26. A Gate of Hope
26
A Gate of Hope
This book is dedicated to Katherine Morgan, whom I met in New York City in 1952 when she had brought her four daughters home from Colombia for high school. She worked for a missionary magazine called Voices, in a tiny office in a dismal building near City Hall. I sometimes helped her there, doing odd jobs for the staff—consisting of Katherine, one or two other women (if my memory is correct), and the superannuated editor.
We usually ate lunch in the office, making tea in a seedy little washroom and sometimes feasting on cold mutton pies brought in by the editor, a Scot, who thought even the solidified fat delectable. I plied Katherine with questions about her life—her experiences as missionary, wife, mother, widow. She answered them always with good humor and often downright hilarity. When I probed things most of us would call problems, she made light of them.
One day, in answer to a question, she said, “I’m sure I’m a better woman because I’m a widow than I would have been otherwise.”
She was unfailingly thoughtful and kind to the old man she worked under; she took time for me, a hopeful missionary candidate (and more or less “booted” me to South America); she laid down her life daily for more than half a century in Pasto and then in Bogotá. She kept open house for anybody and everybody—the poor, the sorrowing, the ill, the insane, the outcasts and criminals, the dying. Anyone who needed a mother and a home and love found them all at Katherine’s. She did it not merely unselfishly. She did it with no thought of self whatsoever.
Her Valley of Baca (weeping) was made a place of springs for me and for thousands of Colombians. For me she stood as irrefutable proof that the answer to our loneliness is love—not our finding someone to love us, but our surrendering to the God who has always loved us with an everlasting love. Loving Him is then expressed in a happy and full-hearted pouring out of ourselves in love to others.
I’m still behind Katherine and all the rest who have so brightly shown me this pathway to God. I’m praying and trusting that the same Lord who drew them after Himself will keep on drawing me. We have His promise, “I will woo her, I will go with her into the wilderness and comfort her: there I will restore her vineyards, turning the Vale of Trouble into the Gate of Hope” (Hosea 2:14–15 NEB).