11. The Girl in the Church
As excited as I was about my prospects in hotel management, just before I jumped in with both feet I found myself being tugged at the heart toward military service. India was at war with Pakistan, and a deep sense of duty had begun to emerge in me. A college buddy had also talked about joining the military, and we realized we shared a desire to become pilots in India’s Air Force.
So with the blessing of our families, my buddy and I traveled all the way to Dehradun in the foothills of the Himalayas, where we would be tested and interviewed with several hundred other applicants. Only a top handful would be accepted. After a full battery of mental, physical, and endurance tests, I was overjoyed to learn that, out of the few hundred competing, I had placed third and my buddy fourth. The officers in charge seemed impressed, knowing I had good physical endurance because of all the sports I played.
That night, I called home excitedly, “I’m going to make it. All that’s left is the interview with the senior officer tomorrow.”
For the first time, I could tell by my dad’s tone that he was proud. I was told there would be a big celebration party for me when I arrived home.
The next morning, I sat confidently in front of the senior officer — a gruff, heavyset man — ready for anything. After many questions about my values and my hopes and dreams, he startled me with a direct statement.
“Son, I’m rejecting you,” he said abruptly.
“Huh?” I thought, dumbstruck.
“You’re being turned down by the Air Force,” he repeated.
I was stunned into silence. I had a hard time believing this. Before I could ask why, he explained. “This job is about killing, and psychologically you are unfit to kill.”
What could I say to that? It hit me hard. He must have seen tears welling up in my eyes, because he said, “I’m doing you a favor, young man. Believe it.”
When I stepped off the train in Delhi, a crowd of family and friends was waiting for me with garlands. Talk about a low point — it was absolutely humiliating! I struggled with it; but deep inside, my concern was for a reason other than another failure. I wondered, “Is this God stopping my steps?”
I pondered much on this for the next few days. Finally someone suggested I go and talk to a visiting missionary who was staying at the YWCA, a man named Russell Self from Canada. I gathered myself to go and see him, and I ended up pouring out my heart to him over my disappointment.
Mr. Self sat listening and nodding his head, and I thought, “He must be thinking, ‘This kid is just taking up my time.’ ” Instead, he responded with sage counsel.
“We can be so sure of ourselves at times,” he said, “that we don’t know there are some doors we shouldn’t be entering. God not only opens doors; he shuts them too. Sometimes very painfully.”
“This has to be one of those times,” I thought. But knowing that didn’t lessen my pain.
“What we often miss,” Mr. Self added, “is that some of those shut doors reveal the most important clues as to where God wants us to go.”
What was the clue for me here?
“Remember this, from Psalm 37,” he said. “ ‘The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way.’ God has it all in his order, Ravi. I believe that’s what you’re to know from this.” Then he opened his Bible, leaned forward, and read: “Commit thy way unto the Lord; Trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.”
“Where are you reading from?” I asked.
“Psalm 37:5,” he replied.
That was all I needed. The Word of God is so pointed, so reassuring, so comforting in our time of need, and so full of warnings when we flirt with the sin of our selfish desires. This was something so new to me — to hear words of such deep penetration into the soul.
I knew he was right. As I left the Y, I thought about the Air Force officer who had rejected me, and I realized he had been right too. Not only was I psychologically unfit to kill; deep down I knew I didn’t have what it took to be a pilot. The young men flying in India’s Air Force were doing all kinds of daring things in planes — things that simply were not within me to do. On my little bicycle, yes — but in the air, I don’t think so! “Yes, God,” I whispered as I walked out the door of the Y that day, “only You know the direction my steps are to go. I will trust You with them.”
My buddy, who had completed his interview after I had completed mine, had thrown up his hands in triumph, certain, as I had been, that we would fly together in India’s Air Force. Yet only he was selected for the National Defense Academy. Five years later, I would be heartbroken to learn he was killed when his plane went down in the Himalayas. That news sadly brought back so many memories of my friend — and it reaffirmed to me that God ordered my steps and that our times are in His hands.
As my father got closer to retirement (which comes at age fifty-five in India), he began to think more about career prospects for his children. He was still moving in powerful circles, and he must have wondered aloud about our futures while he mixed with people like Roland Michener, who was then the Canadian ambassador to India. One day Ambassador Michener suggested to him, “Why don’t you consider moving your children to Canada?”
My dad must have been taken aback at that thought. It would be a profound move for our family. Yet again, it might be a good one.
“If you decide to do it,” the ambassador said, “I will clear the way for you.”
