A New Beginning (7 page)

“‘They . . . they made me leave where I was,' I half stammered. ‘I . . . I got no place else to go.'

“Aunt Mary looked me over a few long seconds in silence.

“‘Well, I'll go call Grandma,' she sighed with notable reluctance, then turned and left me standing there.

“Next, Grandma came to the door. She asked the same question—what was I doing there?—her voice containing even greater annoyance than my aunt's. I repeated my story.

“‘I'm trying to find a job,' I said, ‘and . . . I need someplace to stay.'

“She thought for a minute. ‘You'd best get yourself into town then,' she said, ‘where the farmers gather. Ask around. See if there's anyone needing a hired boy.'

“By now I was really hungry. I'd been up since four in the morning, and I hadn't had anything to eat all that time. But I didn't dare ask for anything. So I just turned and did what Grandma said and wandered off in the direction of town.

“I spent the rest of the morning knocking on the door of every farmhouse, asking everyone I saw about work. But it was no use. I was just a skinny kid with a high voice, and nobody needed the likes of me. At the grain mill I joined a group of men waiting to be picked by some farmers for work in the fields. Every man there was eventually picked but me. As the men began leaving in wagons, I hid behind a shed so no one would see me standing there alone.

“Finally I walked dejectedly back to my grandmother's. I was afraid to go knock on the door again. I knew they didn't want me there. That fact was obvious enough from their looks and sighs and tones. But I had nowhere else. I literally had no place to call home.

“So I walked around to the back porch and sat down, hoping in time that either my grandmother or my aunt would notice me and invite me in. Finally I heard the screen door open behind me.

“‘What did you find out, Chrissy?' asked my aunt. I told her I hadn't found out anything. She turned without another word and went back inside.

“A little while later my grandmother came out. She asked the same question. I gave her the same answer. Then she turned and went back inside.

“I kept sitting there. I didn't know what to do. I was so hungry I was beginning to get dizzy from the heat. Then, to my horror, I heard the clinking of silverware and dishes inside. I realized my aunt and grandmother were eating lunch!

“The sound of it was too awful to bear.

“I couldn't stand to listen to the sounds of them eating. I got up from the porch and walked back around to the front of the house, lay down under a big shade tree, and finally cried myself to sleep.”

Christopher stopped and looked down, blinking hard and sniffing a few times. He pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The church was still as could be. I could hardly look at him without bursting into tears myself. I was weeping just to listen, but I tried hard not to make any noise. I wanted to run right up in front of the church and throw my arms around him. It was so quiet. Everyone felt for him having to relive such sad and lonely memories.

“Several hours later,” he went on, “my aunt came out, saw me lying there, and woke me up. I suppose she and Grandma had realized that if it got much later I'd still be hanging around by evening, and then they'd have no choice but to take me in.

“‘You want to go see Amos?' she asked, referring to my younger brother, who at the time was living with some relatives about five miles away.

“I nodded. I scarcely paused to think that this was their way of getting rid of me—
anything
would be better than this, I thought.

“Aunt Mary hitched up the wagon and drove me the five miles. Later that evening I was taken to yet another aunt's house, who finally told me, since there was no place else, that if I could find a job I could stay there with her family.

“Well, there is no need to recount every detail of this part of my life except to say that by my late teen years I was crushed to a pulp. I managed to find work here and there. God took care of me, but those were very, very hard times. Over and over I was told that I wasn't ever going to amount to anything. Not only did my relatives seem to feel no need to display any compassion, they also seemed to consider it their duty to remind me over and over how worthless I was, which they lost no opportunity to do. This is something about the human species I have never understood, and still do not understand—why there seems an inborn compelling to ridicule and hurt and make fun of those less fortunate than ourselves.

“In all honesty, I must confess that I could not help being angry at the relatives on my father's side. There had been a great deal of money in the family at one time. Many of my half brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles owned nice large farms. Yet no one lifted a finger to help me or my brothers and sisters. Those on my mother's side showed no more compassion, as is clear enough from my first hours in Willard. My aunt at least let me stay with her, and for a couple of years I managed to find enough work here and there to pay her for my board and room.

“I mention this anger to show that spiritually, during these years of my late teens, what was growing within me was not faith, but resentment. When you are very young, all you do is hurt, without thinking about
why
. As you grow, however, you begin to wonder why
you
have been singled out for such hardships. The minute you begin asking that question, frustration and bitterness—and usually anger—set in.

“This anger that I felt toward my relatives as the years passed I gradually transferred to God, as many people do. I thought that God had altogether forgotten me and did not care any more about me than anyone ever had. I was worthless in everyone else's eyes . . . I figured I was worthless in God's eyes too.

“Sometime during these years, therefore, I determined that I was not going to believe in God anymore. Thus, I declared myself an atheist. What had God ever done for me? I thought. Why should I bother about him?

“I had an older brother, however, who had had just about as tough a time of it as I had and had felt the same rejections from the relatives. Joe had struck out on his own quite a while before and was now married and living down in Mansfield. More important, he had become a Christian. When I was eighteen I went to visit him, hoping he might be able to help me get a job.

“So I went to my brother, and he saw in an instant that I needed help, emotionally, spiritually, and every other way.

“‘You know what would be good for you, Chris?' Joe said, ‘—school . . . maybe even a Bible college.'

“‘Bible college?' I replied. ‘But I'm an atheist.'

“‘God loves atheists just as much as Christians,' Joe replied with a smile.

