13. The Longest Journey
Donald Coggan, the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that the longest journey in the life of one’s belief is from the head to the heart. My own life was testimony to this fact. The truth that had gone into my head had rescued my heart from its turmoil.
Allow me to elaborate a bit on Coggan’s maxim. If we say that a sexual union is sacred — if marital love is exclusive and cannot be compromised — then it stands to reason that if you violate that sanctity, your emotions will be in keeping with the violation. Likewise, if it is rationally sound that Jesus rose again from the dead, the heart should delight that this life is not the end. Or, if it is rationally sound that the home is a gift of God, then family life is emotionally invigorating. In short, if the reasoning is sound, the feelings will follow. Feelings follow belief; belief, then, should follow truth.
I would add that the converse to Coggan’s statement is just as true, namely, that the longest journey is also from the heart to the head. And so came my hunger to know the great depths of truth behind my faith. It led me to further disciplined and in-depth study as I pursued a Master of Divinity degree at seminary.
The president of my denomination, however, wasn’t pleased to hear about my plans. After my trip to Vietnam, Dr. L. L. King of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) had taken notice of my preaching and evangelistic work. Upon my graduation from Ontario Bible College, the C&MA — in the person of Rev. William J. Newell, the district superintendent — put me on staff as a full-time itinerant evangelist in Canada. The stipend of six hundred dollars a month doesn’t sound like much by today’s standards, but I was thrilled to be paid to do what I had been doing on my own since my days at the Yonge Street Alliance Tabernacle. This district was operating in the red, and to bring me on with a salary (the first time the C&MA had salaried an itinerant evangelist) was an act of faith on the part of Rev. Newell. I remember my dad’s gratitude to him, “Thank you for investing in my son.” Not to be outdone, Rev. Newell replied with a twinkle in his eye, “I plan to capitalize on it.” How true his words would become — and in a short time. After one year, the honorariums from my preaching exceeded the salary, so, at least for my part, I did not add to the district’s financial concerns.
The itinerant life had come naturally to me. Now, as I was poised to begin seminary training, Dr. King cautioned me: “Many an evangelist has gone to seminary and lost his sharp edge, Ravi. They come out jaded, or softened in their zeal. I’d hate for you to lose your sharp edge.”
“Dr. King,” I assured him, “if I ever begin to lose my evangelistic verve, I will be the first one to pull out.”
The teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, was fabulous, and I could not have asked for a better faculty. There is an old rabbinic saying that you have two sets of parents — the ones who brought you into the world, and the ones who brought you into the knowledge of the Lord. Thankfully, I have had both in my life, and the people who taught me at Trinity qualified supremely as the latter.
My biblical passion was fired by two Old Testament professors, Dr. Walter Kaiser and Dr. Thomas McComiskey. Both had earned their PhDs from Brandeis University, among the best schools in Old Testament studies, and they gave me a love for the Old Testament. But the two professors who would prove most influential in the direction my preaching would take were my mentors in philosophy and apologetics, Dr. John Warwick Montgomery and Dr. Norman Geisler.
Dr. Montgomery was as tough a man as they came, with seven degrees, three of them doctorates. It was difficult to find a secretary who would work for him. In fact, people who worked on the school switchboard placed a red ring about his button, so they would immediately know when he was calling them and could be mentally prepared not to make a mistake. I know this because my wife was one of those switchboard workers. Giving Dr. Montgomery the benefit of the doubt, I would say that quirkiness sometimes accompanies genius.
I’ll never forget the first time I dared to ask him a question in class. All this apologetics stuff was quite new to me, and I asked, “Dr. Montgomery, would you please define ‘circular reasoning’ for me?”
He stared at me, and then with a touch of sarcasm said, “My friend, circular reasoning is reasoning that goes in a circle. Does that help?”
“To be honest with you, sir, no,” I answered quickly. “The reason I’m asking you is because a critique I read of your apologetic method says you indulge constantly in circular reasoning. What I want to know is, what are they talking about?”