When my father brought this up with the family, we were astounded at the thought of such a move, yet somewhat excited too. As Dad explained his reasoning, I felt the sheer excitement of the possibility. Going to Canada? I would be that much closer to my dream of going to Cornell University. I could finish my hotel management studies there, get a general manager’s job in a large hotel, and simply do what I wanted to do.
“I’ve put in the application,” my father said. He hesitated for a moment, then spoke his concern. “Only we don’t have the money to go.”
I blurted out the first thought that came to my mind. “Dad, we can pray,” I said. “The Lord can make it happen if He orders it. Why give up?”
I didn’t usually speak that forthrightly in my father’s presence, much less to his face. But I was emerging out of a shell, and I felt the daring of the moment, the daring of faith. “Why not have courage?” I thought. “If going to Canada is what the Lord wants for our family, we’ll be able to go.”
My father was still a year away from his official retirement at the time, so he couldn’t make the move immediately. But he could send Ajit and me ahead to sort of scout out the land, with the idea of moving the rest of the family later.
“What would you two think of going to Canada ahead of time?” he asked my brother and me.
We were only too willing to go, for the family’s sake. The question became, where in Canada should we go?
Ajit and I knew that John Teibe was from Calgary, so we decided that’s where we would move. Then we talked to a friend, and she chuckled. “Why would you go to Calgary?” she said. “It’s more agrarian. You should be heading to Toronto. It’s much more cosmopolitan.”
Just like that, my brother and I decided, “OK, we’ll go to Toronto.” At the time, that’s how most of our decisions were made.
A few weeks before we were to leave, my father received some news from the Indian Airlines Corporation. He was informed that because of his government service over the years, he and his family were entitled to fly anywhere in the world that Air India flew, first class and free of charge. I just about hit the ceiling as I leaped into the air.
What a huge encouragement that was for our family! All of us would be able to make that major part of the move for free. Of course, more pertinently in my mind was that it was an answer to our family’s prayer.
In May of 1966, on the day Ajit and I were to leave, the temperature in Delhi was 120 degrees. And, of course, there was no air-conditioning in our car as we rushed around trying to take care of everything before leaving; we could barely touch the steering wheel or, for that matter, sit on those plastic seats. When we finally were ready, we boarded the airplane, which was bound first for London before going on to New York and then to Toronto. To our great pleasure, we were escorted to the first-class section, where we were seated behind Mr. J. R. D. Tata, the principal owner of the Tata conglomerate and the chairman of Air India. That in itself was a thrill.
Five days and three international flights later, after a brief stop in London to see relatives, Ajit and I flopped, exhausted, onto our beds in a Toronto rooming house that a friend had secured for us at the cost of eight dollars a week each. But our arrival had not been without incident. As our plane had taken off from London for Toronto, Ajit grabbed my arm and gasped, “The plane is on fire!” Sure enough, as I looked out the windows I saw that one of the engines had flames coming from it. The pilot made a dramatic turnaround, and several minutes later, after what seemed like an eternity, we descended to safety with a heavy thud. The automatic extinguishers worked, and we breathed a sigh of relief, but you could imagine our thoughts at that time. The next day’s newspapers read, “Plane ablaze circles London” — somewhat of an exaggeration, but no doubt capturing the risk for which my brother and I had volunteered.
Because of the foreign exchange restrictions established by the Indian government, we were allowed to bring from India only fifty dollars each, with a little over four hundred dollars to follow a month later. This amount in rupees was three times our dad’s monthly salary, and we knew he’d gone out on a limb to get it for us — in fact, he had probably borrowed it. So we knew we had to be careful to conserve it all. It had to last us until we had found jobs and received our first paychecks. Starting with only fifty dollars each — with eight dollars each paid out for our room rent, and eight dollars each for a deposit — we were left in a rather precarious state in a foreign land, praying by the hour that we would soon land a job.
During those first few weeks, my brother and I could hardly wait until noon each day when we would buy our big meal of the day. We would walk over to the supermarket — called “Dominion” — and buy a hot dog for twenty-two cents. On some mornings, when we couldn’t stand going without something to eat, we allowed ourselves some cornflakes at a greasy-spoon place. But essentially, we couldn’t eat very much until we got jobs.
Early on that first morning after our arrival, I phoned the Youth for Christ office in Toronto and told them about our situation. “We came to Christ through Youth for Christ in Delhi,” I explained. “Do you know anyone who might be able to show us around the city?”
