A Disappointment Opens a Door

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How our disappointments turn out to be God’s perfect placed appointments! I was annoyed that I was not sent to a London hospital,
but instead to a Midlands hospital in Leicester. There the visiting padre was Gilbert Barclay, who I did not know was C.T. Studd’s son-in-law. His keenness for Christ, so different from that of the oilier padres I had met, immediately drew us together.

One day Barclay dropped on my bed a little magazine about C.T. Studd in the heart of Africa. As I read Studd’s glowing account of his meeting his “black gold,” it was an immediate call of God to me to join him. This was to be the total redirection of my life, for I was considering an application for a permanent army commission. It was also the beautiful reversal of my having given up my girlfriend five years before.

C.T. Studd had a remaining daughter, who at last fitted my rather faint hope for a girl both physically beautiful and beautiful in her total devotion to Christ. I had always witnessed and sought to win various girl acquaintances in my army years. But I had come to the conclusion it was always the pretty girls who were the pagans, and the non-pretty the Christians! Pauline totally reversed that for me.

All of these five army years were my first youthful intercession. They included the set purpose of a bold witness for Christ in the unfavorable
surroundings of the British army of those days. This produced an absorption in God and in bringing the gospel to the men, which left no time for pursuits of the flesh.

There was the intercessory death and resurrection law for all fruitfulness of the Spirit in my being denied promotion and in the miraculous capture of the farm by our left-behind-in-a-pigsty platoon. There were marvelous
physical preservations and good strong training in “playing the man” in a man’s job.

Finally there was the. totally unexpected and unprepared-for commission to my true life’s calling to “preach the gospel to every creature”—the true war of all wars. Thus the fire burning in those C.T. Studd magazine pages intermingled with the fire in me. That was my call to 40 years in the
Worldwide Evangelization Crusade!