Tag Archives: God’s leading

God’s Plan and His Leading

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The Rules.
Jo and I met in Bible School in our teens. After graduation, we began to see each other quite often. One time I hugged her and kissed her on the forehead. “Jack,” she said, “You can hug me and kiss me anywhere on my face you want, but don’t kiss me on the lips unless you love me. And don’t tell me you love me unless you truly mean it.”

I understood clearly. Jo had been hurt in a previous relationship and did not want a repeat. That was okay with me. I just loved being with her.

The Story.
One summer, Jo and I worked together as counsellors in a youth camp at Chestermere Lake near Calgary. During a break between camps, we, and several other counsellors, were left to look after the facility.

On the first evening, we enjoyed a tasty supper Jo had prepared. Then we went for a long canoe ride on the lake as the sun prepared to set late in the mid-summer evening. We talked about our future, working at camps for the summer and Jo returning to Oliver, BC, and me to Red Deer, AB, so both of us could look for jobs in the fall.

Returning to shore, we sat leaning against a log and watching the sun disappear over the lake. I lit a cozy little fire, and we wrapped a blanket around our shoulders. More accurately, it was around my shoulders since Jo lay with her head on my chest.

The Important Question.
As we relaxed in the stillness of the evening, a thought popped into my mind, “If I were going to marry, what girl would I pick?” My thoughts flew back to two serious relationships that flared for a while and then ended. There were several less serious dating experiences with other girls during my years of attending Bible school. But those memories took only seconds.
The answer was almost immediate. “This girl here with me, of course.”

Another Important Question.
My next thought was, “She is going back to Oliver after the summer. Will I ever see her again?” That thought motivated me to lean over her and, for the first time, kiss her on the lips. Jo kissed me back. “I love you,” I said and kissed her again. “I love you, too.” We kissed again. “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” she said. We kissed again and again.

From that first thought, “What girl would I marry?” to Jo’s, “Yes” took probably no more than twenty seconds. Then it hit me. Hey, Jack! You are engaged to be married! Wow! A few minutes before, when I lit that little campfire, I had no idea that I would be making a life-long commitment that evening. Now the deed was done—a God-led decision!

And today, Thursday, March 31, we are celebrating sixty years of marriage!

God is so Good.
He has worked together with us throughout our lives, first giving us a wonderful, growing family and constantly helping us grow in love, joy, and appreciation for each other. Then, for all these many decades, God led Jo and me to work together as a team, bringing His Word to a whole people group in Brazil for the first time. Then he used us in leadership ministries, and to speak and write, promoting the ministry of worldwide Bible translation, even raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bible translation, and God only knows how many people joined that task as a result.

None of this would have happened if God Himself had not brought the two of us together in a love and marriage commitment sixty years ago.
What a day to celebrate!

Three Warning Letters I Wish I had Received, and a 4th I made sure I got)

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Three Warning Letters I Wish I had Received, (and a 4th I made sure I got)

This Saturday, March 19, I expect to celebrate my 84th birthday. Since my life divides nicely into four 21-year segments, I wrote four messages to my four selves.

Dear 21-year-old Jack, as I look back at your age 0 to 21 years,
I thank God:

  • For keeping you safe through the war under Nazi-occupied Holland and for bringing you to Canada.
  • For giving you the faith to accept God’s offer of salvation.
  • For your high school girlfriend who led you into a good church and from there to attend Bible school.

As I look ahead to your age 21 to 42 years, I warn you to be careful in your relationships with girlfriends. Instead, trust God to help you find a wife for you to treasure and to become the most important woman in your life with whom to raise a family and serve God together. Then confirm these priorities to focus a life of love: to God, to your wife, to your kids, and your ministry, in that order!

 Dear 42-year-old Jack, as I look back at your age 21 to 42 years,
I thank God:

  • For favouring you with Jo as your wife, and the mother of your three daughters, and choosing your family to live with the Canela people of Brazil and translate his Word into their language.
  • For raising ministry partners to support you in your life ministry through prayer, gifts and encouraging letters.
  • For your daughters’ love for God and for helping them to excel in their studies, in Belem and on several furloughs.

As I look ahead to your age 42 to 63 years, I warn you not to forget that the Canelas and the translation program belong to God, not to you. He is in control of the timing, not you. I also urge you to trust God to prepare you, in his own way, for a post-Canela ministry.

