Soon the whole congregation was joining in on the refrain. “Let my people go. . . .” Again and again the words swelled up under the big tent.
The meeting ended, the vets trooped out to the waiting bus. But still inside my head the words sang on. “Let them go . . . let me go. . . .”
It is foolish, of course, to suggest that a simple song—a song overheard, not even sung—could become a prayer, and that God would honor it.
And yet the very next day, during dreaded occupational class, a strange thing happened.
In spite of the fact that I had a king-sized hangover, I could do nothing wrong at my wheel. I sat down and slapped a hunk of gray clay on the wheel, then moved it toward the center while my foot worked slowly. A vase rose under my fingers.
Incredulous, I threw another glob of clay onto the wheel. Once again the shape rose effortlessly, matching the form I held in my mind.
Later that day something even more unsettling happened. During afternoon rest period I was flipping through the magazines provided for us, when all at once I reached for the Bible that I kept on my nightstand as a memento of my mother. I had not read it since I’d been back in Holland. But that afternoon I suddenly started reading, and to my astonishment I understood it. All the passages that had seemed so puzzling when I struggled through them before read now like a fast-paced action yarn. I read straight through the rest period and had to be called a second time for afternoon tea.
I was still devouring the Bible a week later when the hospital told me I could begin going home for long weekends. I read there, too, stretched out hour on end on my bed in the attic. Geltje would bring me soup, look at me to see if I was all right, then go back downstairs without saying a word.
What was happening to me?
And then the church-going began. I, who never went to church, started now to attend with such regularity that the whole village noticed it: not only Sunday morning, but Sunday evening and Wednesday mid-week service as well. In November 1949, I was formally mustered out of the army. With part of my separation pay I bought myself a sleek new bicycle and learned to pedal by thrusting with the good leg, coasting with the bad. I still could not take a step without pain, but with wheels beneath me it no longer mattered so much. Now I started attending church services in neighboring towns as well. On Mondays I went to a Salvation Army meeting in Alkmaar. On Tuesdays I pedaled all the way to Amsterdam to a Baptist service. I found a service somewhere every night in the week. At each one I took careful notes on what the preacher said, and then I spent the following morning looking up passages in the Bible to see if all the things he said were really there.
“Andrew!” Maartje came up the ladder, balancing a cup of tea. “Andrew, can I be frank with you?”
I sat up. “Of course, Maartje.”
“It’s just that we’re worried about the amount of time you’re spending up here all alone. Always reading the Bible. And going to church every night. It isn’t natural. What’s happened to you, Andy?”
I smiled. “I wish I knew!”
“We can’t help worrying, Andy. Papa’s worried too. He says—” She stopped as though wondering how much to say. “Papa says it’s shell shock.” And with that she backed swiftly down the ladder.
I thought about what she’d said. Was I in danger of becoming a religious fanatic? I had heard of people who lost their minds and went around quoting Scriptures at everyone. Was I going to get like that?
And still my strange compulsion swept me on, biking from church to church, studying, listening, absorbing. Pier wrote me once, asking me to meet him for a good old-fashioned drinkfest, but I didn’t answer the letter. I intended to, but I found it weeks later stuck in the back of a biography of Hudson Taylor.
And on the other hand I began spending a lot of time with Kees, and with my old schoolteacher, Miss Meekle, and with the Whetstras, and of course, more than ever with Thile. Every week I cycled down to Gorkum to talk over with Thile the things I was reading and hearing. It was too cold now to sit out on the wharf. So we tended the fish shop and, between customers, talked.
At first Thile was thrilled about the things that were happening to me, but as the weeks stretched into months and I continued my hot-paced rounds of churches, she began to be alarmed. “You don’t want to burn yourself out, Andy,” she’d say. “Don’t you think you ought to pace yourself a bit? Read some different kind of books. Go to the movies now and then.”
I couldn’t bother. Nothing in the world interested me except the incredible voyage of discovery on which I had set out. From time to time, also, Thile asked if I had found a job. This was a more serious problem. Obviously until I had a job I couldn’t even suggest to Thile the dream I had had so long for her and me. I set out job-hunting in earnest.
Before I found one, though, a fragile little event occurred that changed my life far more radically than the bullet that had torn through bone and muscle a year before. It was a stormy night in the dead of winter, 1950. I was in bed. The sleet blew across the polders as it can only blow in Holland in mid-January. I pulled the covers higher under my chin, knowing that outside the sleet was driving almost parallel to the ground. There were many voices in that wind. I heard Sister Patrice. “The monkey will never let go. . . .” I heard the singing under the big tent. “Let my people go. . . .”
What was it I was hanging on to? What was it that was hanging on to me? What was standing between me and freedom?
The rest of the house was asleep. I lay on my back with my hands under my head staring at the darkened ceiling and all at once, very quietly, I let go of my ego. With a new note in the wind yelling at me not to be a fool, I turned myself over to God—lock, stock, and adventure. There wasn’t much faith in my prayer. I just said, “Lord, if You will show me the way, I will follow You. Amen.”
It was as simple as that.
