In the game!

I decided it was time to tell why I am writing this blog…. I’m still on the second of three reasons…to help people understand what following Christ looks like - from my vantage point.

As I connected with people from various walks of life, and all sorts of beliefs, I began to see how God in His marvelous grace can reach us and use us for His glory in whatever state we find ourselves in. (Consider David, Joseph, Paul, the woman at the well, etc…) God does not wait for us to have perfect lives. He sees our brokenness and our hearts, and His mercy and lovingkindness have no end for those who call on Him and put their trust in Him.

Well, that’s exactly what I discovered. I was still in the game! My Heavenly Father was taking me by the hand and gently sending me back into the game, where I found I had a new relevance to other imperfect people around me. In fact many - then and now - want to listen to my story and hear what I have to say. Why - because my life’s been pleasant and easy? Not at all… It’s my scars and my imperfect life that, oddly enough, give me a platform to give praise and glory to my God.

I can’t tell you how surprised I was when I first realized this, and how delighted I am that I can still serve my God. You do not have to have a “pleasant” or perfect life before you can follow and serve Christ. And following Christ is both difficult and easy. It requires humbling oneself (difficult for many of us) before a loving God, and before His Son, whose life was given on the cross to free us from the bondage to sin we were born with (easy for us – the price was paid). If you don’t know how great it is to be free, I encourage you to become a follower of Christ. You will never ever regret it.

And now…the third reason I’m writing this blog… It’s to tell my grandparents’ stories from their lives as pioneer missionaries in Cameroon, Africa - so that in hearing these stories of faith, our own faith in God will grow.

In the game?

As in the previous post, I’m using tidbits from my story to tell what I want, in terms of this blog. And I’m still on the second of three things - to help people understand what following Christ looks like. From my vantage point, of course…

It’s interesting to me that about the time my life started to get visibly messy (it was behind the scenes messy long before) was about the time I started to learn the most about following Christ. And about what kind of follower He wants…

I thought that I would be of little use to God once the road to, and through, divorce started, and that made me very sad because I really wanted to serve Him and bring Him glory – even then. I was totally expecting to have to sit quietly on the sidelines – watching all the action, but knowing I’d no longer be called into the game. I was sure that I was now like the injured player who could still wear the jersey, and may get a few sympathy pats from a teammate now and then, but would soon be forgotten, as I watched the game from my spot on the bench. But I had a surprise ahead.

As I began to walk through my new life as a separated and then divorced person, suddenly I began connecting with unbelievers at every turn. Oddly enough, a handful of them, and not most of my Christian friends, became my support group. They helped me through the tough, lonely times, when many Christians acted like nothing huge was happening to me. I was gushing blood, but it was almost like no one at church saw it. And I’m positive most, if not all, didn’t intend, even for a second, to enlarge my wounds. They simply didn’t know what to do with me, or what to say to me. I was an elder’s daughter, a pioneer missionary’s granddaughter, a Sunday school teacher, a worship team member…and was initiating divorce (needless to say, not lightly). It (I?) was scary to many, I think, and I guess understandably so. Yet it hurt… (A few Christians - my sisters and niece especially - were huge supports to me, I must say, for which I'm forever grateful.)

But God’s love and grace are huge. He never, ever abandoned me or let me down. And it really should be of no great surprise to us when people fail us. I’ve told my kids that many times. “I love you so much and don’t ever want to fail you, but unfortunately I will. But don’t look to me; look to God. He will never fail you.”

Does God "not failing me" mean I always get what I want? Of course not… I never wanted to be divorced, for example. But life on this earth, which is broken by sin, is only temporary and my Jesus walks through it with me, and will bring me safely into eternity with Him. That is how God never fails me. That is how I’m never alone. That is why I write this blog…to encourage others. To tell people: “Don’t look to me or my grandparents. We will fail you. But look at our God. He will never ever fail you.”

(In the game? to be continued...)

In Annie's words...

As we approach the beginning of a new year, I’ve decided to do a few posts that are Annie speaking in her own words. I’ll begin with this one.

This has been a year where I’ve taken a few bold steps (for me), like booking a trip to Africa – and with a woman I hadn’t yet met, taking a vacation alone (okay, so it was only one night away, in a city two hours from here), and yes…kicking off a blog. I’ve switched things up a bit, I guess, and it causes me to think about what it is I want from this switch. (Warning: I always get a bit reflective as a new year approaches and kicks off. I’ll get back to Africa stories soon...)

Well, first it must be said that I want to bring glory to my God and Savior. It rolls off my tongue and keyboard with ease. Does the desired roll from my life with as much ease?...

