Gheorghe was the speaker for the last sermon of the day. It was a very personal one. He talked about the shortness of breath that had plagued him for years. “But do you know,” he said, “when we had that wonderful conversation with our Bibles, something happened not only to my spirit but to my body as well. I’ve been breathing better ever since.”
And then Gheorghe opened his Bible. “I have a final scripture that I should like to share with you, Andrew,” he told me through the interpreter. “Will you open your Book to Acts 20:36–38?”
I found the place.
“This,” said Gheorghe, “is the passage that says good-bye the way I should like to. ‘And when we had spoken thus, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And they all wept and embraced Paul and kissed him, sorrowing most of all because of the words he had spoken, that they should see his face no more. And they brought him to the ship.’”
I had to laugh at him applying words about Paul to me. “That’s going from the highest to the lowest,” I said.
But although we might be small in faith next to those first-century Christians, at least we could follow their example. And so after dinner I did kneel down and pray once more with them all. And then these Christians in the center of the communist world wept, and embraced me, and accompanied me to my little blue ship.
16
The Work Begins to Expand
When finally I crossed the Dutch border again, I had been away from home more than two months, considerably longer than I had expected because of the lengthy detour both going and coming. I pulled into Witte late at night, exhausted, yet exhilarated. I raced up the ladder shouting, “Corry! Corry, I’m home!”
Corry stumbled to the door, blinking, happy, overflowing with wonderful small talk that could hold to the subject for no longer than thirty seconds.
“Yes, everything is just fine. The leak in the roof is worse. The family is all well. Early June is what the doctor says now, but with first babies it’s sometimes difficult to tell. Are you sure you don’t want more coffee?”
Joppie arrived on June 4, 1959. He was born at home, as I had been, and I was with Corry the whole time, just as Papa had seen all of us into the world.
———
And with his arrival it was clearer than ever that Corry and I needed a home of our own. Geltje’s third child was on its way, and Cornelius and his wife were expecting their first. Even by Dutch standards the little house was bursting at the seams.
The problem was where to go. Though this was 1959, the effects of the war were still being felt everywhere in Holland. Housing in our small country had never been plentiful, and since 1945 every available brick had gone to rebuilding homes bombed or flooded during the war. Although Witte’s population was mushrooming, there hadn’t been a new building there since the 1930s.
When I went to see the burgomaster about house-rentals, he shook his head.
“I’ll have to add your name to the end of the list, Andrew,” he said, “and I may as well tell you now—that list hasn’t moved by a single name in almost three years.”
“Well, sir, we have to start somewhere. Put us down.”
“If you could find a house to buy, that would be different, of course. The waiting list applies only to rentals.”
“Thank you for the compliment, sir. Where on earth would I find enough money to buy a house!”
The burgomaster nodded. “Not only that,” he said. “As far as I know there are no houses for sale anyhow.”
As the summer dragged on and the clothes that people continued to send again swamped the little room over the shed, we began for the first time to make a serious prayer campaign of our need. Every night for a week we laid our situation before God, trustingly and expectantly.
And on the morning of the eighth day I had an idea. I was setting out for the post office, but I had barely crossed the canal in front of our house when I remembered something. The schoolteacher who was moving to Haarlem—wasn’t he renting old Wim’s house in town? That house was available then!
But what good did that do us; we were the last name on a long list of applicants. Still, I was impressed with the way the idea had come to me: sudden and sovereign in a manner I had come to recognize. Suppose, again, it were God’s idea? Suppose Wim were willing to sell the house? He hadn’t lived in it himself for many years. For the time being I wasn’t even going to think about the twenty thousand guilders it would cost. I’d just take a step forward and see what happened.
Forgetting all about my errand, I struck out across the polders to Wim’s farm. I found him milking.
“Hello, Wim!”
“Hello, Andrew!” Wim said, twisting his head around against the cow’s flank. “Hear you’re traveling a good bit. Lord’s work?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Well, I hear your place in town is going to be empty. Have you ever thought of selling it?”
Old Wim’s jaw literally dropped open. “However did you know!” he said. “I made up my mind to sell just last night—but I hadn’t told a soul about it yet!”
I drew a deep breath and took the plunge. “Then would you consider selling it to me?”
Wim looked at me for a long time, saying nothing. “House has been in the family a good many generations,” he said at last. “I’d like nothing better than for it to be used for the Lord’s work, now that there are no more of us.”
Only then, with heart racing, did I ask Wim the price. “Well,” he said, “could you manage ten thousand?”
This time I was the surprised one. That was half what I thought he might be asking. “All right, Wim. We have an understanding. I will buy your house,” said I, who still did not have a penny to my name, “for ten thousand guilders.”
Before going home I telephoned Philip Whetstra. Never before in my life had I borrowed money, but it seemed to me now that this was right. Mr. Whetstra told me that if I came to his office the following day I could have the money then and there.
