12. “I Am Called to This”
My mother struggled in Toronto — oh, how she struggled. Everything was foreign to her. She and our three younger siblings had arrived six months after us, in December, and right away our mom ran into the inevitable culture clash. For example, Margie’s mom took her to buy some snow boots to wear during the hard winter, and the saleswoman who was helping her tried to lift Mom’s sari above her ankle.
“No, no,” my mother chided and half chuckled in embarrassment, and in her strong Indian accent, she continued, “you cannot do that. Please, please, no, no.”
The woman sighed and told her, “Well, if you want snow boots, you’re going to have to do it.”
“Then please let me do it.”
Mom wasn’t going to allow anyone, not even another woman, to see her calf muscle.
Ajit and I had prepared for their arrival by renting a home from a family in the church where our whole family could live. Yes, we had saved up enough money to do that. I remember the night my mother and younger siblings arrived. We stocked up the fridge with ginger ale, juices, and muffins — things that would be both foreign and welcoming to them. Once they arrived, I began to feel more of a sense that Toronto was home.
Despite my mother’s struggles, she was determined to get an education while in Canada. She trudged through the snow to attend classes in special education because she wanted to teach mentally challenged children. And she succeeded, earning her teaching certificate and a position at a school just a few miles away. I was so proud of her.
A few weeks after her job began, she came to me with a request: “Ravi, I want you to explain hockey to me.”
“Hockey?”
“Yes,” she said with no explanation.
In Toronto, National Hockey League games were telecast every Wednesday and Saturday nights, and I thought that might be the best way to teach Mom. So each week, we sat together and watched an NHL hockey game. As I explained the sport as best I could, she would take notes, and whenever a goal was scored, she always wrote down the name of the player who scored or of someone who had made an outstanding play.
Only later did I learn that one of the children in my mother’s classroom never spoke. He would sit through the entire school day, silent and introverted. So Mom had decided to talk to his parents to find out what his favorite occupation was at home. “Watching the Toronto Maple Leafs,” they had told her.
Every Thursday morning then, after the Wednesday night game, my mom tried to talk to the boy about the previous night’s game. “What did you think of that goal by Paul Henderson?” she would ask. He would suddenly light up with excitement if the Leafs had won or react in disappointment if they had lost. Bit by bit, she drew him out of his shell, until the day finally came when he spoke to her. By sheer determination to hear this lad speak, she endured even that in which she had absolutely no interest.
Margie’s mother was, and is, a very friendly person, and she and my mom hit it off right away (this, despite the Reynolds’ feelings about Margie and me). I had already told Margie that without my mother in my life, I would never have made it, and Margie could relate to this right away because she had come from a very close family. As Margie got to know my mom, she could see that the Lord must have had a special place for her because she had lived through so much, endured so much, and had never once complained about it while we were growing up. My mom only began to talk about the difficulties of her life once she got to Canada, and it’s a testament to her affection for Margie that she confided much in her. In fact, there were some things she shared with Margie that she had never even shared with me. On one occasion, she told Margie a rather startling story. “I was committed to be engaged to another man, you know?”
“What?” said Margie.
“Yes, my parents arranged it all. I had never met him, but I was told some things about him. Then the day drew closer and closer, but nothing was said. The engagement was all set. Then the day came and went. One day, I said to my mother, ‘What happened? Why did I not get engaged?’ ‘Oh,’ said my mother, ‘some time ago, while he was riding in a rickshaw, he suffered from a heatstroke and died.’ ”
Margie was stunned. “And they never told you this?” she asked.
“No. That’s the way it was, growing up in those years.”
When Margie shared this with me, I asked my mother, and, sure enough, with some hesitancy she told me the story. What does one say to an episode like that?
Because the Reynoldses weren’t in favor of our relationship at first, Margie would occasionally slip over to our home, where my mom was always cooking Indian food for the family. If you ever walk into a home where Indian food is being prepared, you’ll never be able to deny where you’ve been, as the aroma of the spices and sauces works its way into your hair and clothes. So, whenever it was time for Margie to walk home, we always hoped the fresh air would remove any scent of curry over the course of the two-mile walk. But it never worked. Mrs. Reynolds always knew where her daughter had been.
Our family’s humor took some getting used to for Margie. Admittedly, some Eastern humor is almost juvenile — verbal slapstick, I suppose. A little bit like Dumb and Dumber. So that when Indians have a laugh, it can seem to be at childish things. But it really isn’t childish; it truly is childlike. Sometimes when my family broke up over something, Margie would whisper to me, “I don’t know what’s so funny about that.”
“Margie,” I would explain, “it loses something in the cultural translation.”
In turn, I have to confess that when I watched I Love Lucy with Margie’s family, I would say the same kind of things to her. Who would ever think of beds traveling across the room by vibration each time a train went by? But after a while, it grows on you, and the laughter comes naturally.
