Author Archives: Jack

Lessons I Learned About People’s Inborn Helpfulness

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Lessons I Learned About People’s Inborn Helpfulness

When my pastor asked me to sing How Great Thou Art as a solo on the Sunday TV program. I had never sung on TV, but I agreed since I had sung that hymn in church as a bass solo.
Arriving at the station, I stood in front of a camera and microphone, looking around at the welter of television studio equipment all around me. Then, bright lights came on, and the director cued the pianist, who played the introductory chords. I sang, looking straight ahead into the camera, and finished the first verse and chorus, then glanced to one side and suddenly saw the side of my head on a television monitor.
The shock of unexpectedly seeing myself, but not as in a mirror, drove the words of the next verse right out of my mind. The pianist played a line of the first, then repeated the last part of the chorus. When she started the verse again, the lines popped back into my mind, and I successfully finished singing all the verses. That experience taught me to always have the words of the song on a piece of paper in my hand.
At my summer job, the foreman said, “Hey Jack, I saw you on TV yesterday. I enjoyed the whole program.” When I apologized for messing up the solo, he looked blankly and said, “I never noticed anything wrong. You did great!” I learned two lessons: always have the words of the song on paper in my hand, and people sometimes don’t even notice mistakes, so don’t bring them up.

I learned another lesson during the years I spoke at many fund-raising banquets for Wycliffe. One time, an elderly man fell asleep and slid down off his chair. Someone grabbed him before he hit the floor, but everyone’s attention was on that drama. When things quieted down and all eyes were back on me, I had no idea where I was in my story. I asked, “Where was I?” Someone in the audience shouted, “I heard a knock on the door,” and I continued my speech.

Where was I?

In another city, I was speaking to a crowded gymnasium when suddenly everyone looked to my left. I turned to see a woman at a back door, pantomiming a heart attack, then running to a woman in the audience. I heard, “Come, bring your purse. Your husband needs the nitroglycerin pills; he’s having angina pains.” After both women had left, I asked, “What story was I telling?” and someone shouted, “The boy who got bitten by a snake!”

These incidents taught me that the audience is always ready to help me get back on track. It increases their interest, making them feel like active participants rather than just passive listeners.
People are helpful, and not just audiences. We all need help at times. For the past months, I have been learning to shop for groceries. I often ask people around me where I might find things. If they know, they are always quick to help. Asking for help develops a humble spirit. I notice this especially when I need to ask our grandkids for help. They are far smarter about smartphones and computer programs than I am.
Asking them for help makes them feel honoured. As believers, we know that God, also, is honoured when we ask Him for help.

As usual, I am taking a summer break from writing the InSights and OutBurst blog. I’ll be back in early September, and hope to meet your all here again then.

Gifts the Spirit Gave me Designed my Life.

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Young Jack Starting Diary

Jesus Gave Me His Spirit
I was converted during an evangelistic crusade in the summer before I started grade nine. The Holy Spirit made His home in my body and gave me gifts and abilities with which I could serve God. I soon discovered that I loved words, I loved reading, telling stories, and even writing stories. In the first year of Bible College, when I read Psalm 90:12: “Teach me to number my days that I may apply my heart unto wisdom.” I started keeping a rudimentary diary in a cheap scribbler.  I was motivated to become a regular diarist of my actions and relationships.

When my siblings gave me a birthday present of a small, hardcover, lockable five-year diary book, I started using it immediately, copying the entries from the cheap scribbler I had been using. My new diary had room for only a few lines per day, but I used it, right through Bible School and the first years of marriage. Then I used a similar diary, a one-year version, with a whole page dedicated to each day.

 More Encouragement to Write
The Spirit kept encouraging me to keep writing about my daily life. He even used truths spoken by pagan philosophers to help me. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates) “He who does not remember the past is condemned to repeat it.” (Santayana)

When Jo and I had our first child, Valorie, God’s command struck home to me. “Do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.” Deut. 4:9-10.

