Weird little boy perhaps, but that’s ok.

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I’ve been conscious since childhood of a striving within me after God, but so much gets in the way, notably myself. There was the time that I was so deeply moved when I was about seven years old. I was standing beside the piano in a back room in our house where various families gathered for morning coffee around ten o’clock each weekday morning. The room looked out over the vegetable garden and on beyond to Lake Malawi a thousand feet below the mountain top where we lived. Dorothy, an English lady, was playing, and her children and I sang along though none of us really wanted to. She played things like Polly Wolly Doodle whatever that was all about. But then she played “There is a green hill far away without a city wall”. I knew the hymn, but this time it meant something and I knew that Christ’s crucifixion was somehow at the centre of things and it was to do with me, and I had to stand facing those events while Dorothy played and then probably continued with “What shall we do with the drunken sailor”. I remember that so vividly even though it happened nearly 60 years ago. An intersection moment. God called and I heard him but didn’t know what to do about it so I just believed. And reading the Bible at that tender age became important too. I was quite assiduous at reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament. The stories I was familiar with, but I wasn’t quite sure about the colour of the cover - wasn’t as serious as the content required. I loved to go to Church, not just the morning service that everyone attended, but more particularly to the evening service that wasn’t so well attended. I think I might have seen it as taking a step into adulthood, but it was also a more reflective event and the atmosphere of late Sunday afternoons appealed to me, an hour when something spiritual might happen. I knew that my parents’ entertainment of Cuban mercenaries was something to do with God. The young soldiers who smoked cigarettes were invariably ill and my parents weren’t being subversive, just doing the godly thing by helping the sick and very often healing them. They gave refuge to all sorts of rum characters in rural 1960s Malawi and they were often accommodated in my bedroom - mercenaries, out of favour politicians, de-frocked priests, big game hunters. What were they thinking? It was part of their Christian DNA and I was becoming their child and recognised a God impulse at work in their dangerous compassion. I loved to go to funerals, propelled along by something of the divine. They were a channel from earth to either heaven or hell. I would just show up after hearing my mother mentioning that someone had died in a village five miles away. I walked with the crowd that was heading there and I thought a lot about Jesus when Mary and Joseph lost him in the crowd at the temple in Jerusalem. I’d be away for hours. Sometimes the crowd wasn’t going to a funeral. Goodness, I was a weird little boy.