Experiencing God at Home (5 page)

Our earliest memories as children centered on church. Worship services, Sunday school, potlucks, and friends from church were central to our lives. That wasn’t unusual, considering our father was the pastor. It had not seemed terribly unusual when, in a special-called family meeting, our parents informed us we were moving to Canada. However, our dad is notoriously optimistic! During that meeting, he excitedly told us about the enormous possibilities for ministry in Canada and about the snow we would have fun playing in. However, he somehow overlooked the facts that the church only consisted of ten people, and that the church building was the biggest eyesore in the city, and the kindest description of the church parsonage was “modest.” (Luckily for the church there was no Google Earth street view back then!)

Those early days in Saskatoon taught our family much about perseverance. We learned to keep our eyes on God instead of on the problems that seemed to always be lurking around the corner. We can still remember attending Sunday school in those early days of the church. An elderly British accountant taught us kids in the church basement. Every spring, the winter runoff would cause water to seep into the building. We’d arrive early Sunday mornings with our father and mop up the water on the floor. Then as our Bible lesson commenced, we watched water steadily creeping back into the room. When the water finally reached the legs of the table where we were sitting, class was dismissed!

During those days, we also discovered what a church “family” is all about. We did not have any blood relatives within a thousand miles of us, so our church family became our “cousins,” “grandparents,” “uncles,” and “aunts.”

Even though our church was never in danger of being described as a megachurch, our father was highly respected and, in the case of some of our friends, held in awe. He wasn’t overbearing, demanding, or super spiritual. In fact, he had a playful side that took diabolical delight in practical jokes. (He could
not
be trusted with firecrackers!) Our church was filled with new believers, and for many of them, our father was the first pastor they had ever met. He was still developing his understanding of the biblical principles that would one day be published in the book
Experiencing God
.
But even in its embryonic form, our father’s biblical teaching was as riveting as it was powerful.
1
The church of our youth was a beehive of exciting activity. The lights of the church seemed to be on around the clock, every day of the week.

In the 1980s there were swarms of teenagers, university students, Bible school students, and curious visitors trafficking through the building. There were dozens of mission churches in surrounding towns to which many of our church members drove on Sundays to teach, preach, sing, play musical instruments, and lead Bible studies. It was normal for people to come to know Christ throughout the week and be introduced to the congregation on Sundays. For our family, these days were especially exciting because we remembered how close the church had come to shutting its doors. It may have been at that early time in our lives that we first realized the dramatic impact one family could make on an otherwise hopeless situation.

Serious Times and Difficult Days

One of the most challenging moments for our family during the early years in Saskatoon was when our mother became seriously ill after our baby sister was born. At the time, we were not told how close she was to dying—at one point, the doctors had informed our father they did not think they could save her life—but the memories of taking cards and flowers to her in the hospital are etched in our minds to this day. We are not sure what was going through our father’s mind at that time. He had five children between the ages of a few months and ten years old, no family to help him, a church to run, kids to feed and get to school, a baby to manage, and a wife in the hospital with a life-threatening condition. He certainly would have wondered why God brought him to Canada only to have his American wife become gravely ill. However, our father’s mantra has always been, “Bring your troubles to God and your faith to the people.”

Our home life was one of organized chaos more than disciplined calm. There were five kids with five schedules, five sets of homework, mountains of laundry, and a veritable army to feed at every meal, including numerous guests. Complicating those issues was a meager income with which to purchase food and a dad who seemed to be gone far more than he was at home. But we felt loved and safe. And, we knew God was working in and through our little church that miraculously kept growing.

Maybe it was the long, cold (we’re talking Siberia cold) winters that toughened us up. Or perhaps it was due to the fact that we sat squarely on the lower end of the middle class (or the top end of poverty level) that strengthened our resolve to trust God in the good times as well as the difficult. One thing was certain: our parents were not quitters. Our father was a man of faith who regularly put his trust in God for all to see. Perhaps he got his steady nerve from his British father who survived the horrors of the First World War. When my dad was running a Bible college, he once asked a pastor to fly four hundred miles to Saskatoon once a month to teach classes. The pastor was uncertain whether the funds would be available to cover his airfare. Ultimately the man agreed to come, saying, “Henry, I don’t have the faith that the money will be there, but based on your faith, I will agree to come.”

Looking back, we’re not sure how our mother held it all together in those days. She was (and is) a very strong woman. During our first month in Canada, she walked straight into a burglar at 2:00 a.m. as he was entering her bedroom. (The unwary thief’s ears are probably
still
ringing from that scream!) She was not perfect (we have stories, but we are sworn to secrecy!), but she was our fiercest, most reliable, and loyal supporter. She was also the best cook we knew (her homemade cinnamon buns were legendary!) and a woman of prayer. She would later return to work part-time in order to obtain some of the items our little house needed, such as a paved driveway, a microwave oven, a dishwasher, finished bedrooms in the basement, and Christmas presents. You can read her perspective on our home in her book
Experiencing God Around the Kitchen Table
.

