reminder “Have Faith In God.”
That was it! It wasn’t that I needed the security of a certain amount of money, it was that I needed the security of a relationship.
I walked up the crunchy pebblewalk feeling more and more certain that I was on the verge of something exciting. The school was asleep and quiet. I tiptoed upstairs and sat by the bedroom window looking out over Glasgow. If I were going to give my life as a servant of the King, I had to know that King. What was He like? In what way could I trust Him? In the same way I trusted a set of impersonal laws? Or could I trust Him as a living leader, as a very present commander in battle? The question was central. Because if He were a King in name only, I would rather go back to the chocolate factory. I would remain a Christian, but I would know that my religion was only a set of principles, excellent and to be followed, but hardly demanding devotion.
Suppose on the other hand that I were to discover God to be a Person, in the sense that He communicated and cared and loved and led. That was something quite different. That was the kind of King I would follow into any battle.
And somehow, sitting there in the moonlight that September night in Glasgow, I knew that my probing into God’s nature was going to begin with this issue of money. That night I knelt in front of the window and made a covenant with Him. “Lord,” I said, “I need to know if I can trust You in practical things. I thank You for letting me earn the fees for the first semester. I ask You now to supply the rest of them. If I have to be so much as a day late in paying, I shall know that I am supposed to go back to the chocolate factory.”
It was a childish prayer, petulant and demanding. But then I was still a child in the Christian life. The remarkable thing is that God honored my prayer. But not without first testing me in some rather amusing ways.
———
The first semester sped by. Mornings we spent in the classrooms studying systematic theology, homiletics, world religions, linguistics—the type of courses taught in any seminary. In the afternoon we worked at practical skills: bricklaying, plumbing, carpentry, first aid, tropical hygiene, motor repair. For several weeks all of us, girls as well as boys, worked at the Ford factory in London, learning how to take a car apart and put it together. In addition to these standard trades, we were taught to build huts out of palm fronds and how to make mud jars that would hold water.
And meanwhile we took turns in the kitchen and the laundry and the garden. No one was exempt. One of the students was a doctor, a German woman, and I used to watch her scouring garbage pails as though she were preparing a room for surgery.
The weeks passed so fast that soon it came time for me to head out on the first of several training trips in evangelism. “You’re going to like this, Andy,” said Mr. Dinnen. “It’s an exercise in trust. The rules are simple. Each student on your team is given a one-pound banknote. With that you go on a missionary tour through Scotland. You’re expected to pay your own transportation, your own lodging, your food, any advertising you want to do, the renting of halls, providing refreshments—”
“All on a one-pound note?”
“Worse than that. When you get back to school after four weeks, you’re expected to pay back the pound!”
I laughed. “Sounds like we’ll be passing the hat all the time.”
“Oh, you’re not allowed to take up collections! Never. You’re not to mention money at your meetings. All of your needs have got to be provided without any manipulation on your part—or the experiment is a failure.”
I was a member of a team of five boys. Later when I tried to reconstruct where our funds came from during those four weeks, it was hard to. It seemed that what we needed was always just there. Sometimes a letter would arrive from one of the boys’ parents with a little money. Sometimes we would get a check in the mail from a church we had visited days or weeks earlier. The notes that came with these gifts were always interesting. “I know you don’t need money or you would have mentioned it,” someone would write. “But God just wouldn’t let me get to sleep tonight until I had put this in an envelope for you.”
Contributions frequently came in the form of produce. In one little town in the highlands of Scotland we were given six hundred eggs. We had eggs for breakfast, eggs for lunch, eggs as hors d’oeuvres before a dinner of eggs with an egg-white meringue dessert. It was weeks before we could look a chicken in the eye.
But money or produce, we stuck fast to two rules: We never mentioned a need aloud, and we gave away a tithe of whatever came to us as soon as we got it—within 24 hours if possible.
Another team that set out from school at the same time we did, was not so strict about tithing. They set aside their ten percent all right, but they didn’t give it away immediately, “in case we run into an emergency.” Of course they had emergencies! So did we, every day. But they ended their month owing money to hotels, lecture halls, and markets all over Scotland, while we came back to school almost ten pounds ahead. Fast as we could give money away, God was always swifter, and we ended with money to send to the WEC work overseas.
