Home Thoughts From Abroad

When I graduated with an R.N. from the Atkinson School of Nursing at Toronto Western Hospital in 1973, it was about as far as a young woman without any money could go in their education. I was grateful for the opportunity to get out of Lucan, even if my education wasn’t everything I desired. Over the years as I was promoted to managerial positions I took numerous courses – over forty in fact – to keep up with the demands of my increased responsibilities.  Unfortunately, as the courses I took were purpose-driven to meet the challenges of my job, they never translated into a degree, closing the door to further education.

Nonetheless, my career in Nursing Administration and the networking and communication skills I developed turned out to be ideally suited for ministry in Southeast Asia as I was called upon to develop an evangelical outreach through health care in Cambodia. The last five years have been an amazing adventure with God and I have used everything that I have learned over the course of my career to meet the challenges of ministry. However, with every accomplishment, with every open door, there has been a new challenge and a new responsibility. Often I have found myself scrambling to learn the things I need just in order to do my job, which just keeps growing.

My responsibilities have now grown to the place that I recognize the need to document and systematize the process that I have initiated in order that this project may receive the recognition in university and college settings that would allow it to be of practical use in other mission fields.  When Steve and I returned to Asia in July we began investigating the possibility of furthering our education. We were delighted to find a Masters program at Fuller Theological Seminary that would give us an opportunity to put to good use the lessons and hard won successes that God has lead us through in the last five years. This program would also help me to develop the educational foundation I need to take my work in this region to the next level.

The Master of Arts in Intercultural Studies (MAICS) is designed to prepare students for various types of cross-cultural ministry and provides a foundational set of integrated courses from the schools of theology, intercultural studies, and psychology as well as a second set of missiological courses such as anthropology, globalization, mission history, spirituality, and a theology of mission.  Elective classes are available in the areas of mission history, international development, children at risk, and urban ministry.

A month ago, so quickly that we barely had time to take it in, Steve was accepted into the program and just yesterday completed his registration for two courses that he will begin online in January. My enthusiasm for my husband’s acceptance was tempered by the knowledge that despite all my efforts to obtain transcripts and provide documentational support, it looked as if I wasn’t going to be accepted. Greatly disheartened I began looking at other options, but there really wasn’t anything else out there that would meet my needs in ministry. Steve continued to encourage me to believe that God would grant me the desire of my heart, but I must confess that my own hopes were dimming.

What a shock it was then this morning to wake up to an email message from Fuller congratulating me on my acceptance into the program! I am staggered by the grace of God speaking His words of hope and encouragement into my heart. We are so excited to be at this stage in our lives and still have the opportunity to be learning and studying courses that will apply directly to our work here.  We have ten years to complete the course work and even if it takes that long it will be well worth the journey. Surely God is faithful to those who seek to faithfully serve Him. I am now a candidate for a Master’s Degree!  How amazing is that!

I had SAT scores in the high nineties coming out of high school. With some proper support and encouragement I could well have had scholarships to the university of my choice. But life is what happens while you are looking for other things; and other things in the late sixties were not conducive to education. When the dust settled from my misspent youth I did finally get my B.A. and B.Ed., but always had a hankering to do more.

But marriage and kids came along, and the years we took on sabbatical were spent serving Another more important than myself. To cut a forty year long story short, here I am at what could be charitably described as the autumn of my years with no more education than what at the time was the bare essentials to secure a decent career.

Now that our kids’ education has been paid for, and two of the three are married and living in their own homes, and we have not only some disposable income for the first time in our marriage, but even some disposable time, would it be alright Lord if I got myself that long sought for higher education? Apparently so; for I merely had to apply for the doors to fly open in my favour. To cut a much briefer story short, I am as of today a candidate for my Master’s Degree; courses enrolled and paid for.

I am not sure whether I am an old fool or not. At my age I could be dead before I graduate. On the other hand I could, like my dear departed mother, live for another 30 years. That would be time for far more than a Master’s! At any rate, fool or no, I am registered for two online courses starting in early January, and I am looking forward to the challenge.

I am also looking forward to seeing New Zealand. We leave on Sunday, and hotel internets being what they are, blogs might be thin on the ground for the next couple of weeks. No matter, you have Christmas puddings to eat and Christmas nieces, nephews and kids to hug. We’ll post some pics if we can. If not, we wish all of our readers the Merriest Christmas ever and the Happiest New Year. May the God of Love and Comfort be your portion!

My mother had a flair for the dramatic, and carried herself in style. Even well into her old age, she was concerned enough about her appearance that she liked to know well in advance when people were going to visit so she could get herself ready. She had a real keen clothing sense and a good eye for what she could wear. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that Mom was all about show; what was easily seen and noticed by others.