My dad didn’t arrive until the next year, when he was able to officially retire from Indian government service at the age of fifty-five. That was a big move for him. Indian law did not allow my dad to take his money out of the country, so even with the retirement package he received from the Indian government, he needed to work when he arrived in Toronto. He went through interview after interview, but no one wanted to hire him because of his age. Eventually, he took a job at Eaton’s, which was at that time Canada’s largest department store, selling shirts. What a comedown it was for this powerful man! In India, he had people waiting on him night and day, at work and at home. Now he was climbing up and down a ladder on the sales floor, trying to please choosy customers.
He finally found a marvelous job as an employment manager for a large company. But the shift in my dad’s life had registered somewhere within him. It was the beginning of God’s process of humbling him.
Like my mother, my dad had great affection for Margie, just as he had for my sisters. She seemed to draw a natural tenderness out of him, and he always called her “Margie-girl.” Yet, my dad still remained my dad. Whenever he would come to hear me preach at church, it always made me more nervous and self-conscious. I would see him tilt his head back to listen, and boy, was I terrified! He was not always complimentary either (though I’m sure that all the while, deep inside, God was doing a profound work in his life). To our father, we kids were always representing the family, so he continually wanted to shape us to his way. After I delivered a sermon, he might say something like, “Do you have to shout so much?” “Why do you have to tell a humorous story in a sermon?”
I would feel a stab in my heart, because that was just my style, and I was still learning to preach. Most of the time, I thought to myself, “Please, just let me be.” I just endured it.
A few years later, sometime after Margie and I were married, the magazine article appeared that mentioned my suicide attempt — a story printed without my knowledge. My dad was horrified and embarrassed by it. I was just as embarrassed and didn’t want to talk to anyone in the family about it. But by this time, Margie had established a close enough relationship with my father that she decided to talk to him about the subject. At the end of their discussion, his comment to her was so defining of him.
“Oh, well,” my dad said, “I suppose if God could use people who are murderers, he could use someone who tried to commit suicide.”
Beyond that, the issue has still not been discussed among our family.
Not long after my buddy Sunder graduated from MIT in Boston, he moved to Toronto and married my sister Sham. Around that time, his own parents followed my mother and father’s pattern by relocating to Toronto, where they moved in with Sham and Sunder, not far from where we lived.
Sunder’s mother still held her son’s conversion against him, and she arranged her Hindu idols prominently in their room in Sham and Sunder’s home (and they are still there today). But Mr. Krishnan still seemed very curious about the faith that Sunder and I had embraced. Every time I visited the Krishnans, Sunder’s dad found a way to get me alone so his wife couldn’t hear us talking.
“I just finished reading C. S. Lewis,” he would say. “What do you think of his book Miracles? And what about the other one, Ravi, The Screwtape Letters?”
We would talk until he heard his wife approaching, and then he would quickly change the subject. But he never missed an opportunity to speak about Lewis or other subjects revolving around Christianity. I realized that the powerful seeds of the gospel, sown back in our homeland, had never left this very fine gentleman, one of the finest men I’d ever known.
In those days I loved to cook, and I utilized my passion whenever I could, most often for our church. I prepared a lot of food for youth events, sometimes feeding two or three hundred on special occasions. One summer, I worked at a Bible conference for the Christian and Missionary Alliance, cooking for all the campers for the entire summer. The Westbury let me have the time off, because they knew that both the cooking and the church were passions for me.
However, I’d never heard of sloppy joes, cole slaw, or macaroni and cheese — the usual camp fare. My specialty was French cuisine, so I went with what I knew, and those campers reaped the rewards of my culinary studies, enjoying a multitude of sauces, potato dishes of all variations, Yorkshire puddings, and all kinds of Continental specialties. It didn’t quite add to the camp atmosphere, but it certainly made for table conversation.
I wasn’t able to eat that way on my own income, of course. Besides, I was spending most of my money in those days on books. My mind was hungrier than ever, and books had become my biggest expense; I quickly learned to look for newspaper ads for used books and would end up first in line. And, by reading as widely as I did, very often one author would introduce me to another. It was C. S. Lewis, for instance, who led me to G. K. Chesterton, who had been such a tremendous influence on Lewis. Chesterton stood out for me because he had the ability to stretch my imagination, as did my old favorite, the biblical commentator James S. Stewart. Stewart expanded my thinking by constantly making historical references, literary references, and references to the heroic journey God has for every Christian. And then there was one of my favorites, Malcolm Muggeridge. Language to him was the gateway to the imagination, and I found him to be right about this.
