Tramp for the Lord (12 page)

We both laughed and hung up. “Lord,” I prayed, “if I have made a mistake in hearing Your direction, please show me. But if I heard correctly, then open the way.”

An hour later the girl called back. “Did you really pray for an island in the Indian Ocean?” she asked, incredulous. Before I could answer she continued, “I just received a telegram from Qantas, the Australian airline. They have just begun to use the Cocos Islands for a refueling station and beginning tomorrow will have a direct flight from Sydney to Cape Town.”

I thanked her and hung up. It was good to know that God does not make a mistake in His plans.

However, I am stubborn and never seem to learn my lessons well. Just a few days later, after I got to Sydney and was to make a short trip to Auckland, New Zealand, and back, I ran into another situation which would have been much easier on me had I remembered the lesson I should have learned back in Formosa.

Since I was only going to be in Auckland for four days before returning to Sydney and then on to Cape Town, I packed all my essential items into one suitcase which I would carry with me. I left the other suitcases with my friends in Sydney, planning to pick them up when I came back through on my way to Africa.

Besides my essential clothing, I also took with me my notebooks, Bibles, literature and colored slides. My slides, taken in many lands, and the manuscripts of my sermons are all very valuable to me. Although I seldom read from my notes when I speak, I feel more comfortable when I have them before me. I have been accused by my friends of ascending the platform with three Bibles and five notebooks. I think it is hardly that bad, but I have met so many people and jotted down so many ideas that I cannot remember them all. So I try to carry all my notes with me.

As I started to leave the Sydney airport for the plane, one of the pilots spotted me struggling along with my heavy suitcase. He volunteered to help me. “I have to stop by the radio room first,” he said, “but then I shall bring your bag directly to your seat.”

I hesitated to turn loose my bag, however, since it was filled with everything I needed for the rest of my journey, not to mention a lifetime of treasures.

“You can trust me,” he insisted. “I will arrive at the plane before you and shall leave your bag on your seat.”

Reluctantly I parted from my suitcase and watched the pilot as he walked out the door. Several minutes later we boarded the plane, and I rushed to my seat. The bag was not there. Alarmed, I called the stewardess. She assured me that the bag had been stowed with the rest of the luggage and was perfectly safe. I tried to settle back in my seat as we took off, yet I had an uncomfortable feeling inside.

The plane made a stop in Melbourne before heading out over the Tasman Sea for New Zealand. However, when we landed in Melbourne, there was a radio message waiting for me. Like Job, the thing which I greatly feared had come upon me. The message was from Sydney. A bag, belonging to Corrie ten Boom, had been left in the radio room.

I was frustrated—and angry. “Can they send it to me?” I asked the ticket agent.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “The only way we can get it to you is to send it on our next plane to London. From there it will go to Rome, then Tel Aviv, and then …”

“Oh,” I groaned, waving him quiet. “It will never make it. It contains all my earthly treasures, and it is not even locked. Tell them just to hold it for me in Sydney. I shall pick it up when I return in four days. In the meantime, I have nothing, not even a toothbrush.”

I reboarded the plane and slumped in my seat, dejected, angry and full of resentment. On the flight from Sydney to Melbourne, I had witnessed to the stewardess about my faith in Jesus Christ. I had told her that Jesus was victor in every situation and that He gave us the power to praise Him in all situations. Now, however, I did not feel very much like praising Him at all.

I looked up, and the stewardess was bending over me. “How wonderful it must be to be a Christian at a time like this,” she said. “Most people would be full of anger and resentment.”

I forced a smile and said, “Well, it must be for some reason; nothing happens by chance to a child of God.”

Even though I was speaking the truth, I was not walking in the victory. Victory would mean that I had no resentment at all, and at that moment I was overflowing with it.

It was late evening as the plane took off from Melbourne. It would be a night flight to Auckland, and I tried to make myself comfortable. Below us was the sea, with only the engines of the plane to hold us in the sky.

I dozed, fitfully, and then woke to the smell of smoke in the cabin. The other passengers were awake also, and some of them were up in the aisle, expressing alarm. Moments later the stewardess was at my seat.

“I have good news for you,” she said softly. “We are returning to Sydney to pick up your bag.”

“Yes, indeed, good news for me,” I said. “But tell me, are we not in great danger?”

“No,” she said, smiling sweetly and patting my pillow, “we are just having some hydraulic difficulties. There is no danger.”

I followed her with my eyes as she went from seat to seat, assuring all the passengers that there was no danger. I leaned across the aisle and asked the man in the next seat what was meant by hydraulic difficulties.

“It is bad news,” he said. “All the mechanism on the plane depends on the hydraulic system. The wing flaps, the steering mechanism, even the landing gear is controlled by the hydraulic system. Since the fire is in that system, it means the pilot could lose control of the plane at any moment.”

I sat back in my seat and tried to look out the window. Below was the blackness of the Tasman Sea. The smell of smoke was still very strong in the cabin. I was not afraid of death. Often as a prisoner I had faced it. I remembered the words of Dwight Moody: “The valley of the shadow of death holds no darkness for the child of God. There must be light, else there could be no shadow. Jesus is the Light. He has overcome death.”