5
The Step of Yes
I went to sleep that night with the sounds of the winter storm yelling at me. Curiously enough, although I had just thrown away every shred of self-defense, I felt secure in a way I had never before known.
In the morning I woke up with such joy welling in me that I had to tell someone. I couldn’t tell my family; they were worried enough about me already. That left the Whetstras and Kees.
The Whetstras understood right away. “Praise the Lord!” Philip Whetstra shouted.
The phrase made me uncomfortable, but the tone of his voice warmed my heart. The Whetstras did not seem to think I had done anything strange or abnormal. They used words like “born again,” but in spite of the odd language, I got the idea that the step I had taken was along a well-traveled road.
Kees also, when I told him, recognized the experience at once. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by his inevitable books. He gave me a scholarly look. “There’s a name for what’s happened to you,” he said, tapping a particularly forbidding-looking volume. “It’s called a crisis conversion. I’ll be interested, Andrew, to see if a response-in-depth follows it.”
To my surprise, though, when I went to see Thile, she did not seem as pleased as the others. Wasn’t this the kind of thing people did at mass rallies? she asked.
Poor Thile, she was about to have another shock worse than the first. A few weeks later—in the early spring of 1950—I went to Amsterdam with Kees to hear a well-known Dutch evangelist, Arne Donker. Toward the end of his sermon, Pastor Donker interrupted himself.
“Friends,” he said, “I’ve had the feeling all night that something very special is going to happen at this meeting. Someone out there in the audience wants to give himself to the mission field.”
Theatrics, I thought. He’s got someone planted out here who’s going to jump up now and run forward and add a little emotion to the evening. But Mr. Donker continued to peer out over the audience.
The silence in the meeting hall under his stare grew oppressive. Kees felt it too. “I hate this sort of thing,” he whispered. “Let’s get out of here!”
&
nbsp; We edged our way to the end of our row. Heads turned eagerly. We both sat down.
“Well,” said Mr. Donker at last, “God knows who it is out there. He knows the person for whom is waiting a life of perpetual risk and danger. I think probably it’s a young person. A young man.”
Now all over the hall people were turning and looking around as if to spot whom the preacher meant. And then, in obedience to some summons I shall never understand, both Kees and I were on our feet.
“Ah, yes,” the preacher said. “There you are. Two young men! Splendid! Will you boys come forward?”
With a sigh, Kees and I walked down the long aisle to the front of the meeting hall, where we knelt, as if in a dream, to hear Mr. Donker say a prayer over us. As he prayed, all I could think of was what Thile would say. “Really, Andrew!” She would be shocked and hurt. “You are going down the sawdust trail, aren’t you?”
But worse was still to come. After he had finished his prayer, the preacher told Kees and me that he wanted to see us after the service. Reluctantly, and half suspecting him of being a hypnotist, we stayed behind. When the hall was empty, Mr. Donker asked us our names.
“Andrew and Kees,” he repeated. “Well, boys, are you ready for your first assignment?” Before we had a chance to protest, the preacher went on.
“Good! I want you to go back to your own hometowns—where do you come from, boys?”
“Witte.”
“Both from Witte? Excellent! I want you to go back to Witte and hold an open-air meeting in front of the burgomaster’s house. You’ll be following the biblical pattern—Jesus told the disciples to spread the good news ‘beginning at Jerusalem.’ They had to start their preaching in their own backyard. . . .”
The words exploded one by one in my mind like mortar shells. Did this man know what he was asking?
“Oh, I’ll be with you, boys!” Mr. Donker went on. “Nothing to be alarmed about. It’s all in getting used to it. I’ll speak first. . . .”
I was barely listening. Instead, I was remembering how much I disliked street preachers of any stripe. More words drifted into my conscious.
“. . . So we have a date, then. Saturday afternoon in Witte.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, intending to say no.
“And you, son?” Mr. Donker asked Kees.
“Yes, sir.”
Kees and I rode the bus home in stunned silence, each secretly blaming the other for having got us into such a spot.
Not a soul in Witte missed that meeting. Even the town dogs turned out for the show. We stood with the evangelist on a little platform made of boxes and looked out over a sea of familiar faces. Some were laughing outright, some only grinning. A few—like the Whetstras and Miss Meekle—nodded encouragement.
The next half hour was a nightmare. I don’t remember a thing that Kees and Mr. Donker said. I only remember the moment when Mr. Donker turned toward me and waited. I stepped forward, and a terrifying silence rose to meet me. Another step and I was at the edge of the platform and glad for the loose Dutch trousers that hid my knocking knees.
I couldn’t remember a thing I had planned to say. So all I could do was tell about the way I felt dirty and guilty coming home from Indonesia. And how I had carried around the burden of what I was and what I wanted out of life, until one night during a storm I laid it down. And I told them how free I had felt ever since—that is, until Mr. Donker here had trapped me into saying I wanted to become a missionary.
“But you know,” I said to my hometown, “I might surprise him at that. . . .”
———
I almost dreaded my next date with Thile. It’s hard to tell the girl you hope will marry you that you’ve suddenly decided to be a missionary. What kind of a life was that to offer her? Hard work, little pay, maybe disagreeable living conditions in some far-off place.