Again, he just stared. He might have been thinking, “Did this guy just get off the glass boat? Or does he just not know what not to ask in class?”
But after that exchange, Dr. Montgomery took a shine to me. He submitted to a scholarly journal a paper I cowrote with a classmate, and he later asked me to accompany him on a trip to East Germany for a two-week Reformation tour, to follow in the steps of Luther. Between our financial constraints and my feeling intimidated by him, I was inclined to decline, but it was Margie who finally put down the deposit for the trip and pushed me out the door. I saw a different side to Dr. Montgomery on that trip. He was not only encyclopedic in his capacity, he had a tender spot to his one-on-one teaching approach. Many a time, I would see him sitting next to a member of the group, engaged in a casual teaching mode.
Dr. Norman Geisler was a hero to me from Day One. Studying existential philosophy and taking numerous other philosophy courses under him made a huge difference in my approach to argument. Dr. Geisler inspired me with the confidence to walk into any lions’ den and believe I would come away victorious for the gospel. His best gift to me was his twin loves, the Bible and philosophy. He loved the Word of God and never shied away from any attack on it.
As you might imagine, the study load at Trinity was so incredibly heavy that it kept me pinned to my desk for virtually every waking hour that I wasn’t in class. That was true of every semester, but especially the first term of year two, when I had to master two languages simultaneously, Greek and Hebrew. The biggest challenge was giving my marriage due time, let alone developing other friendships.
As it happened, two doors down from us in student housing lived William Lane Craig and his wife, Jan. Bill would go on to become a leading evangelical philosopher. In those days, he and I joked about what we called our “fellowship around the garbage dump.” Around nine thirty or ten every night, we would empty the trash in the dumpster behind our apartments, and that was about the only time we found to talk about our studies and its challenges.
Through it all, Dr. L. L. King’s caution came back to me many times — almost constantly, in fact. When you’re dealing with criticism of the New and Old Testaments, you’re facing tough attacks on the Scriptures by some great intellectuals. And you have to be honest with yourself in bringing your own integrity to these matters. You wonder, “Did the walls of Jericho actually come down so dramatically? Did these walls even exist? Is the book of Daniel actually predated prophecy and not postdated history? What are the realities here?”
The problem is that you’re diving deeply into this kind of critical material for three to four weeks before you even get into the actual text of the book you’re studying. Then, once you do start into the book, it can easily become to you just a text for analysis and not the Word of God in all its life-altering power.
I stayed on my knees a lot as those days proceeded. And, thankfully, I had professors — men full of great intellectual integrity — who were sensitive about keeping the primary focus on God’s Word. One of those men was Gleason Archer, who had written a book-by-book defense of the Old Testament, challenging the critical attacks against it. Because of its yellow cover, it was branded by us seminarians as “The Yellow Bible.” He gave me tremendous confidence in responding to the textual critics with the declaration that the text we have for Scripture is authentic.
My experience at Trinity points up one big difference between Islam and Christianity: Islam shuns a critique of the Quran. If you ask the hard questions of the Quran, you risk being branded, and, in some cases, you even risk your life. The Christian, however, has always been willing to subject the Bible to the severest analysis and is able to come out, knowing that it can survive the blade of the skeptic. Examining those tough issues at Trinity, I only grew in my love for and trust in the Holy Scriptures. I think of what I gained there as summed up in Jesus’ words, when He said, “The Scripture cannot be broken,” and, “Thy Word is truth,” which He declared in prayer to the Father in John 17.
In the fall of my second year at seminary, I was asked by Elmer Fitch, one of the district superintendents of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, to speak at the pastors’ conference in that area, which opened up many opportunities for me to preach. From that point on until the time I graduated, there were few weekends that I was not out speaking. The benefits were twofold: I graduated from Trinity debt free, and it kept my passion and calling alive so that I did not become too buried in academia.
Also, during my second year Margie did not come back to Trinity with me after Christmas. Instead, I joined her in Toronto in February for the birth of our first little one, Sarah. Our medical coverage was in Canada, and so Margie stayed there, awaiting the arrival of this gift from God. It was a joyous moment for me to see our daughter in Margie’s arms, and my heart nearly burst as I held Sarah myself.