“I didn't have an answer for that one!

“But I loved to read and learn. Secretly, in fact, I had harbored a dream of going to college someday. Of course I never saw any way such a thing would ever be possible. My brother's bringing up the subject suddenly brought the dream to life.

“‘But I've got no money,' I said. ‘How could I ever afford to go to school? Besides, I'm not interested in going to college to study the Bible.'

“Not only was my brother a Christian, he had attended a Bible college in Richmond, Virginia, for two years himself. And now came the surprise.

“‘Tell you what, Chris,' he said, ‘if you will agree to attend the Richmond Bible Institute,
I'll
back you up to make sure you don't get into any financial difficulties.'

“I could not believe my ears.

“My brother
believed in me
enough to make such an offer! It was a shocking thought. The wheels of my mind quickly began to turn. His offer would give me a whole year to find work. If I could work along with my studies, I could begin saving money for future years . . . and
continue
going to college!

“Even though I still believed myself to be an atheist, this Bible college would give me a chance to realize my dream of obtaining a higher education. Though I did not know it at the time, God really did have my life in his hands.

“Of course I agreed to my brother's proposal.

“Over the course of the next few years, after I traveled down to Richmond, life gradually began to look up for me. I met people in the city who
accepted
me, not because I was or was not a Hutterite or anything else . . .
but just because of who I was
.

“You cannot imagine what that was like for a young man who had never experienced full and unconditional acceptance in his life.”

Sitting in that pew and listening to Christopher talk, I again found myself thinking of things he had told me right after our meeting, this time about his desire to tell people of God's love. Now I saw that desire from a larger perspective:
I found growing within me an enormous hunger to help people be
complete. To help them become full people, to help them
know their heavenly Father intimately and wonderfully, to help them to see and know God and be his sons and
daughters, to know that he was not a faraway God Almighty and Omnipotent somewhere in the distant heavens, but that
he was a close and present and tender and compassionate and loving Father to them. And it was this hunger
that led me toward the ministry
.

“I cannot point to a day or an hour when I suddenly
believed
in God again,” he was telling the congregation. “I suppose perhaps, in a way, I never really stopped believing in him. When I speak of ‘believing' in him again, maybe what I mean is when I was able to
admit
to myself that I believed in him.

“The process was gradual. But as I read and studied and interacted with people at the school, studying not just the Bible but all the disciplines of learning, over the course of time I gradually knew that I
did
believe and had really believed all along. As I matured, I came to recognize that God had been watching out for me and protecting me and nurturing me all through the years of pain and inner conflict over my worth. The acceptance I began to feel from others, I began to feel from him too.

“Not only did I come to realize that God accepted me, I began to realize that he
loved
me—in an active way, not merely passively, that he loved me energetically and had purposes for me which I could step into and be part of.

“What a change this was!

“It meant I was a person who mattered! I wasn't a nothing as I'd thought all those years. I was
somebody
 . . . because I was God's son. I was actually
worth
something.

“God began—I can think of no other way of describing it—to reveal to me just what it meant that Jesus continually called him
Father
and told us to do likewise. I struggled and struggled with memories of my own imperfect father, trying to come to grips with why God had chosen such a flawed human relationship—that between fathers and their sons and daughters—to describe his relationship with the men and women he had created.

“This was a great internal battle for me,” said Christopher. “The mere word
father
conjured up images and emotions of hurt. The phrase
God is a loving Father
set up an oxymoronic dichotomy in my mind that I could not resolve. The concepts
love
and
fatherhood
did not go together.”

As Christopher spoke, I remembered the struggle I had had too with anger against Pa when we had first come to California, feeling like he'd run out on us. I'd had to learn how
father
and
love
could go together too, just like Christopher was describing.

“Yet once I began to see God's Fatherhood with clarity,” Christopher went on, “I also began to see earthly fatherhood from a more proper perspective as well. Perhaps the time may come when I will have the opportunity to tell you in more detail what I believe God showed me in this way. But for now, suffice it to say that for the first time I began looking up into God's face and trying to call him
Father
, knowing that he loved me, and then asking him what kind of man he wanted me to be.

“I say
try
because it was extremely difficult at first. I called God
Father
out of obedience to Jesus, who told us to address him in this way. Even the word
Father
was difficult to say in my prayers. I literally could not pray to God that way. Yet gradually I got more and more used to it. And of course I need hardly say that forgiveness occupied a great deal of this gradual process. As I learned to say
Father
to God, I found more and more forgiveness welling up within me for my own earthly father, and then, surprisingly enough, for all the others toward whom I had allowed bitterness to fester within my heart.

“You cannot imagine how transforming this process was, so much so that I began to hunger to share this wonderful newfound love with others who, perhaps like myself, did not know that God was a
good
Father who cared about them. If God could love
me
and pull
me
out of the hole of worthlessness in which I had lived most of my life, then he could do so for
anyone
! And perhaps I could help people to know what I had not known during my boyhood—that they were valuable in God's sight.

“The more I thought and prayed and studied, the more I realized that every single human being is important in God's sight. I hungered to tell this to people who, like myself for so many years, did not know that wonderful truth. I wanted to tell it to unbelievers and non-Christians. I hungered even more to help people in churches, God's people, grow to know their Father more intimately.

“God created us as special individuals. He loves each one of us so much. How enormous these truths were for me! I had felt such rejection that when I realized I was a special and unique individual in God's sight—
everything
changed.