At times, my mind seemed nearly to explode with the voracious hunger I had. I began to realize that I desired more than what books offered. So I looked into studies in theology, and I learned that Toronto Baptist Seminary offered part-time classes to people like me, whose work schedules required flexibility. I could take their classes during the day, while I continued my great job at the Westbury at night.
But I found it exhausting to work at night, take classes during the day, try to keep up at church, and see Margie as much as I could. In the end, however, exhaustion wasn’t the reason something had to give. I had begun to look at life differently, for a variety of reasons: my love for theological study, my passion for preaching and the increasing number of invitations I received, and, not least of all, Margie’s great love. It changed everything about the way I viewed the career ahead of me.
The hotel catering business was about maximizing margins in every area, about figuring out ways to sell more food and liquor — especially liquor, where the profit margin was larger. I was encouraged to get customers to order liquor with every course, from aperitifs to liqueurs. I remember days at the hotel when I saw some pretty pathetic sights and had to ask for security to come and usher people to cabs, or when I had to listen to the sorry tales of those who were trapped in the lifestyle. I began to think that, whatever one’s conviction in this matter, enticing someone to consume more was not what I felt I could live with honorably. Margie would often ask me that question as well. Yet, in her usual, gentle way, she knew how to raise it without an accusatory feeling but rather to prompt me to think through the issue carefully.
Now, with another passion slowly pushing aside my love for hotel management, I could no longer deny it. I decided to look beyond the part-time classes I was taking at the seminary and consider going to Bible college full-time. With this decision, I knew I’d have to face the encouraging, talented man who had been helping me map out a bright future.
One night, as Tony set our plates down for our post-banquet meal, I said, “Tony, my friend, I have something to tell you.”
He anticipated what was coming. He seemed to listen with interest as I told him about theological training, about my passion for preaching, and about the requests I was getting to speak.
Before I could finish, he put his hand on my shoulder.
“Ravi, I’ve known for a while where your heart is,” he said, smiling, yet with a bittersweet look. “You have to do what’s right. Taking away the passion of your heart would be to change you in the wrong way.”
And so, with that, just twenty-eight months after Ajit and I landed in Toronto, I would start classes in theological training at Ontario Bible College.
My father struggled terribly with my decision. This was the last big hurdle in my life he had to cross. “What are you going to do there?” he demanded. “And how are you going to support yourself once you’re out? Have we financed all your education for you to just become a preacher?” In his mind, the ministry was just not for the intellectual or the successful. After that initial outburst, he backed away and didn’t speak to me for five weeks.
I didn’t rule out his questions — they were a legitimate reaction. In fact, I didn’t know how I was going to pay my bills. My parents couldn’t support me — so I would have to take on work to supplement the small “love offerings” I made from preaching engagements. I lined up a few things, but as the day to begin college approached, I knew I wasn’t going to have enough.
On the weekend before classes started, I drove eight hours to Fort Wayne to preach at Fred David’s church. I got back at around 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, with my first class to start at nine. Yet I still didn’t know whether I would even go to the college that morning, because I didn’t have the minimum amount needed.
As I walked into my room, I found an envelope lying on my dresser. When I opened it, I saw that it was from my younger brother, Ramesh, with a note and a sum of cash. Ramesh had written that he wanted to help me pay for my first semester’s fees. He had been working part-time, and something told him that I needed help.
My brother’s gesture touched me deeply. And I took it as being from the Lord. I walked into Ramesh’s room, where he was sound asleep, and I offered a prayer of thanks for him.
Something of enormous significance to our family happened about five weeks later. In spite of his toughness, my father had always been spiritually minded to a certain degree. When he arrived in Toronto, I could tell that John Teibe and Cliff and Betty Robinson of the International Christian Leadership executive ministry in Delhi had had a deep influence on him. Yes, Dad had sung in the choir, and he knew all the right words — but it was not from a heart that had been conquered yet. He was still only halfway there.
Some of my family was sitting in church one Sunday evening when the invitation was given to publicly respond to Jesus Christ and to say you were willing to follow him. Glancing around, I was surprised as I detected conviction on my father’s face. It was an expression of determination he put on whenever emotion was creeping up.
That night, it came across his face as the invitation was given. He had his head down, trying to hold in the conviction. He had done many things that would have shown the world that he had a spiritual side to him. But deep inside, his pride had always been an issue. My father never, ever, wanted to look vulnerable. His position, his speech, and his personal carriage all revealed an inner strength. Now something was happening. He was touched in his innermost being by a message that cut to his heart.
He was restless, and then with a bent countenance he stood up and gave a sideways look. In what must have seemed like an eternity to him, he walked forward to the altar in the famed People’s Church in Toronto. This was his moment of truly humbling himself before God.
