Twice I was invited to exhort at the old Moreland Hill meeting. The presiding brother, Percy Drummond, called upon a fine old brother, Jabez Davis, to read Matthew 22. It was a very powerful reading but, oddly, the verses were not in the text order, and he missed out one or two. On the next occasion, Jim Drummond as presiding bother called upon Jabez to read Haggai 2. There was a fairly long pause and then, “Sorry, I don’t know that one, brother.” Jabez was illiterate. He wasn’t reading at all. He was reciting from memory.
WHEN I READ Bro. Hugo Mitchell’s exhortation, I remember when I met Wilfred Grunnill, an English missionary brother who was in his eighties. He had a long white beard, and incredible determination of spirit. He arrived in Port Antonio after midnight in an old beat up motor car with no muffler and no headlamps. He had made the eighty mile journey from Kingston, through the night and over the Blue Mountains without lights. I asked him how he had managed. He said that as a seaman, he had always had good night vision, and for some of the way he had just followed the tail lights of a car in front. He also said that he had a flat tire on the way over, which is why he was a bit late.
I ONCE VISITED a little ecclesia in the mountains of one of the West Indian islands. The Sunday I went they had a baptism — a 71-year-old lady. They asked me to officiate. We went to the only water available, a rushing mountain stream. We made a little pool by damming the flow with big stones. The water was ice cold. I shivered continuously from the time I stepped in. It didn’t seem to worry the new sister at all. She was so eager that she almost plunged into the water. On emerging, she paused a moment to raise her hands and shout an Alleluia. She took the emblems afterwards as if her life depended on it, which, if you come to think about it, it did. A few days later, after I had left the area, I heard that she had fallen asleep in Christ, from pneumonia.
AS A YOUNG SISTER, I spent a few years in the Caribbean. The most meaningful moment for me was a breaking of bread meeting in a brother’s house in Marabella. There was a Hindu funeral going on right in the next yard, and the wailing and shrieking was so loud that it was impossible for us to hear either presiding or exhorting brother. Both decided they could not compete. So we remembered the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus in complete silence. The emblems meant so much more to me that day.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One