The day after her birth, my brother-in-law Sunder took me out to dinner, and halfway through our meal he asked, “Well, what does it feel like to be a father?”
Exhausted, I groaned inside, thinking, “Why does he want to be philosophical now?” I joked my way around the question, and after dinner I went home to get some sleep.
Sometime past midnight, the phone rang. “It’s Sarah,” Margie said, trying to remain calm. “There’s a problem with her blood count.”
Our daughter had an ABO incompatibility. She was allergic to her own blood, and her body was creating antibodies against it. When the mother’s blood type is O and the child’s is either A or B, such a situation can arise. Because Margie’s type is O, she had antibodies within her circulation against A or B. Normally these antibodies remain contained, but sometimes they can leak through the placental barrier and enter into the baby’s bloodstream. In effect, Sarah in her type A now had antibodies counter to the very blood type circulating in her, and she was in a deteriorating situation. That night, I paced the floor, wondering, “Lord, what is happening here?”
Sarah’s situation got worse the next day, and this continued in the days that followed. Finally, by the fifth day, it had reached crisis proportions, and the doctors were contemplating a total-body blood transfusion.
What does it feel like to be a father?
Suddenly I had found out.
If you had put Sarah in a room next to a dozen other babies on their first day of life, I’m not sure I could have picked out my daughter. I had barely held her in my arms before this crisis arose. But she was our very own offspring, and I loved her — and so every nerve in my body hurt in response to this threat. The next time I saw her, she had been placed under fluorescent lights as part of her treatment, the rays counteracting her body’s reaction to her blood. It was a sight that broke my heart.
Our baby Sarah came out of that experience healthy. But from that first moment, I gained an appreciation of the analogy God has given all of us: that we relate to him as a child does to a father. And seeing life through the father’s eyes is a different kind of seeing. There was no room, not even an inch, for selfishness — it all had to go out the window. I also learned from Day One that you may have your plans for your children, but they have their plans for you.
It was a ground-level reminder that training in theology was about more than doing battle with Bultmann and Barth.
During the summer breaks at Trinity, I began taking long overseas engagements to preach for the Christian and Missionary Alliance, while Margie went back to Toronto to stay with her parents. It was during one of those breaks — in the summer of 1974 — that the denomination asked me to go to Cambodia.
Here was a nation on the cusp of the darkest time in its history. For decades, there had been only a handful of known Christians in the whole country, and now it was under siege by what would become one of the most vicious regimes in the history of the world. The C&MA asked me to preach there for five weeks.
I was making the necessary preparations to leave when my father approached me with a letter he had written to me. He asked me to open it only when I arrived in Cambodia. When I did, in my dimly lit room in Phnom Penh where I was staying with missionaries, I read words I never could have dreamed would come from him.
My dad told me how thrilled he was that God had called one of his children into the ministry, and that it spoke volumes to him. Then, in open language he had never used with me, he said how sorry he was for the hurt he had brought into my life. My dad knew how to use words, and he chose the right ones. He did everything he could to bridge the gap.
It meant everything to me. And now tears rolled down my face as I considered all that God had done. At one time, my dad had looked me in the eye and said I would never make anything of my life, that I would end up an embarrassment to him. I knew, better than anyone, that only God could have brought about this change in him. The Lord had changed our relationship — by changing both my father and me.
This moment could well have been another story in one of Jesus’ parables on the return of the prodigal. Only here, it would take on a different twist. It would be something like this:
There was a young man who, determined to go his own way, asked his father for his inheritance and in a fit of despair left his home. His father, outraged by this, slammed the door shut, pushing the son out of his home, and asked him never to return because he was shaming the family by his demands and his disrespect. The son went into the far country and squandered his inheritance by making a sport of life. Then, when he had come to nothing, he went to the top of a hill to jump and to end his life.