In my heart, I felt the world’s weight lifting for him and for our family. It was a new dawn, a new gift from God — my father’s salvation. Only a high-powered Indian would know what this meant in terms of the surrender of pride. All the ramifications of position and prestige keep you from doing anything like this in India. At least at that time it was so; it was a rare happening. But God took one through the eye of the needle — what is not possible with man was possible with Him.
I knew that, when this happened, there was no turning back for my father. For the first time, he made a public confession that he was determined to serve Christ with all his heart. From that point on, my dad became a transformed man, probably more than any person I ever knew. His life, his temperament, his language, the way he treated my mother — everything changed. He was truly transformed from above. God gave me a brand-new father.
“How wonderful, Lord,” I said inwardly. How absolutely wonderful!
In time, he became an elder in the church and an active Gideon in the worldwide organization. He also was asked to join the church board. His pastor commented on how he would come to my father, seeking wisdom for making tough decisions. And my dad loved his family more than ever. He was the typical grandfather, never coming to his grandchildren empty-handed.
I had always loved my dad — but more so than ever after that. Was it hard for me to get close to him, even after this? Yes, I am sorry to say it was. That was just my hesitant personality; I was always nervous that I would disappoint him. But that was not him — it was just me. Our hearts would become knit (and especially later, at a timely moment granted to us by God), even though my heart was nervous. That’s the best way I can put it. My dad soon began to cheer me on in my Bible college days as I prepared for ministry.
And so, from that room in the Wellington Hospital in New Delhi in 1963, to the church altar in Toronto in 1968, not just a world without but a world within had been traversed. The physical geography part of it had been easier; for the terrain of the soul, only God was big enough.
It would have been hard to miss Koos Fietje. He stood out easily on the campus of Ontario Bible College — a tall, lanky Dutchman about my age who was deeply committed to the Lord, a trait that was immediately evident to all who met him. The first time Koos and I met, we knew right away we would be friends.
It was friends such as Koos and Roy Tibbit, who eventually would work for Wycliffe Translators, that made my time at Ontario Bible College such a powerful experience. These friends were a new breed to me, each of them hungry, each sharing a passion common to mine. Again, it was a case of “fire begets fire,” as God shaped me through their friendship, their deep commitment, and their serious focus.
There were also some fine men who taught me at OBC, many of them serving as surrogate father figures. Anywhere I went on campus, it seemed, I could sit down with a professor or administrator who was willing to mentor me — someone who could help me, who could show me whether the direction I was headed was wrong or right.
And still, there were books. I remained a habitual browser, and now I could do it freely in the college library. I remember clearly the afternoon between classes when I came across a writer who would become a timely mentor. The English revivalist Leonard Ravenhill stirred me deeply through his book Why Revival Tarries. I started reading it in the library, and his fiery style and powerful pithy statements so grabbed my attention that I simply couldn’t put the book down. I could hardly wait for a class lecture to be finished so I could hurry back to Ravenhill and read another ten or fifteen pages before the next class started.
You can talk a lot about God, Ravenhill wrote in essence, and you can know a lot about God, yet you can know very little of God in your relationship with Him. I did not want that to happen to me. I remember one paragraph he shared about prayer, quoting the famed Saint Chrysostom:
The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire; it hath bridled the rage of lions, hushed anarchy to rest, extinguished wars, appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, expanded the gates of heaven, assuaged diseases, repelled frauds, rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course, and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt. Prayer is an all-sufficient panoply, a treasure undiminished, a mine which is never exhausted, a sky unobscured by the clouds, a heaven unruffled by the storm. It is the root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings.
He then quoted E.M. Bounds: “No erudition, no purity of diction, no width of mental outlook, no flowers of eloquence, no grace of person can atone for the lack of fire. Prayer ascends by fire. Flame gives prayer access as well as wings, acceptance as well as energy. There is no incense without fire; no prayer without flame.”
Thoughts such as these, as well as Ravenhill’s own writings, more than any other during my Bible college years, shaped my thinking about prayer, preaching, and the importance of getting near to God.
When I mentioned Ravenhill’s book to a friend, he said rather casually, “Oh, yes, Leonard Ravenhill. He preached at my church in London, Ontario.”
“He did?”
“Sure, he preached six or seven times. In fact, my church has his sermons on tape.”
I could hardly believe my good fortune. “Could you get those tapes for me?”
He did, and the more I listened to the tapes, the more profoundly I was moved to want to be the kind of man Ravenhill described — one who was needed in Christ’s church for the church to be what God intended it to be. I listened to those tapes every night in my room, causing my mom to say at one point, “Don’t you ever get tired of that man’s voice?”
Even though my years at Bible college were great ones, I had no idea where I was going with the education I was receiving there. I knew I wasn’t called to be a pastor, because I was more inclined toward a persuasive style of preaching. Over time, people’s past encouragements about my gift for evangelism began to come more into view for me. Still, I didn’t know any evangelists I could just walk up to and say, “Would you hire me?”