But there you would be wrong. There was much about my mother that she kept to herself. For all her dramatic flair she was a very private person. The pictures on this page are evidence of that. Of course we knew for years that Mom liked to do needlework; many of her generation did. And of course that needle work had to be based on a picture of something. Needlework often comes with a printed pattern to follow. But what we didn’t know was that Mom actually drew her own sketches, and not all of them appeared in needle work.

These are just some of the artistic sketches that were found among her possessions when my sister collected them from Mom’s little flat in North Hykeham. None of us knew of their existence until this sketchbook came to light. It shows that no matter how well you think you know someone, there is always more to know. The naiveté and innocence reflected in choice of colour and theme in these sketches strikes me as remarkable for one so weathered in years and worn by physical limitations. Her body may have been old, but her spirit, as evidenced by these pictures, was as young and light as a child’s. What a remarkable find!

This week while Steve is in England with his brother and sister to celebrate the life of his mom, I am very grateful for the week at home to get caught up on the many tasks that just seem to pile up. Each year I bring back a decade of photographs to scan and organize and I always enjoy revisiting the memories and the impact these events have had on our lives.  One of the things that I was reminded of was just what a good team Steve and I make we take on a task together.  We began our relationship rebuilding an old MGB in my parents’ driveway and went on to many other more challenging projects.

In 2001 we bought our third fixer- upper, a nasty little house in London which we planned to renovate and resell , largely to pay for our kids post secondary education.  I really hated that house because it was so much work, everything had to be striped right back to the bare bones and rebuilt from scratch.  We were both working pretty demanding jobs and had plenty of other responsibilities.  However, it suited our needs as it was close to the university and had a separate apartment in the basement which Dave lived in most of the time we were there.  When we listed it for sale in 2006, it sold within hours above our asking price.

I came across the before and after photos of the kitchen today and was delighted to be reminded of what excellent work we can do when we work together.  We make a great team.

I grew up just about a mile down the road from Aunt Lil and Uncle Stewart and my cousin Sandra is only a few weeks younger than myself so I have many happy memories of my times with all of them. Many of those memories were formed on the beach at Ipperwash where they rented a cottage each summer and several times took me along.

Last summer, I had the joy of seeing Uncle Stewart and Aunt Lil surrounded by their four grown children and their spouses, sixteen grandchildren and fifteen great grandchildren as they celebrated their 60^th wedding Anniversary.  It was a happy day for everyone, but I am sure no one enjoyed it more than Aunt Lil, whose greatest joy was always being with her family.

My dear Aunt Lil, my Mom’s youngest sister and the last of the seven children of my grandparents, Robert and Lil Barr, has now gone to be with her heavenly family.  Friday, Nov 16 truly was the end of each of our parents’ generation as my husband’s mother passed away earlier the same day. Our thoughts and prayers are with Uncle Stewart, Sandra, Ian, Donna and Judy and their families as they say their good-byes to a wife, Mom, Grandma and Great Grandma who was first and foremost committed to her children and grandchildren.

Lil was their rock and never one to back down from a challenge. She faced the struggles of life, including the last few years battling with illness, with courage and persistence. She taught us all that when bad things happen, you find your strength in faith and family, you dust yourself off and remind yourself of all the good things you still have, and you get on with your life. Her own life was a blessing and an encouragement to everyone she knew. Love you always.

My Mom passed away last night. She was 93 and had enjoyed relatively good health until a couple of years ago when her hearing and sight began to decline. She was the last of our four parents to die, and with her death that generation and its memories is now lost to our families.

Mom was born in 1919 in London, England to middle class parents. Her Dad, Hugh Blakeman, was a building contractor and she and her sister Constance lived in Wembley and Dollis Hill, relatively affluent neighbourhoods in London, England. Mom was on holiday in Italy with her mother and sister when she bumped into Dennis, an acquaintance from London and began a romance that led to her engagement. Dennis had enlisted in the air force as a pilot in what everyone knew would shortly be conflict in Europe.

Mom enlisted as well and was soon serving in the south of England in the secret radar installations that dotted the southern coast. Soon German shells were dropping all along that shore in an effort to disable this vital defense line, and Mom spent long days and nights in bunkers manning the small green screens that identified incoming aerial attacks. The WACS, as these brave young women soldiers were called, were trained to distinguish between the larger German bombers and the smaller British fighters by the shape and size of the blips on the screen. For every smaller blip that disappeared, another British plane went down. One of those blips that disappeared one night over the English Channel was her fiancée, Dennis.

There was no time in those days of wholesale destruction to mourn the death of one airman and the marriage dreams of one female soldier. Friends and family members were dying daily all around you and life seemed to be not much more than a matter of mere chance; where you happened to be standing or sleeping as the bombs rained down in an unending cascade. Along with the inevitability of death came an almost desperate attempt to affirm life and cling to whatever chance it seemed to offer you of future happiness.