There were times before the end of the tour, however, when it looked as though the experiment was failing. One weekend we were holding meetings in Edinburgh. We had attracted a large group of young people the first day and were casting about for a way to get them to come back the next. Suddenly, without consulting anyone, one of the team members stood up and made an announcement.
“Before the meeting tomorrow evening,” he said, “we’d like you all to have tea with us here. Four o’clock. How many think they can make it?”
A couple dozen hands went up, and we were committed. At first, instead of being delighted, the rest of us were horrified. All of us knew that we had no tea, no cake, no bread and butter, and exactly five cups. Nor did we have money to buy these things; our last penny had gone to rent the hall. This was going to be a real test of God’s care.
And for a while it looked as though He was going to provide everything through the young people themselves. After the meeting several of them came forward and said they would like to help. One offered milk; another, half a pound of tea; another, sugar. One girl even offered to bring dishes. Our tea was rapidly taking shape. But there was one thing still missing—the cake. Without cake, these Scottish boys and girls wouldn’t consider tea tea.
So that night in our evening prayer time, we put the matter before God. “Lord, we’ve got ourselves into a spot. From somewhere we’ve got to get a cake. Will You help us?”
That night as we rolled up in our blankets on the floor of the hall, we played guessing games: How was God going to give us that cake? Among the five of us, we guessed everything imaginable—or so we thought.
Morning arrived. We half expected a heavenly messenger to come to our door bearing a cake. But no one came. The morning mail arrived. We ripped open the two letters, hoping for money. There was none. A woman from a nearby church came by to see if she could help. “Cake” was on the tip of all our tongues, but we swallowed the word and shook our heads.
“Everything,” we assured her, “is in God’s hands.”
The tea had been announced for four o’clock in the afternoon. At three the tables were set, but still we had no cake. Three-thirty came. We put on water to boil. Three-forty-five.
And then the doorbell rang.
All of us together ran to the big front entrance, and there was the postman. In his hand was a large box.
“Hello, lads,” said the postman. “Got something for you that feels like a food package.” He handed the box to one of the boys. “The delivery day is over, actually,” he said, “but I hate to leave a perishable package overnight.”
We thanked him profusely, and the minute he closed the door the boy solemnly handed me the box. “It’s for you, Andrew. From a Mrs. William Hopkins in London.”
I took the package and carefully unwrapped it. Off came the twine. Off came the brown outside paper. Inside, there was no note—only a large white box. Deep in my soul I knew that I could afford the drama of lifting the lid slowly. As I did, there, in perfect condition, to be admired by five sets of wondering eyes, was an enormous, glistening, moist, chocolate cake.
———
With this kind of experience behind me, I was not really surprised to find waiting for me when we got back to school, a check from the Whetstras that was exactly enough, when converted into pounds, to pay my second term’s fee.
The second term seemed to go even faster than the first, so much was there to grasp and to ponder. But before that term was over, I had received money to keep me there a third, this time from—of all places—some buddies at the veterans’ hospital. And so it went throughout the second year too.
I never mentioned the school fees to anyone, and yet the gifts always came at such a moment that I could pay them in full and on time. Nor did they ever contain more than the school costs, and—in spite of the fact that the people who were helping me did not know one another—they never came two together.
God’s faithfulness I was experiencing continually, and I was also finding out something about His sense of humor.
I had made a covenant with God never to run out of money for school fees. My covenant said nothing about running out of soap. Or toothpaste. Or razor blades.
One morning I discovered I was out of laundry soap. But when I reached into the drawer where I kept my money, all I could find was sixpence. Laundry soap cost eightpence.
“You know that I have to keep clean, God. So will You work it out about the two pennies?” I took my sixpence and made my way to the street where the shops were, and sure enough, right away I saw a sign. “Twopence off! Buy your SURF now.” I walked in, made my savings, and strolled back up the hill whistling. There was plenty of soap in that box to last, with care, until the end of school.
