Steeper Still: The Learning Curve of God’s Extravagant Generosity.
Coming to Canada Part 2.
Our hosts met us off the ferry at Swartz Bay, on Vancouver Island. The dad of the family has broad shoulders, attentive eyes and a strong jaw. He had a slightly furrowed brow as we disembarked from the ferry as foot passengers. I wasn’t sure if he was joking. His arms-folded body language certainly didn’t give anything away.
“That’s your yellow card,” he said
No warm welcome, just a riddle. Had we been playing football?
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Your yellow card…”
An awkward pause. Then, a smile crept across that slightly stern look; joy dawned in his eyes. Charlotte laughed. I unclenched my buttocks.
“You bought your ferry tickets when my son was to buy them for you. Your yellow card!”
It’s true. Their son, who lives in Vancouver, kindly met us off the plane and took us across town in rush hour traffic to the ferry terminal, adamantly trying to buy us our tickets before we set sail. Even though we didn’t know how in the world we were going to travel through Canada and make it home to Scotland with the funds we had left, after our escapades at Bethel Church, we were still trying to be self-sufficient. We bought ferry tickets on our credit card with that stiff-upper-lip British resolve, trying in vain to shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our predicament and the kindness of a stranger. Carry on! What! What!
“You will not be doing that again,” our host continued. “We have it on good authority that you will not be buying another thing during your stay with us.”
They were true to their word. That “good authority” was the Lord Jesus himself. This loving couple and their family became the embodied grace of God to us, as we ’hunting dogs’ (see part 1 for reference) began to learn what it felt like to walk and plan in step with the Holy Spirit.
Charlotte and I had only met this couple twice before at a conference. Each year they had invited us to come and visit them on Vancouver Island if we were ever in that neck of the woods. And here we now stood. Speaking of woods… their garden is a wonderland. Mature evergreen trees envelop the house, hiding it from the road. Hummingbirds whir down from branches to feed at a sugar-water feeder outside their patio doors. For the sake of honouring their privacy, like that forested garden, for the remainder of this post, this treasured couple will be called Mama and Papa Bear.
Now empty nesters, these two freely opened up their basement suite for us with the sincere invite to stay as long as we liked. Mama Bear took Charlotte shopping on one of our first days with them. She returned with a new pair of hiking shoes. Papa Bear gave us the gift of a Canadian cell phone and a GPS and, wait for it, a car. A bloom’n car! We had a borrow of it to explore the island during our visit. Then, when the penny dropped that Canada isn’t big into passenger rail travel, and we had no idea how we were going to travel to Lethbridge, fourteen and a half hours away, they didn’t miss a beat in offering us the vehicle. Just like that.
It wasn’t just Mama and Papa bear who imbued such incredible generosity. Their fully grown cubs live this way of life too. One night while visiting their eldest son and his wife, who shared a house with another couple, we were recounting something of our story and how we came to be in Canada. On hearing this, they felt compelled to give us all the cash that they had in their home! $700 from one couple, $500 from the other. It was remarkable. And both Charlotte and I became utterly undone before such lavish generosity.
“Howard, do you trust me?”
In and through this exceedingly generous family, we began to taste afresh the fruit of what happens when you trust in the Lord. In that offering at Bethel Church on our final night we gave to God only what He had first given to us. All things come from Him, move through Him and return to Him. In our surrender and trust we opened the door into his sheer goodness and parental care. God’s blessings are rich and He adds no sorrow to them.
Before we leave Vancouver Island and this family, I must tell of a trip that they encouraged Charlotte and me to make. Papa bear gave me the keys to the car and slipped a $100 bill into my hand, inviting me to take Charlotte out for the day and head “up island” to go explore Cathedral Grove. Cathedral Grove is a forest of ancient evergreen trees. Massive Redwoods and Douglas Firs tower over you as you stand at the base of gargantuan trunks. Charlotte and I walked along the pathways of this forest, feeling ant-like. As if whispered through the branches of these giants, verses from Isaiah came to my mind.
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool;
what is the house that you would build for me,
and what is the place of my rest?
All these things my hand has made,
and so all these things came to be,” (Isaiah 66:1+2)
For years we had named the dream we felt called to build in Scotland “Highland Cathedral.” A church-planting church, rooted in a life of prayer connecting us to the God of revival that an older generation had known and their very countenances still testified about. This vision’s genesis happened after an evening spent at Loch Carron when I was twenty-one. Many years later, we had sought to establish this embryonic vision in our own strength. It didn’t work. Yet, here, thousands of miles away, in a different kind of cathedral, we were reframed in humility. How could any church contain the unmatched and limitless glory of the One whose hands made and shaped all things?
I felt minuscule. So insignificant in the face of this revelation amidst the moss-covered deadfall on the pine needled floor of this ancient Grove. And yet, another joy-filled thought of possibility crossed the horizon of my mind as I craned upwards looking at these green spires. It’s the Lord himself who is building his church. If he can do this in creation, what might he do for the honour of his name in and through his people? Those verses in Isaiah continue,
“But this is the one to whom I will look:
he who is humble and contrite in spirit
and trembles at my word.”
The look of God. What a thought. He is no mute idol or the clockmaker of the deist, but a living God who sees, who moves towards, and dwells with people who posture their hearts in a certain way. These ones embrace humility, seeing their brokenness and their inability to heal themselves, and grow in trembling before the account of the God who comes to rescue them, drawing them to himself. Again. And again. And again. Relentless in His tender mercy.
Modern Physics tells us that the act of observation is never neutral; just ask Heisenberg about his “Uncertainty Principle.” The way he set up his equipment changed the results generated in the experiment. How you look at something, or someone, changes the relationship and the behaviour of the other. I didn’t realise it at the time, but in this forest, I was beginning to see what a B-Road life was all about. The idea, once toasted to over a dram in Edinburgh, was coming to life. With the wisdom of hindsight, I understand now that the trees of that Grove had a sacramental quality to them (as does everything in creation). A sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace. The visible sign of that ancient, evergreen Cathedral brought a grace that caused me to ask, “What indeed is the house, Lord?“ And that same grace gifted me a moment to sense the loving look of God, the Creator settling his gaze on his creature. It’s a look that will change your life if you let it. But remember, it takes God to reveal God. All we can do is to humble ourselves to ask for the grace to pray.
Later that day, we were stopped at traffic lights, just after Nanaimo, heading south to Victoria. I could hear Charlotte’s internal cogs, and she could probably hear mine. We were both quiet and contemplative. I was in awe of the trees in that Grove, dumbfounded too by the generosity of Mama and Papa Bear. Scotland was never far from my thoughts. I turned to Charlotte and asked,
“What are we doing here in Canada?”
She couldn’t answer. Neither could I. But then the laughter came; deep, uproarious, from the belly. It went on for about five minutes. I clenched the steering wheel, making the panting sounds of a woman in labour, still trying to drive as the tears streamed down my face. Charlotte, between silent shoulder shrug laughter, made a high pitched giggling sound as if impersonating a firework. Our strange sounds only intensified the laughter in the other.
We had no idea what lay ahead, but in the face of God’s consistent care and provision we learned to become as little children, holding all things (even long cherished visions) lighter, with open hands.