The next day, one of the YFC leaders came by and picked us up. We must have unsettled him with all our rapid-fire questions, my first one being, “Is there an evangelical church nearby?” I had had only a brief experience in the church that was fully evangelical back home, Centenary Methodist, and I was anxious to go to one. As he drove along, he pointed out a Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) church just a few blocks away from our rooming house. The sign outside read, “The Alliance Tabernacle.”
“It’s Wednesday,” he said. “They’ll be having their midweek prayer meeting tonight.”
He took us to the parsonage to meet the minister, who wasn’t home at the time, but his wife invited us to the service that night. Excitedly, Ajit and I went that evening — the formal name of the church, we learned, was “Yonge Street Alliance Tabernacle” — and we sat in the front row, even though we could barely hold up our heads from being jet-lagged. We went back the following Sunday, and after the evening service the pastor and his wife, Ray and Anita Deitz, invited us back to their house for a small bite to eat. I remember that night for two reasons: first, how gracious they were to have invited us; and second, how tired we were from jet lag, barely able to keep our eyes open while we waited for the food.
The following Sunday, the church was beginning its annual missions conference, and we were excited to attend it. To our astonishment, the main speaker was a missionary to India, a man named Edgar Llewellyn. He must have been just as startled when he saw us sitting there, two young Indians, in a Canadian C&MA church. It couldn’t have been a common sight in the 1960s; in fact, in the whole of Toronto — now declared by the United Nations to be the most multicultural city in the world — there were only five hundred Indians at the time. Today there are five hundred thousand.
After that service, a retired colonel in the Canadian Army and his wife invited us to their home for Sunday dinner, so we climbed into the backseat of their Lincoln Continental. My brother and I felt as if we were sitting in a living room on wheels. As we pulled onto the street, the window next to my brother suddenly began to roll down — by itself! We stared at each other, each blaming the other with a glare that said, “What are you doing?” Of course, it was the colonel, using his electronic panel to give us some fresh air. We were being introduced to the electronic way of living, and I have to say, on that night, half asleep, we were relieved to be in our beds.
Yonge Street Alliance Tabernacle was not a large church. Although it seated about four hundred people, the average Sunday morning attendance was about three hundred. To Ajit and me, it was a fantastic church to be part of, with good preaching, good music, and a good group for the young people. During those first few months, some wonderful families were gracious hosts to us, feeding us and shuttling us around to see various parts of Toronto. I was fascinated the first time I saw an escalator in a shopping mall, certain that if I tried to board it I would miss my footing and have to be carried out. One couple who had been to India and had actually met my dad some years before took us on a memorable day-trip to the majestic Niagara Falls.
There were a few downsides to our initiation into the congregation, as you might expect with any immigrant experience. My brother and I were often introduced as “natives from India,” which in our minds conjured up images of thatched huts, grass skirts, and spears in hand. It also began to grate on my brother that he was introduced as “Ah-ssszheet.” “It’s AhJeet, with the accent on the second syllable,” he would think, “just the way it’s spelled.” I also got quite frustrated because my English was difficult for some people to understand. I spoke very rapidly, with a strong Indian accent, so I had to force myself to slow down and enunciate every syllable. But that’s where my beloved English authors helped me. I found that C. S. Lewis was handy for much more than practical theology; as I read more of his works, my concentration on his command of language began to improve my fledgling efforts.
Still, we had some very tough days in Toronto at first, and sometimes I cried, wanting to go home. To this, my brother would just mutter, “Grow up!” At one point I actually went to the India tourist office attached to the Indian consulate to ask them how much it would cost to go back. The man I spoke with graciously sat me down and told me that everyone expects things to be a utopia when they first come. “It is lonely in the beginning,” he said. “Stick it out, and you will find this will become a wonderful place to call home.”
He was right — and sooner than I expected. Within a week of our arrival, Ajit secured a job at IBM. And when I went to an interview at the Inn on the Park, the manager who sat down with me was so thrilled with my qualifications and knowledge about the food industry that he wanted to hire me right away for their banqueting department. Then he saw my age on the application. “You’re not even twenty-one,” he said, astounded. “You can’t work in a licensed dining room!”
Eventually I was hired as an assistant to the banqueting manager at the Westbury Hotel, a landmark hotel in downtown Toronto, just around the corner from Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Toronto Maple Leafs played hockey. My shift at the Westbury began at 6:00 p.m. and ended at 3:00 a.m., and although I loved the job, it was exhausting. My hard work, however, quickly earned my boss’s trust. The Westbury had seven dining rooms, and almost every night I was helping run banquets that served a thousand to fifteen hundred people. The banquets ended around midnight, and afterward I had to take inventory, tally up everything that was sold or left, lay the groundwork for the next day’s banquets, have a late dinner in the kitchen with the chef, and finally catch the subway to go home. Sometimes I left so late that the subways weren’t running, so I had to take a bus, which was especially hard during the winter.