Dear 63-year-old Jack, as I look back at your age 42 to 63 years,
I thank God:

  • For leading you to repent after you had blasphemed Him, casting doubt on His power, wisdom, and love, after you lost your trust in Him to know the end from the beginning.
  • For allowing you and Jo to complete the Canela translation program despite satanic attacks on you both and to answer your prayers for your three daughters to choose the right husbands.
  • For placing you in two top Wycliffe leadership positions, which led to your on-going true-story-based writing ministry promoting Bible translation.

As I look ahead to your age 63 to 84 years, I urge you forget about retiring from ministry but to focus on your life verse, “He that sows bountifully will reap bountifully,” and grab every opportunity to speak and write. You may well be travelling extensively, possibly without Jo, so trust her to handle important issues, and, together, keep building a strong relationship with your daughters and their families.

Dear 84-year-old Jack, as I look back at your age 63 to 84 years,
I thank God

  • For leading you to promote world-wide Bible translation by speaking to thousands of believers in conferences, banquets, and churches in nineteen countries, and nearly every state and province in North America.
  • For giving you the writing skill to produce five published books of true-story-based articles, and three memoirs showing how God led in your life.
  • For giving you the mental clarity and physical ability to start writing a more extended memoir telling how He led you and Jo through the struggles and translation work of twenty-four years in Brazil.

As I look ahead beyond your age of 84 years to the next, however many years God grants you, I urge you to keep writing God-honouring testimonial stories for as long as He keeps you able to do so. Also, keep trusting in God’s love even if you need to go through a time of pain and illness or the loss of a loved one. And keep on loving God, Jo, your growing family, your friends, and your writing ministry, in that order.

 

Return of an Old Love Affair

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Wow, I didn’t realize how much I’d been missing this!

Elkwater Lake Cypress Hills

Elkwater Lake Cypress Hills

I was enjoying the scene of a placid lake reflecting some low hills at the end, the mirror image so perfect the hills looked surreal in stark contrast with the clearly focused flowering shrubs and bushes in the foreground.

I had just copied some photos to my computer from a new camera and looking at the first few photos on my 23” monitor brought tears of nostalgia to my eyes.No, it wasn’t the summer vacation memory that jarred my emotions. It was the realization that for far too long I had been suppressing a creative urge, denying an emotional need, and neglecting an area of my life that in my younger years had given me great satisfaction.

I was 32 years old when a friend took me into his photo darkroom and taught me to make black and white enlargements. I was instantly hooked on cropping, burning in, and lightening my blowups. Within a few years I was developing not only film and photo paper, but my photographic creativity in my own darkroom in Brazil. I also had a Minolta slide camera with multiple lenses, but used it mostly to shoot photos needed for slides to show on furloughs or pictures to illustrate newsletters.

But then, in the late 1980s the pressures of completing the Bible translation project and looming life changes squeezed artistic photography out of my life. I sold my darkroom equipment, and my large format film cameras and took snapshots, not photos with my 35 mm Minolta camera. After 24 years in Brazil I returned to Canada with hundreds of black and white negatives, and 3,000 slides of our family and ministry among the Canelas.

Leadership responsibilities and blog writing filled the creativity gap. Or so I thought.

About 15 years ago I stopped using the 35 mm film camera and bought a small automatic digital camera good for taking snapshots. Then, about a month ago, I finally listened to what my wife had been saying for many years. “Jack, you need a hobby, something that has nothing to do with words.”

She had often been after me to relax, get out of the world of ideas and into the world of nature. I should have listened to her years ago. I bought a new camera, a digital Nikon with a Nikkor zoom lens, a famous brand I had lusted after in my youth, and now forty years later was finally within my reach. The next day we left on a two-week combined ministry and vacation trip . . . through the mountains! Oh yes!

It was love at first click. I shot 25 pictures a day . . . for two weeks! Some of them even turned out to be good photos showing care for composition, colour, and contrast. And being digital, there was no worry about expense! Great!

But wait! There’s more!

Our four American teenage granddaughters are very much into drawing, painting and photography. So I started a Photo of the Week project where we each share a photo via email telling what we like about it, and how it could possibly be improved and, sometimes, what it teaches us about God. Afterwards we comment on each other’s photos. Now I not only feed my own creative urges, I am helping some talented photo artists to develop their talents. Life is good!

The lesson in all this?

Be open to God’s urging. Listen to your heart. Give in to your gut feelings. And, if that fails, listen to your spouse. Your life will take on more colour, have better compositional balance, and certainly show more contrast with your everyday world.