Then also: I want to love well. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels but do not have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” (I Cor. 13:1, NIV) I think of this verse often as I’m putting down words in this blog. I could write an awesome post some day, but if I don’t love, it’s worse than worthless. I find I’m constantly reminded of this, though my life, all-too-often, doesn’t reflect it…

At some point these conceptual desires to glorify God and love well need to take on shape and get specific. So, here we go. In terms of this blog, what do I want? Why am I writing about my grandparents’ (and father’s) experiences in Africa and posting something here most every week?

Three reasons… First of all, I feel called to do this. With each post I feel like I’m building an alter to my God. I’m laying stone upon stone, story upon story, to, and for, Him. This both removes pressure, and makes me want to do my very best. I’m excited and encouraged when I hear someone’s reading the blog. And at the same time, I would keep building this if no one was reading it. (But I'm thankful, and grateful, that you are.)

Second, I’m writing this because I want people everywhere to understand what following Christ looks like, and this is one attempt at least, to consider what it likely does look like. And from my experience, it’s not much of what the unbelieving world thinks. It’s not about religiosity or right-winged stances or shallow, Pollyanna-type thinking. It’s not about hating sinners or condemning sin or judging people. I learned this through my own story, key pieces of which I will share with you now. (And the third reason is about your calling, which I will get to in a later post...)

The path to my divorce was the most difficult path of my life so far. I’m torn between not wishing it on anyone, and because of the learning, wishing it on everyone. But I don't wish it on anyone. I learned a lot from it, and it was extremely painful and difficult.

The most important, significant learning was about my Savior, Jesus Christ – who He really is and what He’s done for me. I’ll never forget what happened about an hour after I asked for a separation from my spouse, the first time. It was during my first minutes alone after the traumatic, dreaded conversation and I suddenly realized that the Holy Spirit was with me. He was comforting me and so close to me that I could feel Him. I was shocked, and joyfully relieved! Until that moment of surprise, I hadn’t realized that I thought He would no longer want me - that He would no longer be with me. My head knew that God would still want me, I think, but in my brokenness, my heart feared it wasn't so. And this was only the beginning of what I had to learn: God’s love transcends divorce.

Thirsty iron monster

My dad’s perspective continues, in his words…

One time, in 1929, we were coming home to Yagoua from Lere and stopped at a small village called Bosgoi. The Model T Ford had been overheating and needed a drink, as the Africans described it. In those years, whenever this iron monster stopped, a crowd would quickly gather in astonishment. My dad used many of these occasions to preach to the gathering crowd.

This day, as he was preaching, two men with long scraggly hair and unkempt beards were sitting at the back of the group. My father may or may not have recognized them as the two local medicine men, or witch doctors, as they were often called in those days. My mother told me later, that to my father, it appeared that they were disturbing the meeting and so in desperation he sternly said, “In the name of Jesus I command you to be quiet!” Immediately, they became quiet and listened to what he was saying. After a little while we continued on home to Yagoua.

A week or two later, I saw these two men approaching our mission compound asking to speak with my father because they wanted to hear more about this Jesus he had spoken about on that day the iron monster needed a drink. They had traveled 30 miles on foot and it had taken them five days to get to us. (You see they had to come to a village, make friends with the people, stay overnight, then go the next village, make friendly overtures, stay overnight and thus continue on their way...)

My folks had been in Africa 10 years and no one yet had received Christ. These were the first two in that region that did. These most unlikely ones were willing to receive the gospel, thus, one can never be sure who it may be that is open to the Good News. Perhaps it is someone you consider to be the most unlikely one.

This was the beginning of a great awakening in that district of Cameroon, and it all started in the village of Bosgoi because the iron monster was thirsty and needed a drink.

There’s a phrase that’s been going through my mind recently. “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve got.” I first heard this in the electronics manufacturing industry about 10 years ago from Harry, a six sigma black belt who was the quality manager at the firm where I was the training manager. He loved to use this phrase to help teach us that there are reasonable results to be expected from a manufacturing process...and that we need to be open to data-inspired change to these processes, or else it's ridiculous to expect different results.

Harry’s words have been going through my mind a lot this past week. Am I getting the results that I want in life? And if not, do I need to change something or stop expecting different results?

As I typed Dad’s story for today’s post, I kept thinking about 10 years... Ten years of waiting for a convert... Ten years in Africa of doing what Grandpa and Grandma were doing and not getting what they wanted: people to accept salvation through Jesus Christ. Did they contemplate switching things up in order to try to get different results? I imagine they may have…

Grandpa and Grandma kept on in faith when results did not follow. For 10 long years... They trusted God’s call and stayed the course.

