“Goodbye…Hello!” -the missionary mantra -Our Story Continued, #19
In May of 1970, we said good bye to the pink house in Elmer, New Jersey. It was time to return to what was still, “West Pakistan.” We might leave, but the memory of that happy time led our kids to search in every town for a “Pink House.”
I said goodbye to Dr. Rudolph at RE Seminary. I left with more of the tools I needed to prepare Pakistani Christians to celebrate their faith and be able to approach Muslim friends and neighbours. And I left with happy memories of students and staff. I had found everyone very supportive. Indeed, the entrepreneurial student who initiated the coffee and donut concession had insisted that I run it during my time there and keep the profits.
We said goodbye to new friends we had made in the Elmer Baptist Church—and with the church’s pledge of support. Throughout our missionary career, we have found the Lord’s people to be wonderfully generous. While we stayed in the pink house, one local Christian filled the tank at the house with fuel oil while another person brought us eggs and milk.
We said good-bye to Phil and Marie Alcorn who had become friends during our time there. Throughout our lives, God has blessed us with one or two special friends in each church we have attended and in most of our supporting churches. As we have learned, friendship doesn’t have to be exclusive nor continuous. True friends, after an absence of years or a distance in geography, can pick up their friendships when they meet again. What would our lives have been without the love and prayers of friends like the Alcorns?
We even found that God had unusual friendships in mind for rather died-in-the-wool Baptists like us. Consider this. A month before we were to leave Elmer, I wrecked the van I used to drive to seminary in Philadelphia. A dog ran out in front of me and on impulse I swerved and sideswiped a hydro pole. The insurance company wrote it off. I and another student I was driving with needed transportation! Would God provide? We knew He could, but we were surprised at how He did provide. The Roman Catholic compatriots of Mary Helen’s sister, Colie, were quite interested in our ministry. To our astonishment they loaned us a car for the remainder of our time. And they continued to follow our ministry throughout our time in Pakistan.
But there was one more thing to do besides visiting Mary Helen’s and my families. Up to this time I had resisted ordination. It had seemed unbiblical to acquire a title, “reverend,” that would set me apart from other Christians. Weren’t we all level at the cross? Our home pastor back in Toronto, Pastor Reisinger, explained that ordination represented an examination and affirmation of one’s beliefs. His persuasion helped me realize that such an affirmation is often required by officials and might ease my way through the Pakistani bureaucracy. The panel met, examined my beliefs and affirmed my commitment to the historic faith. And so, I became Rev. Wright without becoming more reverent.
Before we left, we found my brothers more cordial and open to talk of spiritual truths. We left them with booklets that, without being overtly offensive, contained convincing descriptions of the Christian faith.
We were eager to return to Pakistan. It would be good to set foot again in the land of our adoption. How sweet the gospel in Urdu would sound to our ears. Would we have forgotten much idiom? Wouldn’t it be grand to sip tea again on string beds in some humble village hut? Or to argue with merchants in the bazaar over prices? Oh, there would be piles of problems but we would be able, Lord willing, to get on with the precious task of proclaiming to Muslims, Marvaris and nominal Christians the whole counsel of God. We would be able to implement our two-fold aim for this new term; itinerant Bible teaching and literature production.
After travelling via Frankfurt and Tehran, where the mission had set up a new field, we arrived in a new town, just south of Rahim Yar Khan. Hello, Sadiqabad!
With little available, we rented a traditional Pakistani house. The front door opened directly onto the street. We soon learned that we were on the main route for camel trains with their tinkling bells. We would often be entertained by their passing. The four rooms plus courtyard abutted directly onto the house behind so that we shared the back wall. And the side walls abutted houses to the left and right of us. The bathroom with its peeling plaster was accessed across the bricked courtyard. To make it more congenial, we stapled decorative plastic sheeting to the walls.
When they returned from boarding, the kids used the bathroom as the room from which they would launch dramas in the courtyard. Needing greenery, I pulled up some bricks, dug in some soil, and planted flowers. In hot weather there were stairs to the flat roof where we set up our string beds to catch the night breeze off the desert. That meant we had to be up at the crack of dawn lest we become a spectacle to our neighbours who loved to peer over the low wall separating their roof from ours. To the inhabitants of town, seeing a foreigner was quite a novel event.
It was quite a kacca dwelling. (Kacca is a very useful Urdu word meaning poorly constructed or half-baked while pacca, meant the opposite; well-constructed, solid, etc. as used for almost anything including asphalt roads compared to dirt roads.) I remember coming back one evening from visiting a village to find Mary Helen standing on the bed in our bedroom throwing shoes at a rat. That it was not imaginary was clear from the hole that had been gnawed through the rug on our floor. The floor was made of bricks laid over what was probably dirt. Kacca.
But we had barely settled before the heat was upon us and school was beginning at Murree Christian School in the mountains. It was time to say goodbye, Sadiqabad and hello, Murree. Stephen joined grade three and Deborah grade two in summer day school. Johnny, not yet school age, stayed home to entertain us in our rented cottage. The summer would introduce me to an exciting new method of discipleship. But a new and more difficult good bye would face the whole family when the summer ended.
As I write this, fifty years later, I realize that Pakistanis must be more prepared for change than English speakers. They use one word, “Salaam” for both hello or goodbye! And the word is akin to wishing someone peace. There’s a lesson there. The ascended Christ doesn’t move from place to place. He’s there already, omniscient, the giver of peace. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give onto you.” “Lo I am with you always.” And that is the constant in life, a certainty that Christians can enjoy wherever they may be.
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