So by the time I returned to our room above the shed, Corry and I were the virtual possessors of a house. We went to look at it right away. Until that moment I don’t think I ever realized what it meant to Corry, living in borrowed space in someone else’s home. She ran from room to room, touching, planning, seeing in the neglected house the home that was to be. “Joppie in here, Andy. And look, a whole room for the clothes, with the laundry tub right there! Did you see the room upstairs where your desk will just fit?” On she went, face flushed, eyes aglow, and I knew that at last she and I had come home.
The next day I went down to Amsterdam and picked up the money. Mr. Whetstra handed it to me in bills. We signed no papers, made no arrangements about paying it back. Nor did I mention the loan to anyone else. And yet over the next three years, enough money came in above and beyond the needs of the work that we were able to repay the loan in that short period of time. Immediately, mysteriously, as soon as the house was paid for, the flow of excess funds stopped—and it remained dried up until there was need for it again. In the years of living this life of faith, I have never known God’s care to fail.
———
We have a Dutch phrase to describe the conditions of old Wim’s house when Corry and I moved in. We call such a place “lived out.” The floors were sagging, the plaster peeling, the roof rotting away: all the ills native to the polder land. But Corry and I loved it all the more. As we mended and rebuilt, the house became uniquely ours.
The only room dry enough to sleep in at first was the parlor. So there we lived while we scraped walls and painted and replaced rotten boards—and of course started a garden. We did all the work ourselves, so it was a slow process. It was five years before the home that Corry had seen on that first visit was visible in its entirety to other eyes as well.
———
And meanwhile the work grew ever larger. That first year after Joppie’s birth I revisited every country I could get back into—several of them more
than once. And as the work grew, so did the problems. Correspondence was number one. Each time I got home, instead of reaching first for my hammer and paint brush, I would go up to my little study—Corry had been right, the desk did just fit—and spend miserable days pecking out answers, with two fingers on an ancient portable, to a mountain of mail. I never reached the bottom of the pile before it was time to set out again.
Anonymity was becoming a problem too. If I kept using my real name when I spoke, wouldn’t I jeopardize my freedom to come and go across borders? I finally reached a working solution that still is only partially satisfactory. I stopped using my full name and began instead to use the name by which I was known behind the Curtain, where last names have almost ceased to exist among Christians: “Brother Andrew.” For an address, I took out a post-office box number in my brother Ben’s home town that served for inquiries about the work.*
It was a compromise: I knew that anyone who wanted to could learn who I was.
But of all the difficulties posed by the expanding work, the one that seemed to offer least solution was the matter of the ever-increasing time away from home. Travel was one thing for a bachelor, quite another for a married man with a child. Out of Joppie’s first twelve months, I missed eight. The first tooth, the first word, the first step—I heard about them rather than saw them. Shortly after Joppie was born, Mr. Ringers reminded me of his standing offer of a job at the factory—at a salary that to us sounded kingly. Later that year I was offered the pastorate of a church in The Hague. I was truly tempted, both times.
But I was never tempted for long. Just as the pressures became strongest to stay home, a letter would arrive. It would bear no return address, it would often have been mailed weeks earlier, and sometimes show signs of having been opened. It would be from some believer in Bulgaria or Hungary or Poland or elsewhere telling me of new troubles they were facing, new needs that had developed. Whatever the message, these letters always seemed to arrive just at the time I needed them most, to make me pack my bags once again and seek a visa for travel to some land in the world of the Communists.
———
It was on one of these trips that year that the courageous little car engine breathed its last.
It happened in West Germany. I was on my way home from a trip to East Germany and Poland. With me in the car were two Dutch boys I had picked up in Berlin, students who had spent their Easter vacation working in the refugee camps. At five o’clock one afternoon we were spinning along, when suddenly there was a crackling sound in the rear of the car and the engine died.
We coasted to a stop and opened the little door in the rear, but nothing we could do would make it start again.
Then I straightened up and saw that beside the road, at the spot where the car’s own momentum had deposited us, was an emergency telephone box. I picked up the receiver and asked for a tow truck. Within twenty minutes we were all bending over the engine with the manager of the service garage.
He inspected the various parts in silence for some minutes, then walked forward and looked at the odometer.
“Ninety-seven thousand kilometers,” he read aloud. His puzzled frown had not left him. “It’s a good mileage, of course, and yet unless you’ve been over unusually rough terrain. . . .”
Now I saw what was bothering him. A little shamefacedly I admitted that the odometer had long since reached its maximum reading of 99,999 and flipped over the zero mark again; this was the second time it had registered 97,000.
“Then I should say,” said the manager, wiping the oil from his hands, “that you’ve got your money’s worth. That engine just hasn’t any more to give.”
“How long would it take to put in a new one?”
He stopped to consider. “My crew leaves in ten minutes. They could have a new engine in for you in an hour, but you’d have to pay them a good tip for staying overtime.”
“How much would the whole thing cost, including the tip?”