There was yet another surprising benefit for me from Bible college. Once I decided to pursue theological training, something shifted in Margie’s parents’ feelings about us. My choice to go to Ontario Bible College seemed to change their whole perspective; they must have seen that I was serious about my commitment to the Lord. Here I was, with a promising business career that I loved and enjoyed, giving it up to go into ministry.
Now they openly welcomed me into their home, inviting me often. And as time went by, I could sense their growing love for me. The day even came when they gave us their blessing to begin dating formally. What a day that was!
Yet, ironically, once I started at the college, I saw less of Margie. We had only a few hours each week to be together, because I had taken on part-time jobs and weekend work to pay school bills, and I kept Sundays clear for preaching engagements. Supplemented by full-time work during the summers — once I sold life insurance, and another time I worked in a warehouse, loading and unloading trucks and trailers — it would provide just enough income over the next four years. Yet Margie had begun her own training to be a nurse, and so sometimes the moments we had together were only about an hour a week. After my classes ended on Friday afternoon, I would come by in my red Volkswagen and pick her up from the nurses’ residence, take her to her parents’ house, then spend the weekend preaching, and return home just in time to pick her up and drop her off at the nurses’ residence before going home to begin a new week.
Despite those limitations, I enjoyed being invited to the Reynoldses’ house for Sunday dinner when I wasn’t away preaching. Sundays in their home was all about the Lord’s Day, with hymns playing in the background. We would enjoy a big meal, and Margie’s mother was a born hostess when it came to this. Mrs. Reynolds served some of the finest Sunday meals, usually a traditional roast beef dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and all the trimmings. Often she would make my favorite — butterscotch pie — which makes my mouth water now just to think of it.
As soon as Mrs. Reynolds got home from church, she and the family would start spreading the goods on the dining table. Like his daughter, Mr. Reynolds was a fantastic conversationalist, able to talk about any subject (except sports!). After the noon meal, we would all sit around talking until three or four o’clock, and maybe take a nap on the couch, with the sound of firewood crackling from a lovely fire in the fireplace. Then we would rouse ourselves to go to the evening service, and afterward it was back to the Reynoldses’ for some cold meats, cheeses, and fresh kaiser rolls. Those were the days when I could eat and not worry about putting it on. Now wisdom gives caution to the taste buds. When I first met Margie, I weighed one hundred forty-one pounds — and at six feet tall I had a beanpole stature.
It was after I had finished preaching at our own church one Sunday that I was introduced to an older woman, a retired missionary to Vietnam, named Ruth Jeffrey. Mrs. Jeffrey and I exchanged a few pleasantries, and she complimented me on my sermon before she posed a question to me that at first seemed to come out of the blue.
“How would you like to preach in Vietnam?” she asked.
“Well,” I stammered, “I’ve never thought of it. Why do you ask?”
“It’s a desperate situation there, as you know,” she said. “I believe there are people in that country who need to hear what God has given you to say.” It was late in 1970, and the war was at its height.
“Why me, Mrs. Jeffrey?”
“I’ve heard you preach,” she said simply.
She spoke very confidently and very knowledgeably. As we talked further, I let the idea roll around in my head. And the more we talked, the more appealing it became.
“If you feel God would want you to go,” she said, “what would you think about a trip next summer?”
Summers were my only opportunity to make money to pay for Bible school. When I explained this, she suggested, “Well, what if someone were to underwrite the trip for you?”
“Who would do that?”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you look into the cost, and let me know how much it would be. We can pray about it.”
I found out later that Mrs. Jeffrey was the descendant of a famous missionary to China, Jonathan Goforth. Her confident manner in church that day had reflected her heritage. So I took her up on the suggestion and talked with a travel agent, who came up with a figure of $3,600 to cover my travel to Vietnam and the fees I would need to go back to school. I wrote to let Mrs. Jeffrey know, but I didn’t hear back from her right away, so I put it out of my mind.
A few weeks later, a check for $3,600 arrived in the mail. It was accompanied by a note from a woman named F. Carol Brown from New Jersey.
“Somebody shared in my prayer group your need for this, so you can go to Vietnam and preach,” she wrote. “May God bless you!”
I was utterly shocked. Who was this stranger who was paying my way? That was a lot of money at the time. God had to be in this, I realized, so I started thinking very prayerfully about how I should prepare.
When I landed in Saigon in May of 1971, I could not have felt more alone. It suddenly hit me that I was in a war-torn country. Had I considered the dangers?
I was deeply in love with Margie. I had wanted to get engaged to her before leaving for Vietnam, but I’d been nervous about doing that while facing a mission like this one. I could tell that her parents had wanted me to give her a ring before I left. But I just didn’t feel right about it, just in case anything untoward were to happen. Now I felt the conviction of my decision even more.