Just before he reached the top, he fell on his face — so hurt and destitute of any help. When he opened his tear-stained eyes, he saw a cross. On that cross there hung a man, who looked at him with eyes of compassion and mercy and said, “Come to Me, and I will give you eternal life.” The young man struggled to his feet to get to the cross, and he felt a strong arm supporting him. It was the arm of the one who had paid with his life.
The tears were gone and a new life infused, and a lamp and a map were given to this young man to walk by the truth. As he descended toward the bottom of the hill, he saw another man bent over, weeping and asking for forgiveness. The young man recognized the voice. It was his own father. The young man opened up the map and shared the light of the lamp. Together they embraced, knowing that the same man on the cross had brought them both there, because the home had been locked to the son and lost to the father.
With the help of the map, they walked back to the locked home. The shadow of the cross was on it. The lock had been removed, and what awaited them there was the one who had been pursuing them all along. The light of the risen Savior welcomed them in.
The words of my father spelled the gospel: reconciliation. We were brought together and made one by God. Nothing could compare to those affirming words from my dad.
The good hand of the Lord continued in His grace to us. And there was another important relationship that, in his marvelous way, God shored up for me on that trip to Cambodia. In order to get to Cambodia, I had to change planes in Thailand, and as I carried my bag through Bangkok Airport, who did I see standing before me among all the Asians but a tall, lanky Dutchman.
“Koos?”
He grinned. “You thought you could go through Thailand without seeing me?”
“Koos Fietje!” I shouted, embracing my old buddy. “I didn’t want you to come all the way down to Bangkok for just an overnight. You’re up country.”
“No, my friend,” he said, “you don’t know how I’ve longed for this time of fellowship.” He grabbed my bag from me and stated, “We’re going to talk till you leave.”
Koos had been serving in Thailand as a missionary with Overseas Missionary Fellowship. When he had heard I would be coming through, he phoned back home to find out when I would be in the airport. Now he whisked me off to his nearby hotel room, and we spent the night catching up before my flight would leave the next day.
As we lay on the two beds, arms behind our heads, we talked about the journey God had put us on since we first met. It had been a wondrous path for each of us and our families, and we marveled at what God had done since we’d last seen each other. After a while, though, I began to detect the slightest hint of melancholy in my friend’s voice. I could tell he had serious things on his mind.
“I have this feeling, Ravi,” Koos finally said. “I think God is calling me to a very serious commitment,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I feel him calling me deeper. And, well, I get the sense that my life is going to change dramatically. I think that someday — I don’t know when — God is calling me to pay the ultimate price.”
It must be said that many passionate young Christians count the cost of such a sacrifice when they first commit to Christ. But once you’re actually in harm’s way, you never really want to think about the possibility. Koos had always been outspoken about his faith. I knew that his actions were consistent with his words, and that there could be some in this foreign setting who would not take kindly to his preaching.
“I’m just telling you,” he said, “because I need your prayers.”
“Koos,” I reminded him, “we made that commitment to each other, and we will honor it.”
With the last hour we had together, we prayed for each other. I was more thankful than ever for this friend whom God had given me and who, after all these years, was still an example to me.
When I arrived in Cambodia, there was a devaluation simultaneously of money and of life. It was a land in chaos. If you went shopping, you had to take a briefcase full of cash because the money was reduced to almost nothing. No matter what I might have been told, I couldn’t have been prepared for the pervasive darkness that hung over that country.
I had been duly warned that it would be very difficult preaching there, so I prepared myself for that. After one of my first meetings, in the city of Phnom Penh, I asked the interpreter to dismiss everyone except those who wished to commit their lives to Christ. He did — and a large number stayed seated.
I assumed there had been a misunderstanding. So I asked the interpreter to repeat the direction, and he did — twice more — but still a vast majority of those in the room stayed. By the time I had finished, a sizable number prayed to receive Jesus Christ into their lives. That was very significant, given Cambodians’ historical resistance to the gospel.