“Five hundred marks.”
Without hesitation I said, “Go ahead. I’ll go get some more money changed at the train station.”
It was on board the streetcar going to the station that I counted my money and realized that all I had with me would not make five hundred marks. There’d be no help from the two students back at the garage—they were riding with me in the first place because they were flat broke.
Should I go back and cancel the work order? No. I could see God’s hand too clearly in all of this. Stopping precisely at the emergency telephone, having the engine wear out here in Germany where it came from, rather than in some distant and hostile spot where replacement would have been impossible and questions awkward. I was far too familiar with the way Christ looks after the practical side of the ministry to miss these signs. This was all His timing, and the question of the money was also in His hands. I was not worried, just fascinated to see how He was going to work it all out.
When I had changed every last guilder, it came—with the German money in my pocket—to 470 marks. Fifty shy of the amount I needed to pay the bill and buy gasoline on the way home.
“Well,” I said to myself, “something will happen on the streetcar going back.”
But nothing did. I got to the garage to find the workmen just finishing up and my two passengers nowhere to be seen. They’d gone for a walk, one of the men said, packing away his tools. The others were cleaning up too. I could delay the moment of reckoning no longer.
And at that instant, the two young Dutchmen raced through the door, one of them waving something in his hand. “Andy!” he shouted. “Craziest thing ever happened to me! We were just walking along the street when this lady came up to us and asked if we were Dutchmen. When I said yes, she gave me this bill! She said God wanted us to have it!”
The bill was for fifty marks.
———
And yet in spite of this experience—and others like it occurring almost daily—I was still a novice in this whole business of God’s bountiful care. I still depended on the isolated miracle, the emergency dispensation to get me out of one spot or another, instead of leaning back in the arms of a Father Who had more than enough and to spare.
Back home there were several new expenses, the biggest of which was the arrival of a second baby. Just a year after Joppie was born, Mark Peter came to join our household. We started buying a little less meat in the market, depending a little more on the vegetables from our garden.
This was no hardship, for we loved vegetables. What we did not realize, though, was that it was part of a whole mental set, an “attitude of lack,” into which we had slipped.
The error came to my attention through the words of a lady I have never met.
One day we received, through our box number in Ermelo, a rather large gift, the equivalent of about forty dollars. Attached to the check was a note from the donor saying, “Dear Brother Andrew: This is to be used for your own personal needs. It is not to go into the work! Use it in Christ’s love.”
I was touched by this thought. We had received personal gifts from time to time from friends, but this was the first time a total stranger had ever made such a stipulation. Instead of putting her note at the bottom of the pile of unanswered mail—three months high it must have been at that point—I sat down and pecked out a thank-you that very day. I told her we especially appreciated the note, because this was something we were very scrupulous about: All donations went into the work unless they were specifically marked otherwise. Even our clothing, I told her, came out of the refugee bins to save money.
Well, I have wished often that I had saved the letter that this good lady shot back. She began by reminding me of the scriptural injunction that the ox grinding the corn must not be kept from enjoying the grain. Did I think God felt less about His human workers? Hadn’t I better examine myself to be sure I was not nursing a Sacrificial Spirit? Wasn’t I claiming to depend upon God, but living as if my needs would be met by my own scrimping? I remember her close. “God will send y
ou what your family needs and what your work needs too. You are a mature Christian, Brother Andrew. Act like one.”
I gave that letter a long and prayerful reading. Could she be right? Was I really living in an atmosphere of want that was most un-Christian?
About this time, Corry and I were invited out to dinner. The time came to leave, and Corry had not appeared. I went up to our room and found her still in her bathrobe.
“I have nothing to wear,” she said in a very small voice.
I started to laugh; wasn’t this what women always said?
And then I saw the tears in her eyes. Silently I began to look over her wardrobe myself. Warm dresses. Serviceable ones—at least with Corry’s meticulous mending they’d been made serviceable. But somehow the clothes she had salvaged from the refugee room had not managed to include anything pretty. Nothing feminine and happy . . .
And suddenly I saw that this was part of a whole pattern of poverty into which we had fallen, a dark, brooding, pinched attitude that hardly went with the Christ of the open heart that we were preaching to others.
So we determined to change. We still live frugally, and always shall, partly because both of us were raised that way and wouldn’t know how else to act. But at the same time we are learning to take joy in the physical things that God provides. Corry bought some dresses. We went ahead with the tearing down of a wall so that she could walk directly from the house to her kitchen.
And when our third baby, Paul Denis, arrived—again just one year after the second—we actually went out and bought him some clothes. And I can’t say that he turned out any the worse for having passed his first days in clothes that still had the store labels in them.
Funny how long it took us to learn the simple fact that God really is a Father, as displeased with a cramped, niggardly attitude of lack as with its opposite failing of acquisitiveness.
———
Fundamentally, this was a lesson in abundance. And having learned the lesson in our personal lives, I was able in time to apply it to the work.
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