After a while, I realized that the prospect of going to Cornell was becoming cost prohibitive. So I trained my sights on a fine hotel management institute in Toronto called Ryerson, and I enrolled with less than a year’s worth of work left to earn the degree I’d started in Delhi. Later, when my boss at the Westbury heard about my studies, he suggested, “Why finish the rest of the year at school? Just do your practicum here. We’ll train you, and in eighteen months you’ll be a banqueting manager.” I would gladly take him up on his offer.
One of the highlights of my job at the top-tier Westbury was working alongside its nationally famous chef Tony Rolden. Tony was a very fine Spanish gentleman in his forties, a straight-up fellow who had served in World War II, and we had a great relationship from the very beginning. Tony really knew how to serve great food, and due in part to his reputation, the players for the Maple Leafs and some visiting NHL teams came to the Westbury after their games to enjoy his fabulous roast beef dinners.
Every night, after the banqueting work was over, Tony made a meal for both of us. He had a great culinary touch. All food, according to him, had to be delicately spiced, retaining the freshness of the food’s taste. For me, spices were made to find delectable combinations. So every meal involved an exchange of ideas and knowledge between us. Sometimes the managing director of the Westbury, Mr. Stanway, joined us, but on most nights it was just Tony and me. Once we had firmly established our working relationship, Tony said he loved working with me and that he counted on my theoretical knowledge of planning, menu compiling, cost management, and so forth.
“You know, Ravi,” he said one night, “you have one thing I don’t have. You’re an educated man. I know as much of the kitchen world as I possibly could at my age — really, everything there is to know. But I’m not educated. I want to make a proposal to you.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s go into business together.”
Tony wanted to start a restaurant — a great one. By this time, he had become the best-known chef in Toronto — indeed, one of the best in Canada — and he had the money to finance a start-up. He was ready to go out on his own, and he was asking me to do it with him.
“You be the brains behind it,” he offered. “I’ll be the hands.”
Here was yet another dream of mine coming true — and in a rather astonishing way. In just a few months’ time, I was being asked to partner in a business with one of the nation’s top chefs. It sounded like a great career move to me, with great appeal on many levels. So, night after night, Tony and I sat down over that late meal and talked things through.
“If you really want to make it,” I told Tony, “it’s got to be distinctive. And that has to come in the areas of soups, sauces, breads, and desserts. You’ve got to come up with the best in these main four areas. You can have superb quality in the main courses, but only if you’ve got top-notch soups, sauces, breads, and desserts will you keep them coming in.”
Soon we were drawing up a floor plan, featuring an open area near the entryway where a large soup tureen would be visible, with steaming signature soups aromatically seasoning the air. For months we planned and schemed, every night advancing the plot further than before. Once again, my future seemed to be coming into a much clearer view.
Yet, one of the downsides of the hospitality industry is that your time is not your own. You work long hours, and your most intense times are during other people’s holidays and celebrations, such as Christmas and New Year’s. I never forget that whenever I’m in a hotel. Whether I’m there only for a meal or for an overnight stay, I’m always conscious that my ability to relax is because someone else is working.
During one stretch in a holiday season while at the Westbury, I hadn’t been able to go to a Sunday church service for several weeks because of my work schedule. Any time I did have off, I used to take a bus to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to visit Fred David, who had moved there with his family to go to a Bible college.
In the midst of that rough period for me, the area youth committee for the Christian and Missionary Alliance planned a weekend “Youth Symposium,” and, having learned of my preaching prize at the Asian Youth Congress, they asked me to speak at it. After the service at which I preached, my brother and I were walking out of the church when a girl stopped us.
“Ajit, I’m offended,” she jested. “You haven’t introduced me to your brother.”
That’s when I saw Margie Reynolds (Margie pronounced with a hard g) for the first time. She extended her hand and our eyes met, and I thought, “What a sweet face. And such a lovely girl!” It was a moment that would carve itself into my memory. On that day we met, everything changed, which is hard to describe when you have never felt that way before.
I knew right away that there was much more to this girl than just her lovely appearance. Margie was sharp, and the better I got to know her, the more things I loved about her. She was a remarkable conversationalist — very well-read, intelligent, solidly informed, and able to talk about virtually any subject. She especially loved history and had read book after book on all kinds of historical subjects.