So, from 1959 to 2025, the Spirit’s gift of using words has resulted in sixty-six years of keeping up my daily diary. I wrote more regularly and recorded more incidents, pondering and reflecting on my thoughts, words, actions and habits. I wrote about the mistakes I made and what I learned from them. I noticed that during those years, my patterns of behaviour became clearer. As I thought and prayed about these patterns—these unconscious repetitions—God’s Spirit helped me to judge and decide whether I needed to continue them or make changes.

 Many Other Ways of Using God’s Gift
God led me to use His gift of words in many roles. Pastoring a church for three years. Then He led Jo and me into a sixty-year word-based ministry with Wycliffe Bible Translators. For twenty-three years, He guided us to work with a Brazilian indigenous people group to translate a partial Bible into their hitherto unwritten language.

Many other speaking and writing roles followed, including leadership, public speaking at conferences, and writing weekly emailed reports on what God was doing in the world of Bible translation. That period was followed by following God’s leading to travel and speak at fundraising events, churches, schools and conferences, often one hundred events per year.

The next ministry God encouraged me to enter was writing and publishing nine books: five collections of previously written blog posts.  Then followed four books of story-packed memoirs: the first covered the first twelve years of my life. The next three are backed by my diaries. The second described my teenage years. The third is packed with stories of Bible College, marriage and early ministry. The fourth describes the twenty-three years we worked with Brazil’s Canela people to translate God’s Word.

I’m grateful that God has given me a spiritual gift and shown me how to utilize it. My prayer for all my family and friends is that God will reveal what spiritual gift He has given each one of you and guide you to use it to bring glory to God.

Four Weeks with Neither an Insight nor an Outburst. What Gives?

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Four Weeks with Neither an Insight nor an Outburst. What Gives?

The Explanation.
I love writing my Insights and Outbursts blog post. For decades, I published one every week. But a few years ago, I initiated a new plan: “A Post Every Other Week.” That plan has worked well. I wrote an Easter oriented Canela story that came out around Easter time. But this past month, my new plan was put On Hold.

Our youngest grandson, Aidan, honoured me by asking if I would officiate at his wedding to his fiancée, Lindsay, in a ceremony near her hometown, Vilonia, in Arkansas, about 60 kilometres north of Little Rock! So, for eight days, Jo and I joined many of our family members in Arkansas, 2,700 kilometres south of Edmonton, Alberta. Yes! Writing a blog post was the furthest thing from my mind! Then, to add to the confusion, the week we returned, I had three medical appointments. Go figure. But here is the blog post, although a couple of weeks late.

My Retirement
I mentioned in my last blog post that I am now 87 years old, and June 30 marks the last day of my being a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Jo and I joined Wycliffe in 1965, sixty years ago. Jo retired earlier because of several serious medical issues. Even in retiring from Wycliffe, I expect to keep attuned to the ideas and stories that my Main Editor, God’s Holy Spirit, puts into my mind. And as He leads, I will write a blog post, probably one every other week.

One of the last major services I performed for Wycliffe was to write the memoir of our twenty-three years of ministry as Bible translators among the Canela people of Brazil. The full name of the book is The Great Adventure: Our Life Among Brazil’s Canela People.

Where to Buy the Book
Check it out online at Amazon.ca or on Amazon.com.
Just search for Jack Popjes The Great Adventure.
It is also available to buy through the FriesenPress bookstore.
Search for FriesenPress bookstore, The Great Adventure.

Here are some readers’ comments:
“I’m already at page 31 and enjoying every word.” PG.
Your book was a page-turner, and I have passed it on to my sister.” I.
“I devoured the book, and it is now going the rounds of my friends.” K.
“Your book is one of the best books I have ever read.” AM.
“I love the way your whole family, wife, and daughters were fully involved.” S.
“Your decades of keeping daily diaries paid off and made your writing so interesting.” A.
“The prayer thread woven through each chapter made me praise God.” R.