Yet I knew I was not right with God because I was not right with man. I still held resentment in my heart and knew it had to be removed before I could even pray. I leaned back in my seat and opened my heart to God, confessing my resentment over my suitcase (which was worthless to me now that we might crash into the sea) and asking Him to forgive me. Then I prayed, “Lord, perhaps I shall see You very soon. I thank You that all my sins have been cleansed by the blood of the Lamb.”

I opened my eyes and looked around me.
What of the others?
I wondered.
Are they prepared to die?
No one was sleeping. All were sitting, alert in their seats. I noticed a woman busy applying lipstick and shook my head. How silly to feel you have to enter eternity with painted lips! I had the strongest urge to stand up and say to the people around me, “Friends, perhaps in a few minutes we shall all enter eternity. Do you know where you are going? Are you prepared to appear before God? There is still time to accept the Lord Jesus….”

But I could say nothing. I wanted to stand and urge them to come to Jesus, but I could not. I was ashamed of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And not only that, there was fear in my heart.

We finally made a landing—a safe landing—in Sydney. My bag was returned to me, but there was no joy in my heart. Even though I had been forgiven of my resentment, I had been ashamed of the Lord Jesus. I found a seat in the lounge and sat with my head bowed, my eyes closed.

“Dear Lord, I am not fit to be a missionary. I stood before the very portals of eternity and warned no one.”

I opened one of my notebooks and read on the margin of a page a note I had made many years before. “To travel through the desert with others, to suffer thirst, to find a spring, to drink of it and not tell the others that they may be spared is exactly the same as enjoying Christ and not telling others about Him.”

“Oh, Lord,” I moaned. “Send me back home. Let me repair watches. I am not worthy to be Your evangelist.”

As I sat there, like Jeremiah, trying to resign my commission, I saw a man coming toward me. He introduced himself as a Jewish doctor who had been aboard my flight. “I watched you all through those hours on the plane when our lives were in great danger,” he said. “You were neither afraid nor anxious. What is your secret?”

A ray of light. Perhaps God was giving me another chance. “I am a Christian,” I said joyfully. “I know the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of God. He died on the cross for my sins, and yours also. If our burning plane had fallen into the sea, I had the assurance of going to heaven.”

We sat and talked for a long time before he excused himself. But a few minutes later he was back again. “I must hear more about this Jesus who gives you such peace,” he said.

Four times he got up and left, and yet he kept coming back. Each time his request was the same. “Tell me more about Jesus.”

I told him how Jesus gives us authority over Satan. How Jesus has promised us mansions in heaven. How He gives to all who believe the power to become the sons of God.

The Jewish doctor drank it all in and finally left saying I had given him much to think about. I sat back in my chair. The Lord, my treasurer, had given me just enough of His wealth that I might share it with one of His hungry children. I had been found worthy to evangelize after all. And in the process I had learned another valuable lesson in the school of life: when I am weak, then am I strong (2 Cor. 12:10).

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom
.

Isaiah 40:11

E
veryone needs a place to be. One of the great joys of heaven is that it is a place, a prepared place. I am thankful that there I will have a special house that is reserved just for me.

When I was born, Father and Mother were living on the Korte Prinsegracht, a typical Amsterdam canal. I was born prematurely and my skin was blue. Uncle Hendrik, Tante Jans’s husband, looked at me and exclaimed, “I hope the Lord will quickly take this poor little creature to His home in heaven.”

But my parents and Tante Anna did not agree with him. They surrounded me with love and care. However, since there were no incubators in those early days, I cried much from the cold. Tante Anna, knowing I missed the warmth of the special place under my mother’s heart from which I had come, rolled me in her apron and tied me against her stomach. There I was warm and quiet.

Many years later I was in a primitive house in Africa. The bathtub was made from an old oil drum that had been sawed in half. Missionaries lived there, and they invited me in to eat with them. Walking into the kitchen, I saw an African woman with the white missionary child strapped tightly to her back.

“Hey, how nice she has your baby on her back,” I said to the missionary mother.

The white mother smiled and said, “The baby was so fearful this morning. All she would do was cry. When the African cook came to the house, she took one look at the baby and said, ‘Ah, Missee, give me the baby. I will keep her quiet.’ So she strapped her on her back, and the baby has slept all morning while the cook has been busy around the kitchen.”

I could understand that feeling of having a place—of belonging. I was often afraid as a small child. Sleeping beside my sister Nollie, who was a year and a half older than I was, I begged to be able to hold her hand at night. She refused, and instead gave me the hem of her nightgown. By and by she did not even like me holding on to that, but told me to hold on to the hem of my doll’s nightgown.

Then, when I was five years old, the Lord Jesus became a great reality to me. My mother told me how He loved little children and was even willing to live in my heart if I asked Him in. I did, and a feeling of peace and security took the place of the fear I had so often felt. From then on I could go to sleep at night and not be afraid.

As a child I prayed a nursery rhyme:

Ik ga slapen, ik ben moe;

’k Sluit mijn oogjes beiden toe.

Heere, houd ook deze nacht

Weder over mij de wacht.

(I’m going to sleep, I am tired;

I close both my little eyes.

Lord, watch over me again

The whole night long.)

In all these years that I have been a “tramp for the Lord,” I have often been afraid. But in those moments I have always reached up and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment. He has never failed to wrap me close to Him. Yet I still long for that time when I shall have a mansion in heaven.