In the city of Battambang, I was taken to a large public arena, where I spoke to a packed crowd, and great numbers of people came to the Lord. One of them was a man who’d been a Buddhist priest for twenty-eight years. As the masses of people pressed forward to commit their lives to Jesus, I quickly realized that what had happened in Vietnam four years earlier was happening now in Cambodia. By the end of the first week, we had lost count of the number of people who had given their lives to Christ.
We talk a lot about heroes of the faith, but there was no doubting the faithfulness of my two interpreters. Son Sonne was the director of the Bible Society in Cambodia, and Chhirc Taing was a colonel in the army — and both were putting themselves at great risk in serving Christ.
On my last night in Cambodia, these two men took me out to the best hotel in town, Le Phnom, for a dinner that I will never forget, one where I came face-to-face with the reality of what ideologies can do to people. Le Phnom was where most foreigners were staying because the city was fast deteriorating. My distinguished interpreters ordered a curry dish for me, and they had the same. As I took my first mouthful, however, I knew something was wrong with the food. It tasted very strange. I did not want to offend them, but I did not want to eat this meal either. Then I plunged my fork into the curry again and heard a crackle. When I raised the fork, a large cockroach lay impaled in the prongs. My tablemates saw it and gasped. Chhirc turned red with embarrassment; Son got teary. “This is the best we have now,” he said. “Please forgive us, Brother Ravi.”
“You needn’t be embarrassed,” I replied. “But if you don’t mind, I will just have some bread and skip the meal.” By this point, I had spread my food on the plate to see two or three roaches in it, and the same was true in their dishes. They just moved the roaches aside and ate the meal. Cambodia is called “A Gentle Land,” but what communism in its rabid form had done to its people staggered the imagination. Millions were killed on that watch.
When the murderous Khmer Rouge gained power, Colonel Chhirc’s name was on their “Ten Most Wanted” list. The Christian and Missionary Alliance urged him to flee, offering to escort him out of the country, but he refused to go, opting instead to send his family out. If I remember correctly, his wife refused to leave without him.
“If I am able to lead even one person to Christ by staying, it will be worth it,” Chhirc said. He remained, and hours after the Khmer Rouge marched in, they took him from his home and executed him for having stood against them. Son Sonne was taken out to the high seas and drowned.
The horrible dinner we had that night pales into insignificance in the light of what was demanded of these dedicated men. I would never forget them. Their examples remain as lights to the church in Cambodia — servants who gave their all for the benefit of those who would come after them.
We count many costs in the Christian life, and God in his way prepares us for them all. Still, the heart is never fully ready to face a significant loss.
I was in Detroit on a preaching engagement and was fast asleep in the pastor’s home when I was awakened by the phone ringing. I looked at the clock, and it was 3:00 a.m. I heard footsteps coming toward my room.
Suddenly I grew fearful, remembering that my mother had not been well when I began the trip. She had been in the hospital.
“Ravi, it’s for you,” the pastor whispered into my room. I walked to the hallway and picked up the receiver. It was Margie.
“Your dad called, Ravi,” she said amid tears. “Your mom just passed away.”
It was a rude, rude shock. None of us had expected it. My mother — gone.
I returned to my room and sat up in bed, wondering, hoping that this was just a dream. How could this happen? As the sad news began to sink in, I quickly packed my bags and immediately rushed home.
Mom had been a diabetic and dependent on insulin for years. After we moved to Canada, her new doctor had switched her from insulin to an oral medication. It not only didn’t work, but she developed congestive heart failure and then suffered a stroke. Now, the Lord had finally taken her.
Isabella Manickam Zacharias died early, at the age of fifty-seven. It hit all of us very, very hard. We hadn’t had a death in the family since my grandmother had passed away years before, when we were children in Delhi. Now my father met me at the front door of our family home, and he looked stricken.
That night, as we sat in the living room consoling each other and absorbing the shock, my father turned to me and said, “Son, I want you to preach at her funeral.”
It was another clear affirmation from him. Normally in such situations, the oldest is given that responsibility. Now he was asking me to represent the family for the gospel’s sake. My brothers and sisters were supportive of this decision, and it was a tender moment for all of us in the family. Ironically, it was then, more than ever, that I wished my mother were there. And in a real sense she was, for had it not been for her, I wouldn’t have been there, to say nothing of her own hope in Christ.