And it was so easy to be myself with her. I found I could talk to Margie about anything — from history, to fun things, to theological doctrines. I could laugh with her, crack jokes, or be serious. The only things this girl knew absolutely nothing about, I discovered, were movies and modern music. She had never heard Elvis Presley sing or even heard of Jim Reeves, my favorite country musician. No, she didn’t even own a record. Her family was mind-bogglingly strict on those matters. But I learned that for every book I had read, Margie had read a dozen more.
To my amazement, I found out that this bright, attractive young woman had never dated anyone. Her mother had encouraged her to go out with certain young men from the church in group situations, but Margie was never interested. And it would be another two years before she and I were officially allowed to date.
Though we were immediately interested in each other, Margie’s parents weren’t for it. First of all, she was sixteen, while I was twenty. And second, why would the Reynoldses let their daughter date a stranger from another culture and background who worked in the hotel industry, of all things, where your time was not your own?
Margie tried her best to get their permission for us to see each other, but her parents just wouldn’t allow it. So we settled for seeing each other at church. Yet this soon became for us less a capitulation than a strategy. I did everything I could to be there, no matter what the event, just to chat with her. And we made the most of every occasion, from worship services to prayer meetings to youth gatherings — and especially youth group outings.
There is an old Puritan sermon titled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” It’s an odd-sounding title, but its central message is that when you have a new love, it expels all old loves. With Margie, I gained a new appreciation of how a new love expels all other lesser ones. After we met, neither of us had any interest in going out with anyone else. Yes, I may as well use the words: I was smitten! What’s more, that condition has remained in me to this day.
Margie and I had absolutely no doubt in our hearts that we loved each other, but there was the continuing issue of her parents’ feelings. And then, of course, there was my future. Did I truly want to make the demanding hospitality industry my life’s calling when my priorities and my “heartbeat” were changing toward other things?
Finally, Margie and I had to come to a decision: we left everything completely in God’s hands. If we were to be together, the Lord would have to change her parents’ minds. I prayed each day that God would turn around their hearts, for I knew I loved her deeply. And I truly believed that the God who had ordered my steps would be the one who would lead us there too. We both wanted their blessing, without which we knew we would have no peace.
I don’t think older Christians can ever fully know what an important role they play in the affirmation of younger believers. When you’re just a youth, it means so much to have someone who’s farther along the road say to you, “I see something in you, and I want you to be encouraged in it.”
Ray Deitz was that man for me in Toronto. As the pastor of Yonge Street Alliance Tabernacle, he and his wife, Anita, were wonderfully kind to Ajit and me. Ray baptized us, affirmed us, and showed great faith in me especially. A little over two years after Ajit and I had first shown up, Ray even asked me to join the church board. So, there I was, all of twenty-two, making decisions with men twice my age. Ray also asked me to help lead the youth, so I served on the executive committee of the youth group as well.
Then, with the help of others, I formed a youth preaching team of about ten of our young people. That’s when I was really off and running. We held services all over southern Ontario, and on two occasions we drove to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Fred David was now the minister of music in a church. Fred had set up a “youth rally” weekend where our young people would be able to preach, and to my great delight Margie went along on that first trip. She was always my biggest cheerleader, showing pleasure every time she heard me speak, and it was so encouraging to look out and see her beaming back her affirmation.
Back at the Alliance Tabernacle, Ray Deitz gave me repeated opportunities to preach, and every time I did, people said the same thing to me afterward: “You know, Ravi, the Lord has gifted you with evangelism.” This was encouraging to hear, but I didn’t know what they were talking about. To me, I was just preaching. So I would nod a sincere thank-you, and sort of write it off in my mind.
Yet, in truth, I did know that a special sensation rose up in me as I preached. I had an intense urge to persuade. From the very beginning — in both Delhi and Hyderabad — I knew I wanted to preach to people who were on a quest, people whose minds were challenging what they saw around them, who were hurting inside, and who needed someone to speak to those issues. Now God was shaping that call in me, using a small church, a newfound love, and a pastor who cared.
In my own heart and self-analysis, I was still just a kid from India who had been transformed by my new life in Christ. I truly hadn’t the faintest idea of what lay ahead, because I had no one to look to, no one who was modeling the gifts that others were seeing in me. I simply was at peace where I was with Christ and with Margie, that new “gift in the making” that helped make each dawn another wonderful day to be alive.