Corry had news for me, too, my last day on the job. She also was leaving Ringers’—she had been accepted in a nurse’s training program. I looked into her eyes sparkling with her surprise and decided finally that they were hazel. We held hands just for a moment, then quickly said good-bye.
Ahead of me now was the task I dreaded above all others: breaking the news to Thile that I had enrolled in a school sponsored by no church, supported by no organization, lacking all of the recognized, dignified, time-honored accompaniments that for her were part of education—and indeed of religion itself. We spent a miserable afternoon walking along the waterfront in the lovely springtime of Gorkum. Thile said very little. I had arguments marshaled for all the objections she would raise. But instead of arguing she grew more and more silent. The only time she sounded angry was when I mentioned the healing of my leg. I made the mistake of calling it a little miracle.
“That’s a little strong, isn’t it, Andrew?” she flared up. “People have injuries get better every day, and most of them don’t go around making wild claims.”
I didn’t stay for dinner with Thile’s folks that night. They all needed time, I thought, to get used to the new plans. That was it; Thile just needed time. Eventually she would come to see why this was right.
Meanwhile, I set about raising money for my trip. I sold the few things I owned—my bicycle and my precious shelf of books—and purchased a one-way ticket to London, where I was to meet the directors of the WEC before heading for Glasgow. When I had paid for the ticket, I had left a little over thirty British pounds, the fee for the first semester.
I was to leave for London on April 20, 1953. But just before that date three things happened in such rapid succession that they left me reeling.
The first was a letter from Thile. She had written, she said, to the board of missions of her church asking their opinion of the school in Glasgow. They had replied that it was a nonaccredited, unaffiliated enterprise that had no standing in any mission circle with which they were involved.
This being the case, Thile went on, she would prefer neither to see nor to hear from me as long as I was associated with this group. She signed the short letter Thile. Not Love, Thile. Just Thile.
As I stood in the doorway holding the letter, trying to take in what it meant in my life, Miss Meekle crossed the little bridge to our house.
“Andrew,” she said, “there’s something on my mind. Something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. Only I didn’t quite know how to do it.” She took a deep breath and plunged in. “You see, Andrew, I’ve never actually heard any English. But I’ve read a lot of it,” she added hastily, “and a lady I write to in England says my grammar is perfect.” She paused miserably. “I just thought I’d tell you.” And she fled.
I was still digesting these two pieces of information when, two days later, a telegram arrived from London: “Regret to inform you expected vacancy has not materialized. Request for admission denied. You may re-apply 1954.”
Three blows in a row. There was no room for me in the school. I probably could not speak the language in which the courses were taught. And if I went I would lose my girl.
Every reasonable sign seemed to point away from the school in Glasgow. And yet, unmistakable inside me, sublimely indifferent to every human and logical objection, was a little voice that seemed to say “Go.” It was the voice that had called to me in the wind, the voice that had told me to speak out in the factory, the voice that never made sense at a logical level.
The next day I was kissing Maartje and Geltje good-bye, shaking hands with Papa and Cornelius, and running down the road for the bus that would take me on the first leg of a journey that is still going on.
6
The Game of the Royal Way
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. Stand
ing 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 propert
y. 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.”
“Yes, sir. Exactly.”
“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.”
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