But that very night a friend saw me washing out a shirt and shouted, “Say, Andrew, lend me some soap, will you? I’m out.”
Of course I let him have the soap and said nothing. I just watched him pour out my precious Surf, knowing somehow that he wasn’t going to pay it back. Every day he borrowed a bit more of that soap, and every day I had to use just a little bit less.
And then it was toothpaste. The tube was really finished. Squeezed, twisted, torn apart, and scraped—finished. I had read somewhere that common table salt makes a good dentifrice. And no doubt my teeth got clean, but my mouth wore a permanent pucker.
And razor blades. I had not thrown away my used blades, and sure enough the day came when I had to resurrect them. I had no hone, so I stropped them on my bare arm. Ten minutes a day on my own skin: I remained clean shaven—but it was at a price.
Throughout this time I sensed that God was playing a game with me. Perhaps He was using these experiences to teach me the difference between a Want and a Need. Toothpaste tasted good, new razor blades shaved quicker—but these were luxuries, not necessities. I was certain that should a real need arise, God would supply it.
And a true need did arise.
It was necessary for foreigners in Britain to renew their visas at periodic intervals. I had to have mine renewed by December 31, 1954, or leave the country. But when that month rolled around, I did not have a cent to my name. How was I going to get the forms down to London? A registered letter cost one shilling—twelve pennies. I did not believe that God was going to let me be thrown out of school for the lack of a shilling.
And so the game moved into a new phase. I had a name for it by now. I called it the Game of the Royal Way. I had discovered that when God supplied money He did it in a kingly manner, not in some groveling way.
Three separate times, over the matter of that registered letter, I was almost lured from the Royal Way. I was, that last year, head of the student body and in charge of the school’s tract fund. One day my eye lit first on the calendar—it was December 28—and then on the fund. It happened to contain several pounds just then. Surely it would be all right to borrow just one shilling.
And surely not, too. Quickly I put the idea behind me.
And then it was December 29. Two days left. I had almost forgotten how bitter salt tasted and how long it took to strop a razor blade on my arm, so intrigued was I over the drama of the shilling. That morning the thought occurred to me that perhaps I might find those pennies lying on the ground.
I had actually put on my coat and started down the street before I saw what I was doing. I was walking along with head bowed, eyes on the ground, searching the gutter for pennies. What kind of Royal Way was this! I straightened up and laughed out loud there on the busy street. I walked back to school with my head high but no closer to getting the money.
The last round in the game was the most subtle of all. It was December 30. I had to have my application in the mail that day if it was to get to London on the 31st.
At ten o’clock in the morning, one of the students shouted up the stairwell that I had a visitor. I ran down the stairs thinking that this must be my delivering angel. But when I saw who it was, my heart dropped. This visitor wasn’t coming to bring me money, he was coming to ask for it. For it was Richard, a friend I had made months ago in the Patrick slums, a young man who came to the school occasionally when he just had to have cash.
With dragging feet I went outside. Richard stood on the white-pebble walkway, hands in pockets, eyes lowered. “Andrew,” he said, “would you be having a little extra cash? I’m hungry.”
I laughed and told him why. I told him about the soap and the razor blades, and as I spoke I saw the coin.
It lay among the pebbles, the sun glinting off it in just such a way that I could see it but not Richard. I could tell from its color that it was a shilling. Instinctively I stuck out my foot and covered the coin with my toe. Then as Richard and I talked, I reached down and picked up the coin along with a handful of pebbles. I tossed the pebbles down one by one, aimlessly, until at last I had just the shilling in my hand. But even as I dropped the coin into my pocket, the battle began. That coin meant I could stay in school. I wouldn’t be doing Richard a favor by giving it to him—he’d spend it on drink and be thirsty as ever in an hour.
While I was still thinking up excellent arguments, I knew it was no good. How could I judge Richard when Christ told me so clearly that I must not. Furthermore, this was not the Royal Way! What right had an ambassador to hold on to money when another of the King’s children stood in front of him saying he was hungry. I shoved my hand back into my pocket and drew out the silver coin.
