The small beginning
"For who has despised the day of small things? But these seven will be glad when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel – these are the eyes of the LORD which range to and fro throughout the earth." [Zechariah 4:10]
I was born on the 23rd day of April 1943 and then left at the hospital by my mother until she was forced to collect me, maybe up to a year later. In the world today and even in Christian societies so many people are blaming their childhood for today’s situation in their lives. It is so easy to do this when society is saying the reasons are because of what has happened to you as a child, and the Church has also taken this on board. It is time for us to look back and see how God’s hand was upon us in bringing us through a training period to make us more aware of His saving grace.
When my wife, Penny, and I look back it is hard to believe so many years have passed and we start to wonder where they have gone. We hear statements like 50 years ago and the scary thing is we can remember that far back and even further!
As I look back over my life it is amazing how God has been there with me and how He has been watching even before I knew of Him. My earliest recollection of the Lord would have been in a Town Hall in a little village called Tokoroa in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand. This village later grew into a town of some 20,000 people but back then it had a garage and a butchers shop, there was also a grocer’s store and that was about it, except as most places had, a Hall where all the local functions took place, including church services.
I recall quite clearly at the age of about four, the day we attended a church service, later I found out it was a Sunday school class where the Minister was talking about Jesus and said when we died we went to heaven. I listened very carefully to his talk and took in every word and thought about this very deeply. So by the time I arrived home I had made up my mind about this dying business and proclaimed to my mother, “I want nothing to do with Jesus and this dying thing as I would miss Christmas”. I am glad God has a heart for children as He must have had a big smile on His face at such simple thinking.
I started school at the Tokoroa primary school, as I said is situated near the centre of the North Island of New Zealand. My earliest memory of school was of being beaten up by two girls. In those days if I had done anything I would have been taken to the Head Master and then he would have had his go at me as well. We moved from there in 1949 and this meant a change of schools and a long bus trip to school each day. There was a much longer one when we went to the Putaruru High School, now College. Tokoroa, Lichfield and Putaruru all schools we attended are all in the same area of the country, with Lichfield, the less known by anybody living more than an hour outside the area. It is where the local hall was for our monthly dances, which I will mention later.
I grew up on a dairy farm about two miles south of a place called Hodderville, which was a Salvation Army Training Farm, in the 40s and 50s when people had had enough of war and just wanted to live in peace. However there were things that happened during the war years that many still regret. I was fostered out about the age of two years, my brother was also fostered out and my younger sister was fostered out and never lived with us again. When I was about 18 months old, my elder sister was killed in a fire so I missed the experience of having a big sister that I can remember. My foster home was in Hamilton and I have many memories of being in that home and not all were pleasant. Being locked in a cupboard for misbehaving, for a 2 to 3 year old does not do a lot for your self-esteem and sometimes it was a high cupboard. I even remember thinking of jumping from the top cupboard to the bed but I think the Lord was looking after me or was I just too frightened to make the jump? Many nights of the week I would have nightmares with these large faces looking at me from the corners of the ceiling. Many years later when visiting Oxford in England, I saw the Gargoyles on the buildings and recognised them as the faces in my bedroom all those years before. I did have a “big” foster brother but he was too old to worry about some little kid running around.
So for the first two to three years I was not in my mother’s care, in fact I may have been left in the hospital from a very early age. The hospital wanted to return me to my mother’s care but they could not locate her and even sent out a search for her. In her own words, she was “forced to collect me from the railway station when the nurses took me home” and from there I was fostered out for the next two or three years, so I had the kind of start in life that many blame for their poor situation through life.
Matthew 18 talks about how God loves the little children and warns people to care and look after them whether we have a parent or not we can be sure of one thing, and that is, God is always there and is our Father in Heaven. [“Our Father who is in Heaven” Matthew 6:9.]
Dennis.