That first week, I stayed in a missionary home in Saigon, and I have to admit that when I went to bed those first few nights, I cried. A U.S. soldier apparently sensed my loneliness when he was visiting the missionaries, and he came to visit me in my room.
He looked around my quarters, glancing over my desk, where lay a Bible, a sermon book, a picture of Margie, and a small tape recorder for sending messages to Margie and my family.
“What brings you here?” he asked, pulling up the lone chair as I sat on my bed.
I told him my story. As I did, I thought, “If God has it in mind for me to minister to the American troops here, it would be a great honor.”
Instead, at that moment, I was ministered to. The soldier listened thoughtfully as I talked. When I finished, he looked at me and asked, “Can I sing for you?”
“Sure, I would love that.”
He began to sing: “When you walk through the storm, hold your head up high. . . .” He had a magnificent tenor voice, and I listened with a rest that gradually crept into my soul. I was so grateful for this young man’s kindness. He ended with the words (adapted from the original song) “You’ll never walk alone when you walk with God.” How timely it was in my need to have a man like this — a soldier fighting a war — taking the time to hear the lonely heart of a stranger from another culture and to minister so caringly.
That Sunday, I preached my first sermon in a church in Saigon. After hearing me speak, some soldiers asked if I would address their troops at the nearby base. Soon, the invitations to preach started to mushroom. I was speaking at military bases both American and South Vietnamese, in hospitals to the wounded, in prisons to the Vietcong, and even to pastors and missionaries.
I remember one Sunday morning service very clearly. I delivered a sermon that day to four hundred airmen, who all stood in their uniforms throughout the service. They were about to leave on a mission, and the chaplain leaned over and whispered to me, “Many if not most of these men will not be coming back.”
As that service ended, the soldiers sang, “It Is Well with My Soul.” The sound of their voices and the sight of them standing there on the very edge of mortality made a profound impact on me.
The very next day, one of my host missionaries came to me, excited because invitations to preach were coming in from the fringes of the country. “It’s wonderful,” he said, “but I don’t know how we’re going to get you to these places.”
It was decided I needed an interpreter, someone who also had transportation. Up to that point, I had been using a different interpreter in almost every locale, and it was somewhat frustrating to adjust to. But as the national leaders began seeing the impact, they arranged for an interpreter — one suited to my style — to travel with me for the three months that remained. The one chosen for this task was Hien Pham, a Vietnamese young man only seventeen years old. He was designated to drive me from to place to place on his motorbike.
When the distances were too great, the U.S. military helped us get to our destinations. This included time spent with the Koho tribe, among whom we had some of our greatest responses to the gospel. My interpreter with the Koho was a missionary named Helen Evans. She was one special lady, and the Lord formed a bond between us such that I started to call her “Mother.” We have kept in touch to this day, as I send her a Mother’s Day card, and on my birthday she sends a card written “to my son.”
One of the first places my young interpreter Hien and I went to was Long Bin, the military air base. From there, we were taken into some of the most dangerous areas of the country, flown by helicopter gunship or by transport aircraft of the U.S. military. The most troubled area we visited was about twenty miles away from the demilitarized zone. There at night, the skies were lit up with an amber color from flares and firepower all around.
On occasion, I saw the awful sights of some bodies lying dead on the ground and others strewn across fields after an ambush. On some nights, Hien and I went to bed knowing our own lives were in danger as we fell asleep to the sound of gunshots. We heard a lot of stories of killing and death, and we saw the results of the destruction daily. We went into military hospitals, where soldiers’ bodies were badly burned or horribly maimed. Yet, with everything I saw, God kept reminding me continually that He was taking care of us and would protect us, and that I was there on His mission.
Vietnam was a world turned upside down. In the villages, even among the missionaries, men and women all slept in the same room. Hien and I once slept in a room with a pastor’s four daughters, at other times in rooms with many more females than that. Oftentimes it was on the floor. In almost every place, we had to change our clothes in the dark, with everyone present, and go to the bathroom in open fields. This was all somewhat discomforting, but what could we do? Privacy was at a premium.
Actually, with a war raging, this proximity to everyone brought a small sense of security. Still, I realized quickly the price that these missionaries were paying for being there. They not only had to manage with very little, but their lives were in constant danger, and they lived with only the bare necessities to protect modesty and dignity. Some paid with their lives. I grew to love them and admire these courageous men and women. Many a soldier would not have made it if it hadn’t been for the spiritual and emotional support given by the missionaries.
The experience was all so disorienting, so hard to know what was going on at times. I often wondered, “Can I take this? Am I going to be able to endure it?” I continually had to remind myself, “This is all for God.” What else could I console myself with?