Coming up with the sermon for her funeral was not easy. The words simply wouldn’t come. To think something and then to verbalize it makes the reality concrete, but I had an awful time trying to make that bridge. I finally went to my dad and said, “All I can think about is that Mom is gone.”
“Why don’t you get down on your knees,” Dad gently suggested, “and ask the Lord to help you.”
As I went to my knees with only that thought — “she’s gone” — I sensed the Lord saying to me, “If you must insist that she is gone, at least finish the thought. ‘She has gone — where?’ ”
Ah! The thought was completed in my mind. “Home,” I said. “She has gone home!” Home to be with the one who made her. What a difference to know that!
When our family gathered at the funeral home, we all were moved as our father wept with remorse at my mother’s casket. Margie remembers it well as she heard him whisper, “Oh, Belle, oh, Belle,” and then cry out, “will you ever forgive me?”
It was a cry that covered years, and it was not for show. In all our hearts, we knew what was behind his cry.
Our dad’s remorse was a reflection of both his conversion and his heartache. Someone has said that our sin scorches us most after we have received forgiveness, and not before. Once you realize how much you’ve been forgiven, you see how great that forgiveness really is. In that moment at Mom’s casket, the hard truth fell upon my father that his chance to remake his love with my mother had lasted just six years. It also showed me that deep inside he was a good man who had been seduced by power in his earlier years — but the Lord had restored him in his latter years.
Our mother’s death left a lot of people brokenhearted. Her boss, the principal at the school for the mentally challenged, spoke to me of her “pristine character.” He told us that her students cried at the news of her death. And my brother Ramesh struggled terribly in the days that followed. I wouldn’t be surprised if some days he still has to pull his car to the roadside to cry over Mom.
As Margie and I drove back to Deerfield, Illinois, after the funeral, I gazed out the window and muttered, “The world isn’t the same anymore.” The cars looked different, the trees looked different — everything was changed. I felt great sadness also because our children would never know my mother. I have often felt that loss for all of my children. My mother’s personality would have made a profound influence on them. But it was not to be.
She was a special lady.
A few years before, my mom had quietly asked me to handle her estate. I was the only one she spoke to about it, and she said she wanted to leave a large portion to me and to my younger brother, because I was in theological training and Ramesh was in medical school. The others were already well settled.
“Mom, that’s not good,” I told her. “Just distribute it evenly. You don’t want to create any tension. I think you should trust the Lord in this, and leave it up to Dad. Let him manage it when the time comes.” She agreed, but only reluctantly. I could tell she really wanted Ramesh to finish medical school, and she knew of his need. As for my future, she had monetary concerns.
Then she told me that for all those years, she had continued giving to the Saint Philomena shrine in gratitude for Sham’s “healing.” Mom wanted this to continue after her death.
“Mom,” I told her, “who do you think healed Sham? Do you think it was the grace of God, or do you think it was some other source?”
“No,” she said, “I think it was the grace of God.”
“Then why don’t we just give it to the Lord?” I said. “I’ll make sure that this gift happens for some cause in India where love and mercy are offered in Jesus’ name.” She nodded. And so on her behalf, after she was gone I gave to several ministries she had appreciated. It was a fitting act for a woman whose entire life had been devoted to giving.
Shortly before I graduated from Trinity in 1976, Dr. King of the Christian and Missionary Alliance flew to Chicago to see Margie and me. He had a proposal for us.
“We would like you to commit the year 1977 to speaking around the world,” he announced.
I almost fell over in my chair. Around the world? It was a daunting notion.
“We’ll send all of you — you, Margie, and Sarah.”
That made it sound a little less daunting. But only a little.
“It would be for forty-eight weeks,” Dr. King said. “You’ll take off from New York on New Year’s Eve and begin your work in England. Then you’ll work eastward, through Europe and the Middle East, and finish on the Pacific Rim. You’ll be home the next December.”