Meaningful Moments

  • A deeply meaningful moment for me was when I was trying to find the home of Bro. Roberto de Queiroz in Cuiaba, Brazil, a city of a million people. Having no address and speaking no Portuguese, it would seem like a hopeless quest. It was Sunday morning and the only person I met who spoke English took me to a kind of shanty town with lots of small homes along narrow lanes, and left me with the information that she thought that a Roberto lived somewhere in that area. I wandered up and down one or two of the lanes. Five minutes later, from one of the homes I heard music that was unmistakable. It was a Christadelphian tape of Praise the Lord hymns. The front door was ajar and I peeped in. A table was set with bread and wine. My search was over.
  • Unforgettable was traveling on a bus in Trinidad with the late Bro. Will Watkins. He sat at the front, and at every major stopping point he put his Bible on his seat, and shot from the bus to give out as many handbills as possible before it set off again. It went on like this for the entire journey ­every journey. Thousands of invitations to read God’s word were distributed in this way.
  • To me, one marvelous moment was when, right after hurricane Flora in 1963 had devastated Tobago, brother and sister Quamina opened their home to around thirty homeless people and sheltered and fed them for weeks, simply out of neighborly love. And he used the opportunity to teach some of them the truth!
  • Alfred Brown was a Jesuit priest who left his order and became a Christadelphian. In the last few weeks of his long life, when he was weak and bedridden, he was to be visited by a very prominent Australian brother on the Bible School circuit. It was planned to hold a brief breaking of bread. As the table was being laid, he bent over to me and whispered, “Do you think the brother will let me give the exhortation and tell him that he must hold on firmly to the truth?”