Almost African Missionaries

The missionary spirit was instilled into us as children in our earliest memories. Our father’s first church was in a high-crime neighborhood in the Bay area of San Francisco. The local police regularly called on the young preacher to help them with difficult cases (including talking a man who had barricaded himself in his house with a gun while threatening to kill his wife, into turning over his gun). Our father’s second church had been victimized by two church splits. In both cases, God used him to bring the congregation back to health and vibrancy.

Then our parents attended an international mission service and were challenged to go wherever God called them to serve. In obedience, they applied to their denomination’s international mission board. They were preliminarily approved to serve at a Bible college in Africa. Then a problem occurred. Richard began to suffer unexplained fainting spells. Richard’s brothers like to explain that a battery of tests were performed on his brain, but they could find nothing! Doctors suspected a brain tumor. The mission board suggested our parents not proceed until the medical issue was resolved. Had it not been for Richard’s health, we would have all grown up in Africa! Instead, it was during the following year that Faith Baptist Church in Canada contacted our parents, and they were redirected north instead of east. Interestingly, once our family moved to Canada, doctors ran the same tests on Richard in order to continue his treatments, but they found nothing wrong.

Growing up in pioneer missions in Saskatchewan, we learned about making sacrifices for the cause of Christ. One sacrifice was living far from relatives. Our mother’s sister’s family served as missionaries to Eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain was still a menacing reality. Likewise, our maternal grandparents took early retirement and set off as associate missionaries to Zambia, Africa. We regularly received “aerogram” letters from our grandparents and marvelled at how a retired couple could make such a drastic change to follow God’s will for their lives.

There were the inevitable squabbles between us kids as the four boys shared bedrooms in our cramped little bungalow. Our mother attempted on many occasions to have regular family devotions with us, but with such crazy schedules, dad’s travelling, and his multitudinous responsibilities with the church and its missions, we were doomed to failure. Our father used to explain that it was more important to live out his faith for his family than to merely talk about faith from a book. He believed more lessons could be learned by implementing Deuteronomy 6:4–9:

Listen, Israel: The L
ord
our God, the L
ord
is One. Love the L
ord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (
hcsb
)

While having regular family devotions or making use of devotional books is a fantastic thing to do, our parents believed the most important thing they could do for their children was to daily live out their faith before us. While we doubted at times that our parent’s methods of discipline were always fair (the older children received
far
more discipline than the younger ones, despite the fact they were
much
better behaved), and though our father could definitely have been home more, and though there were various parental practices that could have been improved upon, there was never any question that our parents truly loved God with all of their heart and would do whatever He told them. That left a lasting impression on us all.

Following in Big Shoes

Growing up, we never had the nicest house on the block (we weren’t even in the top 100), nor did we sport designer fashions. All the same, we children sensed there was something special about our family. It wasn’t that our father was a famous author, because that wouldn’t come for many more years. It was that God was
real
in our home. We had front-row seats to observe God answer our family’s prayers. We witnessed lives being changed because of what God was doing through us. We experienced broken people arriving on our doorstep and leaving changed. You would have thought we were the wealthiest people in town by the confidence we had for the future. And though we have been deeply appreciative of the way our father’s book
Experiencing God
has impacted people around the globe, we can’t really say we were surprised. The book simply summarized the lessons God taught our parents while we were growing up in their home. We had watched those truths changing lives for years, and we knew that once those same truths spread beyond our family and church, countless other people would feel the impact as well.

Our father missed more than one of our ball games and band concerts over the years, but he had an uncanny way of showing up when God was about to doing something powerful in the life of one of his children. He was present when each of his five children gave their lives to Christ. He baptized each of them and performed their wedding ceremonies. He was present as we each surrendered to God’s call into ministry and as we walked across the stage for each of our graduation ceremonies.

Our father, now in his late seventies, deals with a variety of physical challenges and does not have the energy or stamina he once had. His voice has lost its thunder, his body is no longer a slave to his will, and his memory is increasingly selective, but his love for God remains undiminished. His determination to faithfully serve his Lord remains strong. He enjoys spending daily time with God more now than ever before. His example has been the determinative influence in each of his children’s lives. If you know our father, you will recognize his influence throughout the following pages. But before we delve into those truths, we need to tell you a little about our own homes.

Questions for Reflection/Discussion

1. Could you discern God’s activity in your home as you were growing up? If you could, what kinds of things did God do in your childhood home?

2. What did you learn about God by watching your parents?

3. What place did the church have in your childhood home?

4. Are you more focused on your career or on raising your children right now? Are there any adjustments God wants you to make?

5. How might God want to use your family for His purposes in the future?

6. How will your children look back on their time growing up in your home?

Notes

1. At Blackaby Ministries International we have literally hundreds of cassette tapes of Henry Blackaby sermons that were recorded at Faith Baptist Church beginning in the 1970s that are being formatted into MP3 files for downloading. You can access them from our Web site at www.blackaby.net.