The God who holds me

Howard Peskett

It was Christmas 1980 when Wai Mun Foong, a sixteen-year old Malaysian girl who was living with us at the time, was knocked down by a bus outside Newcastle’s civic centre. She died the next day and her funeral was on Christmas Eve. I vividly remember striding across Newcastle’s Town Moor under a lowering sky on Christmas Day questioning God.

In the last twenty years I have experienced fiercer sorrows, passed through deeper waters, found more unanswerable questions and faced many deaths. But I am glad that I can also trace in the history of my life the tender mercy of God, his provision, his guidance, his adequacy and his nearness.

My earliest years were spent in China, during the traumatic Japanese and civil wars. My father was an evangelist, my mother a surgeon. All my life I have been fascinated by this enormous country, and especially the utterly amazing growth of the church there during the past fifty years.

A catastrophe opened chapter two: I was ten when my mother died in 1952. The toxic effects of this childhood bereavement continued into my forties. As a pastor’s son attending church three times every Sunday for years on end, the language and cadences of the King James Bible imprinted themselves on my memory. A schoolmaster’s explanation of Isaiah 53:5 helped me to cross the bridge from an inherited to a personal faith. At university we were privileged to listen to some wonderful Bible teachers; the greatest effect was not necessarily made by the cleverest. I remember one small, Swiss missionary lady striding to a conference platform to speak on ‘The cost of doing God’s will With eyes twinkling, she warned us — by teaching and story — that the cost of not doing God’s will was infinitely more impoverishing! A memorable achievement of those years was to read through the whole Bible with the help of a book, still in print, called Search the Scriptures (IVP). Looking back, I realise that I charged through my Bible reading like a combine harvester: cutting, threshing, sifting, storing. Deeper layers of my consciousness lay unattended, under-nourished, unhealed; the repercussions would appear later.

The overwhelming impression of twenty busy, tiring years as an OMF missionary in Singapore is the joy of friendships and Christian community. The enthusiasm of those Singaporeans for Bible-teaching was electrifying I will never forget it.

Repeated personal failures, disappointments and brittleness turned my attention slowly to innermost things; I became more aware and ashamed of my hypocrisy, perplexed by my inner ‘unintegratedness’: knowledge did not necessarily connote wisdom; and how did wisdom connect with holiness? I kept reading, but now with deeper urgency, with greater passion, sometimes with tears.

In the most recent chapter of my life — teaching at Trinity College, Bristol — I have experienced the love of God more deeply than ever before. The intensity with which I drove myself to do God’s will, as I perceived it, has been transposed; now I see myself more clearly to be his beloved child and the object of his delight. The book which I had often seen as a manual of orders I now see as an all-encompassing sensory wonder, a foghorn of salvation. It is a book for all seasons, to read and ponder; it is like sailing the Pacific Ocean; like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset; like meeting a dear friend at a distant airport; like the smell of an autumn bonfire or the scent of one who is deeply loved. Through this book I see God, hear God, know God. I am transported from Bristol to the bright land of the Trinity and back again that I might live out, here and now, as much of the divine life as a human being can contain. John Wesley prayed, ‘Lord, let me be a man of one book!’ and so do I. It is an incomparable book leading to an incomparable God who holds me and all that is in being. Oh, yes!

© Scripture Union