Rewards and pain

Peter Kimber

If I were to choose a verse of Scripture to sum up the life of my family, it would be Matthew 19:29: ‘...everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life’.

My parents were missionaries who, in a very literal sense, left home and certainly wealth to work in India. They also left family behind — over and over again. My most painful memory is of saying goodbye to my father when he returned to India just after the end of the Second World War, leaving my mother with four children. Some months later, my mother and I followed, leaving behind two sisters and a brother, since they were then too old to be educated abroad. I shall never forget the small band of saints who saw us off at Liverpool Street Station, singing ‘God be with you till we meet again’ Inevitably, they began their singing at too high a pitch, and failed to hit the top note; public embarrassment was added to the pain of separation. It would be five years before my father saw my brother and sisters again. When they did meet, my brother had grown by 12 inches, and my father didn’t recognise him. These painful separations were commonplace for many missionaries’ children before the era of cheap air transport. Indeed, they were also the experiences of people in secular employment — they were just paid better.

Growing up
There is a cost in following Jesus, not just for those who choose to be his disciples — as my parents had chosen — but also for their families. Jesus promised that there would be abundant rewards, both in this life and the next, but is that true in experience? If you asked British men and women of my parents’ generation what they wanted for their children, I suppose many would have wanted a public school education. I had it. Or a commission in the armed forces? I had it. A place at Oxford? I had it. Congenial employment with steady promotions? I had it. Foreign travel to exotic places? I had it. A happy family life? I had it. Rewards did indeed come for my parents, and for myself too.

This, perhaps, sounds too good to be true, and suspiciously like a prosperity gospel! However, for me there was also a lot of pain along the way, as I grew and questioned my faith. What sort of God takes pleasure in depriving children of their parents? Why couldn’t I have had ‘normal’ parents, rather than seeming eccentrics with very minority views? Why couldn’t I have been a libertine like everyone else, without being wracked with guilt?! The more I looked critically at Christianity the less I believed it —yet to reject it would be to betray my parents, whom I both loved and admired. Church was embarrassing, intellectually a non-event and full of extremely boring people. I was by nature a hedonistic young heathen, but from infancy I had been told that ‘the pleasures of sin last but for a season Growing up was a very difficult and painful process.

I wanted God
I suppose my salvation came about because, although I hated church, I wanted God. Beneath all the tedious repetition of preaching and ‘churchianity’, I knew God was real. But the cost was too great. The crisis came in my late twenties when, in a rambling discussion about Christianity, someone said bluntly, ‘But do you actually believe Christianity is true?’ Put on the spot, I had a heart-stopping moment. In my mind, I could hear Paul: ‘If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved’ ‘Yes, I do believe it,’ I said. A Rubicon had been crossed: not the end of the story, but the end of the beginning.

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