“Look, Richard,” I said, “I do have this. Would it help any?”
Richard’s eyes lit up. “It would, mate.” He tossed the coin into the air and ran off down the hill. With a light heart that told me I had done the right thing, I turned to go back inside.
And before I reached the door the postman turned down our walk.
In the mail of course was a letter for me. I knew when I saw Greetje’s handwriting that it would be from the prayer group at Ringers’ and that there would be cash inside. And there was. A lot of money: a pound and a half—thirty shillings. Far more than enough to send my letter, buy a large box of soap, treat myself to my favorite toothpaste—and buy Gillette Supers instead of Blues.
The game was over. The King had done it His way.
———
It was spring, 1955. My two years at the Missionary Training College were almost over, and I was eager to start work. Kees had graduated the year before and was in Korea. His letters were full of the needs and opportunities there, and the director asked me if I would consider joining him.
And then one morning—quietly, without fanfare, as God’s turning points so often come—I picked up a magazine, and my life has never been the same since.
The week before graduation I went down into the basement of Number 10 to get my suitcase. There on top of an old cardboard box in the musty cellar was a magazine that neither I nor anyone else at the school ever remembered seeing before. How it got there I shall never know.
I picked it up and flipped through it idly. It was a beautiful magazine, printed on glossy paper and bright with four-color pictures. Most of them showed masses of marching youths parading the streets of Peking and Warsaw and Prague. Their faces were animated, their steps vigorous. The text, in English, told me that these young people were part of a worldwide organization 96 million strong. Nowhere was the word Communist used, and only occasionally did the word Socialist appear. The talk was all of a better world, a bright tomorrow. And then, toward the back of the magazine, there appeared an announcement of a youth festival to be held in Warsaw that coming July. Everyone was invited.
Everyone?
Instead of putting the magazine down, I stuck it under my arm and carried it with my suitcase back to my room. That night with no idea where it would lead, I dropped a line to the Warsaw address mentioned in the magazine. I told them frankly that I was training to be a Christian missionary, and that I was interested in going to the youth festival to exchange ideas: I would talk about Christ, and they could talk about socialism. Would they be willing for me to come under these circumstances? I posted the letter, and back bounced an answer. Most certainly they wanted me to come. Since I was a student, reduced rates were available. A special train would be leaving from Amsterdam. My identification was enclosed. They looked forward to seeing me in Warsaw.
The only person in the world I told about this trip was Uncle Hoppy. He wrote back, “Andrew, I think you should go. I am enclosing fifty pounds sterling for your expenses.”
And in that moment—just as I left Scotland to head back home for Holland—a dream began to take shape. It had flashed formlessly in and out of my thoughts since the days at Ringers’, always vaporous and ill-defined—until now.
It began my last day at the factory. There was a single card-carrying Communist employed at Ringers’, a short, stout woman whose close-cropped gray hair stood up on her head like a brush. She had a standard pronouncement on everything from our wages (“slave”) to the Queen (an “oppressor”). My evangelistic efforts, when she detected them, pushed the button in her that released such statements as: “God-is-the-invention-of-the-exploiter-class.” Being an utterly humorless person herself, she never realized that people were laughing at her. In twenty years at the factory she had not made a single convert.
I found her a pathetic, rather than a laughable, figure and at lunchtime would often go to the table where she sat alone. The day I left Ringers’ I stopped by the bench where she worked to say good-bye.
“You’re getting rid of me at last!” I said, hoping at least to keep our parting friendly.
“But not of the lies you’ve told!” she flared back at me. “You’ve hypnotized these people with your talk of salvation and pie-in-the-sky! You’ve blinded them with . . .”
I sighed and settled myself for the opiate-of-the-people lecture. But to my surprise, the angry voice faltered.
“Of course, they believed you,” she went on less certainly. “They’re untrained. They haven’t been taught dialectical argument. They think just what they want to think.
“After all”—her voice was so low I could scarcely hear—“if you could choose, who wouldn’t choose, well God—and all that.”
I glanced at her swiftly and thought I saw the unthinkable: I thought I saw tears in her eyes.