After June 30, my jack.popjes@wycliffe.ca email will be scrapped, and I will be using this one, jackpopjes@gmail.com. Any gifts for us coming through Wycliffe after mid-June will not be passed on to us. We expect to live on our CPP and OAS income and our savings. We continue to trust that God will provide for us all that we need, as He has always done.
Blessings,
Jack and Jo

 

God Loves All the Cultures in the World.

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God Loves All the Cultures in the World.
All the cultures missiologists have studied had “redemptive analogies:” cultural ways illustrating how God made peace with sinful mankind. Canadian missionary Don Richardson’s book Peace Child describes the way warring tribes made peace with each other by giving a baby as a “peace child” to the other tribe.

In our book The Great Adventure, I described several Canela ceremonies that picture what Christ did for human beings. One involves a young man who is about to receive a painful public punishment for wrongdoing, but suddenly another person, called the Place-Taker, runs up and takes the punishment instead. We described Jesus as our Place-Taker.

The Canela Easter Story
One of the heroes in ancient Canela stories is called Awke. (This story didn’t make it into the book.) Awke did not have a human father, but he loved people. He treated people well and taught them how to live good lives. The elders of the village, however, hated Awke because he was more popular with people than they were.

One time, the elders pushed Awke over a high cliff, but he turned himself into a leaf and fluttered down until he landed on the ground and then turned into a man again. In the end, they clubbed him on the head and then burned his body in a large fire outside the village: the traditional Canela way of executing a criminal.

Three days later, some women came to sit by the ashes and mourn his death. Suddenly, Awke appeared, fully alive, and said, “I am going home, and I will prepare a home for you and all those who are my friends. Someday you will live with me there.”

We praise God that He has put these types of illustrations into every culture to help people understand His great plan of salvation.

Important Announcement
After sixty years of service with Wycliffe, on Tuesday, June 30, I will join my wife in retirement and will no longer be a member of Wycliffe.
Our first major task with Wycliffe was the Canela Bible translation program in Brazil, which took nearly twenty-five years. Our last task was writing the story of those decades in The Great Adventure, which we finished late last year, and which we have promoted and distributed since then.
I expect to keep writing these blog posts, as well as newsletters and will keep all of you up to date on our future activities.

Why Am I Listening?

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Why Am I Listening?
Those of you who, like me, enjoy talking, have probably had James 1:19 quoted at you. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak.” But there are wrong and right kinds of listening.

Listening to Top the Speaker’s Story.
As a teenager, I worked in a pick-and-shovel crew with three recent immigrants from several countries in Eastern Europe. We often shared stories about our lives and I noticed that every time one of us was talking, the others all listened intently.
When the speaker stopped talking, one of the listeners would say, “In my country this happened to me and . . .” He then would tell something he experienced that was even more dangerous, more thrilling, or ended in worse trouble than what happened to the previous speaker.
These listeners were focused on their own story, which would top the current speaker’s story.

Listening for a Break and Jumping in.
As a pastor, I had preached on why believers need to get involved in some form of ministry outreach. I greeted the congregation as they left the church. Three couples stopped to talk.
“We have been financial partners of a missionary family in Africa,” one woman said. Her husband mentioned they had spent a month in Africa to help build a medical clinic, living and eating together with the African staff.
The other two couples were listening intently. I hoped to hear some ministry-experience stories from them. When the speaker paused for breath, however, the wife of one of the other couples jumped in with a vacation-in-Mexico story and how the food had made her sick.
This totally derailed the personal-ministry-in-missions conversation and deteriorated into sharing bad foreign food experiences. Yes, she had listened intently but was just looking for a break so she could tell her off-topic story.

Listening to Argue
We have all heard people arguing about sports, religion, and, of course, these weeks about politics. The listener is strongly focused on the speaker’s words, but only to pounce on something the speaker said and use it to win the argument.

