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▌BACKGROUND.
In 1962, when I was 14, we were living in the remote mining town of Virginia, South Africa, that part of the country called the ‘Free State Goldfields’, with my father working on the mines in the vicinity ('Merriespruit Gold Mining Co.') and with my siblings and I attending the local schools nearby.
I was the eldest, the only one in high-school and in Grade 10 (Standard 8) at the time. We were relatively poor in those days and my school uniform quite threadbare and skimpy. The bitter Free State winter, often as low as 5°C, had to be taken head-on with me dressed in a short-sleeve khaki shirt, a brown school jersey, khaki shorts and (fortunately) with some NEW brown shoes sporting threadbare shoelaces and new socks.
On top of it all my mother was pregnant with our youngest brother and my second eldest brother of 10 has had to stay at home doing the laundry and keeping house for the rest of us. Virginia at the time was a dusty, sweltering hot town in summer and bitterly cold in winter; whenever the school-bus happened to be full the day I had to walk three kilometres to school (and back).
▌MY FEELINGS GET HURT. One day at school, during a break, this guy in my class called ‘JohanS.’, who was sitting in front of me in class, came to me and hurt my feelings by having the gall to ask me whether I was ‘saved’. He then proceeded to, very diplomatically and genteel mind you, to hurt my feelings even further by asking if I had ever considered accepting Jesus Christ as my Saviour, to which I, no stranger to Sunday School but hopelessly divorced from faith and church at the time, have had to reply with an emphatical and embarrassing “No”.
He then did the unthinkable; he went ahead and hurt my feelings even more by explaining the Gospel of Jesus Christ to me in painstaking detail, and also by inviting me to ‘church’. In church the pastor, unbelievably, then also had the audacity to hurt my feelings really badly by daring all those who did not know Christ to come forward and accept Jesus of Nazareth as LORD and Saviour of the world.
So, after some serious thought, I eventually got up in March 1962 and did just that; I kneeled at the altar and accepted Jesus Christ as LORD of the Universe and Saviour of the world.
▌NEVER A DULL MOMENT. Today I am an old man going on 76 (at the time of writing) with two great kids, the eldest a qualified industrial engineer and project manager for a multinational mining corporation, a devout Christian and an accomplished musician for his church; my youngest an accomplished missionary and former executive pastor who speaks three languages fluently and will soon add a fourth; who has served her church in places like Marseille (France) and Belgium with some distinction and is currently fully (secularly) employed in Belgium, another remarkable feat all of its own.
▌FAMILY. Two younger brothers, already deceased, have accepted Christ before they died. Another brother in Australia is a devout Christian and my youngest brother and my sister both honour Jesus as LORD. My mother was also a keen Bible reader all her life and a Christian. In our family, however, my father was the proverbial ‘hard nut to crack’. He never went to church accept for funerals and weddings and stood skeptic about God, the Bible and the Gospel. His main gripe against me (so I was told) apparently was my nagging persistence that he should (also) ‘repent’.
In the year 2010, on 1 October and a Saturday morning and after many years of intercessory prayer for him, my father (then 86) phoned to inform me that he had made his peace with God; I was so surprised that I held my cell-phone against the television monitor so that he could hear the song that was at that moment fortuitously playing on my television, i.e., Andre Rieu's version of ‘Amazing Grace’. What a nice birthday present for my sister-in-law in Oz (1 Oct) and myself (also an October baby).
Life is short, very short ... as short as the little hyphen between a man’s date-of-birth and
date-of-death on his tombstone. For instance, my parents once, on the way to Cape Town, first stopped over to visit an uncle of mine in a city nearby to say ‘hello’ and shoot some film of him with his family. Later, they were abruptly recalled to my uncle’s home for his funeral; he had, in the meantime, been murdered by an intruder in his home, with his funeral’s film-footage added to the same earlier film about the family.
Life is short and can be over in the twinkling of an eye. The moral of my story: I accepted Christ in 1962 (despite all the adversity, struggles and indiscretions of my headstrong youth) and ever since never a dull moment, all because one guy has had the audacity and courage to hurt my feelings when it mattered.
✋
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