At one point, I was scheduled to preach at a pastors’ conference just a few miles from the infamous My Lai, the site of a notorious incident where an American soldier lost his restraint and killed innocent men, women, and children. Only a few minutes into my sermon that day, Hien stopped interpreting. When I turned to see why, I noticed that he was visibly fighting back tears.
The Spirit of God had come upon him, and Hien could no longer translate. I had to stop my sermon as a handful of pastors came forward and began to minister to my friend. Then something strange happened. Virtually the whole roomful of pastors came pouring forward, dropping to their knees in prayer.
It was a shock to me. Later I was told that when Hien stopped interpreting, he said, “What this man is saying to us is true. We need to take the Word of God seriously. We need God in our land. It is we, the church, that is the problem.” The whole place had come under conviction. I realized the meeting was over — at least the meeting we had planned — and we all knelt and prayed for a couple of hours. For the first time in my life, I was tasting the drops of revival, that moment when a group is touched from beyond the ordinary speech or word of a person.
It began to happen in a lot of the places where I preached — among soldiers, tribal folk, Vietnamese nationals, and even among the missionaries and church leaders. I remember speaking at a Bible college where God stirred the hearts of a handful of young men, and they also fell to their knees in prayer. Every time, I was intensely aware that I was unfit to be there. I wondered, “Why are all these people reacting this way? What is it that’s affecting them so?” Sometimes Hien and I would have to stay up for hours after the meeting, counseling young men who were struggling in their faith or those who had questions about God for their lives. Sometimes it was a pastor, sometimes a soldier, sometimes a tribesman, sometimes a monk.
Hien was not with me at one point on the journey, a frightening three days when I stayed in the former school for missionary children in Dalat in the highlands. My host missionaries had to leave me there so they could attend a conference, saying they would be back for me after the three days. As they pulled away in their vehicle, I was left all alone in the deserted school.
In the early days of the conflict, the Vietcong had stormed into that same building, and terror had struck. Now that terrible history plagued me. Every sound at night would wake me up, and I slept with the dresser pushed up against the door. It was a long three days and three fearful nights for me before the missionaries finally returned.
When they arrived, the plan was to drive down to Saigon so I could be at their annual workers’ conference for the entire mission field. About five of us piled into the jeep, and once we got on the highway, we drove through several remote areas. During one stretch, one of the missionaries turned to me and said, “We’re about to enter the most dangerous area of Vietnam.”
That shook me. I thought, “Why would she tell me that? Why couldn’t she wait until we’d gotten through, and then tell me?”
As we drove through the area, suddenly our car began to sputter and chug, and then it died. Just like that, we were stranded on the side of the road — four missionaries and me, with not a soul in sight. Terrified, we opened the hood and poked around, trying to locate the problem, but nobody could find anything wrong. We tried everything, hoping that whatever needed repairing would be fixed as we fiddled around. We tightened what was already tight and loosened what was already loose — but nothing worked.
After a while, a white jeep appeared behind us, coming up the road we had just driven. As it got closer, we tried to look friendly and waved to them to stop, but when they came upon us they swerved around us and sped away.
We all let out sighs of frustration. Yet we couldn’t blame them. They must have thought, “Why would anyone stop in the most dangerous part of Vietnam?” They probably were afraid of an ambush.
We had no choice but to stand by the roadside and pray. Then someone tried the engine again, and this time it started. Immensely grateful, we quickly climbed back into the jeep and continued down the road.
But after driving a few miles, we came upon the white jeep. As we approached, we saw that it had been overturned, and the bodies of the four passengers were strewn across the side of the road, bullet-riddled and dead. In the distance we could see the Vietcong still scurrying away. We realized that we couldn’t stop — we had to drive on.
God has an appointment with each of us, and it is critical that every man and woman know this. He will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is. This is a reassuring truth to know for every believer, and a necessary trust for anyone who ministers in areas of great risk.
It came into sharp focus for me — and became a turning point in my life — on the day Hien and I stood at the gravesite of six missionaries. They had been killed when their compound was stormed just a few years earlier at the hands of the Vietcong, in an act of cold-blooded murder. As I gazed down at the markers bearing their names, some of whose children I knew, and noted the short duration of their lives, I thought of their courage. They had given everything. This was all real, for the sake of the gospel.
It was a moment of commitment for me. I prayed solemnly, “Lord, I want to be what You want me to be. I’m willing to preach wherever You send me, at whatever cost.”
The trip ended up being full of such commitments. I was making them daily as I went along. Looking back now, I see that my life grew in ways I would never realize until years later. In those memorable days of my life as a young preacher, God was preparing me to be willing to court danger in the years ahead.
