June - Time to Celebrate

 

WooHoo! Celebration time. June marks fifty years since, after a series of undeniable ‘God incidents’, I said ‘Yes’ and became a Christian. I was twenty-five.

 

I’m amazed to find myself so old and so Christian. It’s all happened very fast – well, so it feels.

 

If you’d seen me fifty-one years ago, before I became a Christian, you would never have dreamt it. I was the girl least likely to become a Christian. In fact, one friend said, ‘If Jeanette becomes a Christian, I’ll believe it all.’ She figured she was safe as an unbeliever. Hah!

 

 

Early Hints

There were hints during my childhood and teenage years. Chinks in the solid wall that kept me focussed on the material world, rarely dreaming there was anything more.

One such chink occurred when I was fourteen.

 

 

  A Chink

It was a hot Brisbane summer day. A skinny fourteen year old, I sat on the verandah of our lovely old Queenslander, my legs stretched out over the weather-beaten floor boards. I gazed at the huge magnolia tree, its large shiny leaves rattling in the breeze.

 

Despite the beauty around me, life often seemed empty in our troubled family. I’d sit there and wonder what it was all about.

The galvanised iron roof crackled in the hot summer sun and a chorus of cicadas shrilled their intense song.

 

Suddenly the solid walls of my familiar surroundings seemed to disappear, as if the veil of my senses had lifted and I saw beyond the material world to a different land. A land of light, life and happiness. It was like glimpsing a land that was always sunlit from a world shrouded in fog.

The veil swept back into place and I was left with the shimmering heat and the shrill of the cicadas; but I was also left with a sense of something more – and the beginning of a poem.

 

The Call

As I sat there, the lines began to run through my mind. (In those days I often wrote poems and sent them to the children’s pages of the Brisbane newspapers.) I ran to fetch my notebook and a pen and wrote my poem.

 

It began, in childlike verse,

‘At times, in quiet moments

There’s a longing in us all,

When, like strange music from afar,

We hear it then, the call.’

 

Yes, it was like music. A haunting, half-remembered tune tugging at my mind. A few more verses followed, then the poem ended,

‘Some day, when I am listening,

The music will be clear,

And then I’ll follow far away

That magic call I hear.’

 

Another eleven years went by before the ‘music’ became clear. At last I realised who the musician was, and said Yes to following him.

 

The next 50 years

That was fifty years ago.

 A few days ago I sat with a friend in a restaurant at Wellington Point. We talked about everything and nothing, enjoying good food while outside the sun glistened on the bushes and birds twittered in the trees. In the background, too, was the murmur of happy chatter as a few dozen people enjoyed lunch on a glorious South-East Queensland autumn day. We are blessed.

My heart swelled with gratitude for the fifty happy years of being a Christian. There have been plenty of ups and downs, that’s for sure, but always God’s been there to carry me through and faithful friends were beside me. An unusual life, perhaps, but a rich life.