In such a context Mom and Dad met. She was singing in the mess tent that served as an entertaining venue in the rare evenings when they weren’t being bombed. He was a young army officer, just one of thousands that were being assembled in the south of England getting ready to be shipped to Africa to stop the Axis advance there. He strode in to the back of the mess hall one night, listened for a minute as Mom was singing on the stage, turned to his mates and said, “That’s the woman I am going to marry.” Two months later they were wed. The following day he shipped out to Africa. When that campaign was over he was reassigned to Ceylon, and then to what is now Bangladesh to stop the Japanese advance through Burma. He and Mom didn’t meet again until the war was over, almost five years later.

Post-war England was a difficult place to live. The war had been extraordinarily destructive to Britain. Food was still rationed and fresh fruit almost impossible to come by. In such circumstance my Mom and Dad began a family. Rosemary was born just after the war in September 1946, Wyn came along 15 months later, and I was born 17 months after that. A fourth child, Henrietta died after just four days and is buried in Colchester, where Mom and Dad had settled.

Although we lived in a nice house on Turner Road, and Dad had a good job, the chances for promotion were limited and the opportunities for adventure even more so. Emigration to Australia and Canada was actively promoted by England as a way of dealing with the unemployment problems facing Britain. Passage to Canada was the princely sum of $1500 for a family of five. Passage to Australia was free. Mom reasoned that anything being given away wasn’t worth having and decided on Canada instead. We emigrated in 1955, landing in Toronto and living in the attic of family friends until we could find a flat of our own on Dufferin Street.

Mom and Dad loved Canada and did very well there. The opportunities for an entrepreneurial salesman were vast and immigrants like themselves were common in those days. They became good friends with Irene and Dino Voyatzis, neighbours in the Don Mills community where we moved next. Both then moved to the new community of Parkway West, just west of Scarborough in Toronto and both joined an amateur drama group that gave Mom an outlet for her dramatic and artistic talents. She sold real estate for a while and was very successful at it and worked for Kofflers, a local drug store that went on to become Shoppers Drug Mart. She enjoyed the life that Dad’s increasing salary afforded them.

In 1968 Dad’s company closed its Canadian operation and in order to preserve his pension they moved back to England, settling in Lincoln where Dad retired. It was there that he passed away in 1995, succumbing to the cancer that had started in his lungs and progressed to the bone. Mom soldiered on for 17 years without him, but a partnership forged in such circumstances as theirs cannot easily be replaced. Mom gradually withdrew from the world and as her eyesight dimmed and her hearing went became more and more isolated. I had the joy of visiting with her three years ago and had a lovely time taking her out to the pubs and walks where she used to go with Dad. But there was always a longing in her spirit for the man that she had shared such an adventurous life with; a hole in her heart that could not be filled with anyone or anything else.

A year ago Pam and I were able to visit with her again, but she could no longer endure car rides to anywhere and consoled herself with small walks just beyond the nursing home that had been her only home for the last eight years. She was grateful for our visit, but I knew in my heart that it would be the last I would ever see of her. Lately the phone visits have become more and more infrequent as she no longer had the physical strength to get to the phone or hear what was said when I called. When my sister wrote that she had been taken to hospital five weeks ago I began preparing for what I knew would be the end. But even at 93 and after such a full life, these things still have the power to take you by surprise with their sudden intrusion into the ordinary events of your own life.

My mother was a feisty and often abrasive woman. She was as stubborn and strong-willed as anyone you are ever likely to meet. But she was also beautiful and graceful, artistic and loving. It is to my Mom that I owe my love of literature, drama and music. My Dad loved her for her wild and willful determination to be her own person whatever the consequences, and I guess I did too. I will miss her; the last in our family of the ‘heroic generation’ that fought a war to save a civilization from the dominance of tyranny. Her own personal war has at last come to an end. Rest in peace, Mom.

This past election in America may well prove to be a watershed in the Christian Church. Ever since the heady days of Ronald Reagan – darling of the Christian Right – evangelicals have in increasing percentage backed the Republican Party. In this last election evangelical Christians actually voted for Mitt Romney in a larger percentage than did Mormons themselves according to a recent article in Christianity Today, a statistic that is testimony to the desperation of the Christian Right, rather than any revelation concerning the purity of Mormon doctrine or its alignment with accepted Christian theology.

I read an insightful piece in the Washington Post this week about a typical campaign worker for Romney; a devoutly Christian woman who is more than simply disappointed by this past week’s events. She is shattered; her worldview coming apart at the seams as she sees what looks to be the end of Christian America. The writer was not critical of her view; indeed he seemed profoundly moved by her plight and wrote from a sympathetic perspective. I too grieve for her situation, but from an entirely different perspective. My view is informed by decades of working with Americans in a number of Christian endeavours over the years and is coloured by lifelong friendships with Americans based on a common faith in our Saviour. They are lovely, hard-working and dedicated people; but they seriously misunderstand their role in Christian history.