I don’t like to wait a week for something I want, much less a year…certainly not 10. When I’m impatient or full of doubt based on invisible or nonexistent results, I need to go back to my Source. I need to chat with my Heavenly Father, reviewing my intent and actions with Him, and seek His response and direction. He may be leading me to switch things up, or he may be saying, “stay the current course and trust me.” He will guide, and either could be the right answer… Because with God, it is entirely possible to keep doing what we’re doing, and get something we’ve not gotten before.

Model T's destiny

My dad’s perspective continues, in his words…

Just before we were to return to Africa after our furlough in 1926, a couple who owned a restaurant in Chicago gave my dad their own 1925 Model T Ford – one with a spotlight in the center of the front windshield. I always thought this gift came from someone who had quite a bit of money, and generously gave that car. It was not until four or five years ago (Dad wrote this in approximately 1993) that I found out from their daughter that this was definitely not her idea. In fact, she and her brother were exceedingly angry about it. For a whole year thereafter, the family could not afford to buy another car. Instead, the father bought the family a radio to placate the children. As you can see this gift was truly a sacrificial gift.

Missionaries never have surplus funds and the fare on transatlantic passenger boats costs quite a bit more than on slow freighters. It also costs more to ship a car stored down in the hold of a ship than to leave it out on top of the deck. Therefore, we left Brooklyn on the SS West Kidron, a freighter bound for Africa, with the Ford on the outside deck, held down with a few ropes.

A few days out on the Atlantic, we were hit by a tremendous hurricane. The waves pounded against the ship. One moment the nose was pointed up into the sky and the next it was plunging into the sea with tons of water slopping over the decks. The ship would shudder as the propeller came out of the water, and grab again as the rear of the ship came down. I was too young to know, but my parents at times were sure that the ship might sink at any moment.

The fierceness of the storm broke many of the railings off the ship and swept them into the ocean. A storage pantry that the ship’s carpenter had built on the deck was smashed and swept out to sea. There was no reason that the Ford could survive the storm and not be swept overboard. Certainly it was not the cords that were holding it in place.

After the storm was over, my dad took me to the forward deck where we saw several 14 to 18 foot steel bridge I-beams that were 18 inches across. These were twisted and bent by the force of the storm. But the Model T was fine. It was destined for God’s service in Cameroon and Chad. The sacrificial gift had been carefully protected by Heaven’s angels.

I’ve always loved this true story, which Dad told many times during his life. It inspires me with hope and confidence because it reminds me that God is all powerful. And that God has a plan... If the car had washed into the sea, it would be because He allowed it to be washed into the sea. But His will was for the car to make it to Africa. So it did. It’s that simple. Steel beams could twist in the hurricane, but the Model T had a destiny, and it stood unharmed.

I sometimes wonder about my journey... Shouldn’t I be rolling over lovely country roads, receiving admiration from onlookers as I dutifully and beautifully fulfill my destiny? Why, all too often then, does it feel like I’m being tossed about on an ugly ol’ freighter where my destination is not only unclear, it seems likely I may not arrive anywhere at all?

Having faith is both the easiest thing to do and the most difficult. It requires believing past the storm. It requires believing God is big and can do big things.

Back to Africa?

The second post from my Dad's perspective...

During this furlough, well meaning American friends tried very hard to convince my parents that it was absolutely unthinkable, unreasonable and perhaps even sinful to take such a tiny child to that horrible, dark continent with all those poisonous snakes, scorpions and wild, man-eating animals. As I reflect on this, I wonder where they thought I had been all of my three-and-a-half year life, up until that time.

I have heard of other missionary kids whose parents succumbed to that pressure and left their young children at home with friends or relatives, and the children tragically felt that they were unwanted and had been abandoned. In fact, some have even said, “If they didn’t want me, why did they even bring me into the world?” I’m so thankful to God that He had other plans for me and my parents. Every single day that I was in the United States I would ask: “When are we going back home to Africa?” My intense persistence with that question helped remove any doubt from their mind as to what they were to do with me. As a result, I’ve always known I had parents who loved me enough to keep me with them, even when others thought that was the wrong decision.

In addition to that, when I was nine, and until I was twelve years old, my mother stayed in America with me while my father went alone to Africa for three years. At the time I wasn’t mature enough to really appreciate the sacrifice they made on my behalf until years later when I was married, I finally realized the greatness of their sacrifice, and their love for me and for the work of spreading the Gospel.

Well, after this first furlough, we arrived back in Africa. In Nigeria we stayed a few days with some American missionaries and I had a wonderful time playing with their children. Leaving them, we went over trails, primitive roads, and at times just foot paths to reach our home in Yagoua, Cameroon. Now that I had arrived back home in Africa, and had such wonderful memories of playing with the American missionary children, my tune suddenly changed so that it became: “When are we going back to America?” But God had so graciously brought me back to Africa with my parents; for this I am now truly grateful.