How could I even suggest such a life to her, unless she herself were heart and soul committed to the idea as well?
And so the following week I started my campaign to make a missionary out of Thile. I told her about the moment at the meeting when the conviction had hit me and how sure I had been since of God’s hand in this choice.
Strangely enough, the hardest thing for Thile to accept seemed to be not the rigors of mission life, but the fact that I had walked forward in front of all those people.
“One place I agree with Mr. Donker, though,” she said. “The place to start any ministry is at home. Why don’t you get a job right around Witte and consider that your mission field at first? You’ll discover quickly enough whether or not you’re meant to be a missionary.”
This made sense. The largest industry anywhere near Witte was the huge Ringers’ chocolate factory in Alkmaar. Geltje’s husband, Arie, worked there, and when I asked him, he said he would put in a good word for me with the hiring office.
The night before I biked to Alkmaar to apply for a job, I had a wonderful dream. The factory was full of despondent, unhappy people who noticed at once that I had something different. They crowded around me, demanding my secret. When I told them, truth dawned on their faces. Together we knelt. . . .
I was really sorry when I had to wake up.
———
I sat on the wooden bench outside the hiring office at Ringers’. The cloying smell of chocolate hung in the air, heavy and unappealing.
“Next!”
I walked through the door as briskly as I could; I had left my cane at home. Walking was still painful for me but—except when I was tired—I had learned to step on the injured ankle without limping. The personnel director was scowling at the application form in front of him.
“Medical discharge,” he read aloud. He looked at me suspiciously. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I said, feeling the blood rush to my face. “I can do anything anyone here can do.”
“Touchy, aren’t you?”
But he gave me a job. I was to count the boxes at the end of one of the packaging assemblies, then wheel them to the shipping room. A slack-faced boy led me through a maze of corridors and stairways and at last pushed open the door to an enormous assembly room where perhaps two hundred girls were ranged around a dozen conveyer belts. He left me at one of them.
“Girls, this is Andrew. Have fun!”
To my astonishment, a chorus of whistles greeted this introduction. Then, shouted suggestions. “Hey, Ruthie, how would you like him?” “Can’t tell by looking.” Then followed perversion and bathroom talk. Even my years in the army had not prepared me for the language I heard that morning.
The leader of the foul wisecracking, I discovered, was a girl named Greetje. Her favorite subject was sodomy; she speculated aloud on which animal would find a soul mate in me. I was grateful when my cart was full and I could escape for a few moments to what seemed like the sanctuary of male company in the shipping room.
Too soon, it was unloaded and I had to run the gamut of whistles in the big room again. This may be a mission field, Lord, I thought as I took the receipt for the boxes to the timekeeper’s window in the center of the room. But it’s not mine. I’ll never learn to talk to these girls. They’d take anything I said and twist it around until—
I stopped. For smiling at me through the glass partition of the timekeeper’s booth were the warmest eyes I had ever seen. They were brown. No, they were green. And she was very young. Blond, slender, she couldn’t have been out of her teens, and she was handling the most responsible job on the floor: the work orders and finished-work receipts. As I handed mine through the window, her smile broke into a laugh.
“Don’t mind them,” she said gently. “This is the treatment they give every newcomer. In a day or two it’ll be someone else.”
My heart flooded with gratitude.
She handed me a new shipping order from the pile in front of her, but still I stood there, staring at her. In a room where the rest of the women wore enough powder and rouge to make up a circus, here was a girl without a trace of make
up. Only her own fresh young coloring set off those eyes that were never the same shade twice.
The more I looked at her, the more I was sure I had seen her before. But the question would sound like a cliché. Reluctantly, I went back to the assembly line.
The hours seemed to drag. By the end of the long day on my feet, every step on my ankle was agony. Try as I would, I began to limp. Greetje spotted it at once.
“What’s the matter, Andy?” she shrieked. “You fall out of bed?”
“East Indies,” I said, hoping to shut her up.
Greetje’s yelp of triumph could be heard all over the room. “We got a war hero, girls! Is it true what they say about Sukarno, Andy? Does he like them very young?”
It was the worst mistake I could have made. For days—long after I would have lost the value of novelty for them—the girls questioned me about what they imagined to be the exotic life of the East.
More than once I would have quit the job in sheer boredom at their one-track conversation—except for the smiling eyes behind the glass partition. I took to going there even when I had no receipt to deliver. Sometimes along with a receipt I’d slip a note of my own: “You’re looking very nice today,” or “Half an hour ago you frowned. What was the matter!” I kept wondering how she felt about the talk she overheard, and what she was doing in a place like this anyhow. And always, I was haunted by the feeling that I knew her.
I worked at the factory a month before I got up courage to tell her, “I’m worried about you. You’re too young and too pretty to be working with this crowd.”
The girl threw back her head and laughed. “Why, Grampa!” she said. “What old-fashioned ideas you have! Actually”—she leaned close to the little window—“they’re not a bad crowd. Most of them just need friends, and they don’t know any other way to get them.”
God's Smuggler Page 5