Biblical Reasons for Listening
The apostle Paul expanded on what James wrote about being quick to listen and slow to speak.
“Don’t be selfish; don’t live to make a good impression on others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself. Don’t just think about your own affairs, but be interested in others, too, and in what they are doing.” (Philippians 2:3-4 TLB)
The motivation for listening biblically is to focus on the person speaking, to get to know the other person better, to strengthen relationships, to meet their needs—to understand the other person; to learn what they value, what they think or feel about a situation, event or person.
Listening Biblically is listening to learn, to become wise (Prov 1:5), listening to validate the speaker, in effect saying, “You are there, you matter, you care”.
We listen biblically when we want to meet a need in the other person—to mourn with those who mourn; to rejoice with those who rejoice; to encourage the downcast; to build up the ones we listen to.
Biblical listening is other-centered listening—the kind of listeners we all like to have when we speak—the kind of listeners we need to be when others speak.

Our Strengths, Giftings, Weaknesses, and Disabilities.

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Our Strengths, Giftings, Weaknesses, and Disabilities.

During the decades that we served God among the Canela people of Brazil, Jo and I thanked God for giving us the ability to learn an unwritten language and feel at home in the Canela’s culture.

Girls, stop playing with lunch!

God Given Abilities
We also thanked Him for giving Jo and me some special abilities. He made Jo an excellent cook. She took many meats and vegetables she had never imagined using to make meals and then cooked them all over a wood fire built on a clay-packed table.

Jo’s clay kitchen stove

I thanked God that He made me a problem solver. I used this God-given skill to solve household problems, as well as problems the Canelas brought to us to solve. Many of them were medical issues, from rotten teeth and deep cuts from accidents with bush knives and axes to fevers, difficult births, and multiple tropical diseases. Other problems were mechanical issues, such as a defective muzzle-loading shotgun.
One day, I injected a snake bite victim with anti-snake-bite serum, then permanently repaired a hole in a large cast-iron cooking pot, using a small bolt, a couple of washers, and some epoxy metal glue. Bystanders marvelled and exclaimed, “Behold, he doeth all things well,” in Canela, of course.
The Negative Side
My problem-solving skills were undoubtedly a gift from God. I just knew what to do. What I didn’t realize was that my ability was accompanied by some negatives, like constant interruptions in our main task, linguistics, literacy and Bible translation. That showed some of my disabilities: impatience, a hatred of distracting interruptions, and losing track of what I was doing.
The Story
When I was seven years old in Holland, I had a huge problem. My mother sometimes cooked cauliflower for our meals. She served it on my plate and covered it with a ladle of white sauce. I didn’t like the taste of cauliflower to begin with, but along with the white sauce, it made me gag unless I quickly took a large bite of potatoes to cover the horrid taste.
One day, everyone had finished eating, and I still had my cauliflower and white sauce, although I had mashed it all together. So, my mother picked up my plate, saying, “Come with me.” She led me into a small room and set the plate on a wooden box, saying, “Stay here and don’t come out until that plate is empty.” Then she left.
The Solution
I sat on a little stool and swallowed a tiny bite and gagged again. Then I solved the problem. The wooden box I was using as a table had been made by my father as a place to keep a cooking pot warm. My mom had only two small gas burners to cook on and no oven, so she needed a place to keep a third pan of food warm.  The box was insulated with hay and lined with cloth, leaving just enough space to put in a hot pan.
I opened the lid, the box was empty, so I scraped the cauliflower and white sauce dinner into the empty space and closed it. Then, I happily walked into the kitchen and gave my empty plate to my mother.
The Lesson
That was one of my early successes in problem-solving. I meant to go back later, scoop up the food with some toilet paper, and throw it into the kitchen garbage. I forgot to do that, however, and several days later, when my mother came with a pan to keep warm, she saw the moldy mess on the bottom. That led to my own bottom receiving a well-deserved spanking so I would remember to never do that again. It worked! Eighty years later, I still remember!
God’s  Compensations for Our Disabilities
It also made me realize that with every God given ability, we tend to also have a disability: distraction and forgetfulness in my case. I’m learning to take my weaknesses and disabilities to God and ask Him to show me ways to compensate. And He does. For the past few months, for instance, I’ve been using many more sticky notes for daily, even hourly reminders of all kinds, not just for the weekly shopping list.