As I think of my young dad with changeable desires – wanting to go home to Africa, then wanting to go back to America – I think about some of my own changeability. I would like to think my changeable desires are much more adult…mature. But I know better. That’s why the older I get, the more I truly want to defer to my Heavenly Father’s guidance. Not that I hold back, often anyway, from telling Him what I think I want. But the whole, “yet not my will, but yours be done,” is added onto my prayers with more genuineness and truthfulness than ever before.

The other thing I found myself thinking about as I typed Dad’s words, is how God always leads us when we ask Him for wisdom, and truly expect Him to give it to us. (It’s a promise in the book of James, for one...) Grandpa and Grandma sought God’s wisdom concerning whether or not to bring Dad back to Africa with them. And God answered them, in part, through their vocal three-year-old’s daily stated desire to return to Africa. A little boy who would change his tune once he arrived there…

I cannot think of a time when I have cried out to God for wisdom, and He has not answered me. He may not choose to answer in my preferred timing…and yes, some answers I am still waiting for… Yet I know His promises are trustworthy. He has shown me that over and over again.

Berge, Herborg & Harold

This is the first post from my Dad’s perspective. Dad was Grandpa and Grandma Revne’s only child. Dad (Harold Revne) died in 2003, but thankfully he left some stories about his childhood…

My father (this is my Dad speaking about his father)was born in Norway, just south of Bergen on the seashore of the Bjorne fjord. I believe he had as a very young man the desire to serve God as a missionary to a foreign country. In handwritten notes I found, Father says he was influenced by Christian public school teachers and Christian parents. He was converted himself to Christianity at the age of 17, and the young childhood call came back to him then. Consequently he eventually left the farm and emigrated to the United States for further Bible training, practical missionary training and language learning studies, especially that of phonetics and phonemics and the study of the structure of languages.

My mother’s home was located about one-half mile up the mountain from the ocean where my father lived. The children living in the area would walk to school. My mother was three years older than my father and they went to the same school, but did not walk together. The school was in Baldersheim which was about a mile or two away. They never ‘went together’ but secretly liked each other. It wasn’t until my father sent mother a letter with money for a ticket to America that she knew he was serious – this was the equivalent to his asking her to marry him. She came to the U.S. and worked in Fargo as a nurse assistant.

I was born in Norway just half-way between my father’s seaside home and my mother’s mountain view home, in a house belonging to my aunt. My parents registered my birth with the American Consulate because they were naturalized citizens of the USA. My father had been studying in France that summer while waiting my arrival.

Two weeks after I was born they took me with them on a steamship back to Africa, where they had been missionaries for almost four years. Then we went by two covered dugout canoes to Garoua, Cameroon on the Benue river, and then by horseback or whatever transportation mode was available, in order to reach the mission station in Lere, Chad. Naturally I have no recollection of my first three years in Africa, but I am told that whenever a national would peer through the mosquito netting covering the baby buggy, they would invariably remark, “You mean they are even born white?”

When I was three we left for furlough via Norway to America. The first leg of the journey to reach the coast of Africa took two months in two dugout canoes outfitted kind of like Conestoga covered wagons, with mosquito netting to protect from insects, and grass mat overhead to give shade from the hot tropical sun. At night the canoes would be latched together to help prevent the hippopotamus from playfully or otherwise overturning the craft. From Lagos, Nigeria we went by ship to Norway and then across the Atlantic to America.

On landing in the United States I no doubt experienced a mild culture shock since I could not speak English, although I was fluent in Norwegian and two African languages: Masana and Fulani.

I’m trying to picture my three-year-old dad experiencing culture shock upon arriving in the U.S. for the first time in his little life. No worried parental talk of hippopotamus, no comfort of mosquito netting at naptime, no dugout canoes to romp in, and three toddler languages to try to get a glass of milk with, but none of them working... A Norwegian-born, U.S. citizen, who had really only lived in Africa by age three! What an interesting childhood my Dad had.

Yet what I’m even more intrigued by, is Dad’s mention of how his parents got together. Secretly liking each other, a letter with money for a ticket to America… (The next Nicholas Sparks movie?) I would so love to know what Grandpa’s letter said. Maybe he wrote: “Dear Herborg, I know I haven’t seen you in a year or two, but here’s some money for a ticket to America. Please hop on the next boat out of Norway because I’d really like to date you.”

Well, maybe not. Yet whatever Berge said, one thing is totally clear to me. It took some courage and faith for him to write it. And I have no doubt it took some courage and faith for Herborg to respond the way she did. They both took a risk to pursue love. Their granddaughter admires them for this, and is grateful they did.