Americans are justifiably proud of their secular history; it is storied and heroic. Although its founders were not Christians in the strictest sense – their theology was more Masonic and Deist than anything else – there were enough Christians among them to ensure a rich heritage from which a modern evangelical tradition has arisen. This has led to the view among many in that nation that God has chosen America to be His special people in a way not experienced before in human history. Mormons would go even further and claim that the lost tribes of Israel actually wandered over to North America, making America the inheritor of the eschatological promises to the Jews.

Not only does this fly in the face of sound exegesis of the Bible, it also contradicts much of human history. Alexander the Great can lay better claim to being the chief architect of the spread of the gospel, since if he hadn’t conquered the known world there wouldn’t have been a unified language to translate and propagate the gospels. The Romans have equal claim as their conquest of the Mediterranean and their engineering superiority provided the roads for the gospel to travel freely. It was the monastic order, not the Americans, that preserved the gospels through the darkest ages of barbarian destruction, and it was the Germans that gave the world the Reformation that propelled the gospel to prominence again. Finally it was the British, not the Americans that carried that gospel to the far corners of an empire on which the sun never set. Certainly post-WWII America has been the flag-bearer for Christ, but that was a relatively short-lived period of Christian history as already missionaries from Asia outnumber Westerners and have for more than twenty years. More to the point, however you see America’s involvement in the spread of the gospel, it is still not in charge. The Holy Spirit overseas the development of His church, and He does not cede His work to any nation. Christ was not Caucasion; His church has no nationality.

This is not to discount the contribution of America to the cause of Christ, but only to put it in perspective. Those that see the destruction of the church as coincident with the decline of the Republican Party or even the decline of America itself forget that it was the Christian Left that elected Jimmy Carter to the presidency (still the godliest man to ever hold that office regardless of how you view his political savvy). In Carter’s day evangelicals were evenly divided along political lines. Now they vote four to one for the Republicans, a party that is seen as being increasing unconcerned about the plight of ordinary Americans and increasingly committed to a program of toxic “rugged individualism” at the expense of communities and social cohesion. Let the 47% rot in their hovels; I want to get rich! It is a profoundly disturbing trend.

Bryant L. Myers in Walking With the Poor writes, “As Christians we can no longer simply view the world as a collection of individuals. Instead we need to view each individual as embedded in families and communities as well as being participants in the whole gamut of institutions – economic, political, cultural and religious. This [holistic] view of self will not validate metaphors like the lonesome, self-contained ‘I don’t need help from nobody’ cowboy; the entertainer who ‘does it my way’; or the entrepreneur who gambles with corporations without regard for the people that work in them and contribute to their true value. It will not create the full human self of the Bible” (Myers 44).

Evangelicals in America are in for a dry spell politically. They have cast in their lot with a party that is dominated by ‘old, angry, entitled white men.’ I dare say that they are finding that not only are the demographics against them; the God of the Bible is as well. A humbler view of their own position in the development of God’s kingdom on earth aligned with a more compassionate understanding of the hurting communities around them will bring the church huge rewards in terms of godly witness to the nation they love and long to see fulfill its promise. They may at present feel like they are in the wilderness. But it was out of the wilderness that God spoke, and it was in the wilderness that Christ began His earthly ministry. In other words, we need to pray for a genuine spiritual revival. God bless America.

We live at the end of a dead end street and there are times when the half kilometre stretch of the road before you enter our housing subdivision can get very busy. There is a large hospital, two major hotels and a strip mall in that short strip.

However when we headed out Sunday evening we faced near gridlock and it took almost twenty minutes to make our way through. This week is a major Hindu holiday so we assumed that there was a huge celebration at one of the hotels. We only learned the real explanation from this newspaper article this morning.

‘Virgin Mary’ Continues to Draw Devotees, Rubberneckers

Hundreds of devout Catholics and a smaller number of curious onlookers are continuing to gather at the Sime Darby Medical Centre here to see for themselves an image said to resemble the Virgin Mary. The mysterious image of the figure revered by Catholics was reported to have been spotted a few days ago on a window pane at the hospital. In Catholicism the Virgin Mary is identified as the mother of Jesus Christ.

Most of the crowd who spoke to The Malaysian Insider appeared convinced that the image is an apparition of the Virgin Mary with some looking visibly moved. A second image has also been sighted just one pane below that bearing the likeness of Virgin Mary with some saying that the new silhouette looks like Jesus Christ on a cross. Others however were less certain.