I came back from Vietnam a brand-new man. The trip had permanently sealed my calling, and I realized, “I am an evangelist. I am called to do this — to be in places at risk, places where people are willing to hear.” I couldn’t tell you how or where exactly the calling came, but I knew it had happened. And I never looked back.
I didn’t have to explain anything to Margie. She had recognized God’s call upon me long before I did. When she met me at the airport at the end of August of 1971, it had been almost five years to the day I first saw her. Three weeks later, I gave her the engagement ring. She was to be the soul mate of my life.
Upon my return, I was asked to preach at the People’s Church in Toronto, the largest church in Canada at that time, about what I had seen in Vietnam. Over the following months, I received a lot of encouragement from the pastors there and elsewhere, as well as from missionaries who came through Toronto while on furlough. Of course, Margie was still my greatest support. Sometimes she was able to accompany me on preaching engagements, and occasionally she even sang, which I loved. I was transfixed every time I heard her sweet, lovely voice and her beautiful playing of the piano.
With my birthday coming up, Margie wanted to surprise me, so she called Tony Rolden at the Westbury. Tony was overjoyed, insisting, “Bring him here. I’ll take care of both of you.”
I was indeed surprised when we pulled up to the hotel, because we surely couldn’t afford a meal there. I was finishing up my last year at school, and we were saving our money to get married. But I couldn’t have been more pleased. As we enjoyed our roast beef dinner that magical evening, Tony came out of the kitchen and sat down at our table. After that, the waiters were buzzing around us all night long, attending to our every need. It was an unforgettable evening. Tony assured me that I was doing what was written in my soul.
Several years later, long after we had left Toronto, I read a headline in the newspaper: “Canada’s Premier Chef Dies.” Tony had been of that reputation. In the intervening years, he had become head of Canada’s association of chefs.
I still think about my friend a lot — in fact, almost as often as I peek into the kitchen of any hotel where I’m staying. And every so often, Margie will say to me, “I’ll be surprised if you go home to meet the Lord before starting your own restaurant.” The thought still brings a grin.
As the date approached for my graduation from Ontario Bible College on the last Saturday in April of 1972, I was asked to preach at the ceremony. The program usually involved testimonies, but this year the administration came to me with a request: “Ravi, we want you to preach.” It was a great honor. Koos Fietje, Roy Tibbit, John Saynor, and I — close friends all through college — graduated together, and that day we made a pact that we would pray for each other every day, and that God would remain first in our lives. My dad and mom also were there that day to celebrate with me God’s goodness and all that He had brought about in our lives to bring me to that point.
One week later, Margie and I were married, with the full blessing of our families. Now a dream I could never have dreamed for myself was coming true. It was one granted to me from above. As I looked at the invitation, I chuckled — two cultures had met. In India, we always put the full names of the couple and the full names of the parents. So it read — embedded in the heart of the invitation — “Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias, son of Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Tobias Joseph Zacharias, and Margaret Jean Reynolds, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Lindsay Cochrane Reynolds . . .” I remarked that anyone who read that invitation had already paid the price of a time commitment to pray for us.
Three years after I left Vietnam, I was reading an article in a missions magazine about a revival that had taken place there. The author was describing the roots of its beginning, tracing it back to a young Indian who spoke at a Bible college in Nhatrang, where a group of Koho young people had responded to his invitation to follow Christ wholeheartedly, and from there had begun the revival.
What a surprise to read that. Yes — I remember those college students!
During the time of our meetings in Vietnam, I had seen nearly three thousand people come to know Christ. As I read on, I discovered that, in the months after I left, the blessing continued, and significant numbers of Vietnamese and tribespeople had come to know Christ.
I put the magazine down in utter amazement. God had used two young men and one veteran missionary as His instruments for national impact. Of course, the groundwork had been laid for decades with great sacrifice on the part of so many. That’s the way revivals come.
Now, as I think of this period in my journey, I have to think of where my life might have gone had I made certain turns in the road. If I had been admitted to the Air Force in India, I would never have met Margie. I wouldn’t have had the balance that she brought to my life, to bring so many things back together for me. If I had joined Tony Rolden in his venture, I would never have gone to Vietnam and recognized my calling to reach people for the Lord, even in areas at risk. As the Lord had orchestrated it, though, I had gone to war after all — but for a purpose different from the noble one I had as an eighteen-year-old. He had led me to speak hope to people at risk, in the most challenging of circumstances.
God had been in the shadows all along. Every step of the way — from the beautiful girl I met and married, to the school where my theology was shaped, to the committed buddies God gave me, to the calling of an evangelist, to the individuals who affirmed me — everything was being put back together. It was as if all the dismantling I’d done with the first seventeen years of my life was being given back to me, but this time the Lord was putting it together with His unerring hand.
When God puts a broken life back together, He removes the scars because He builds from the inside out. And when God steadies a faltering life, He puts you on His footing.