Letting God Take Over

Three weeks ago I was shoeing horses. Then a routine visit to my doctor changed everything: he discovered that I have widespread cancer. Suddenly I am confronted with death, though not for the first time.

I almost died within weeks of my birth, in July 1938, on a farm in England. A visiting surgeon arranged emergency surgery on my stomach. This left a scar on my chest--and, once I was old enough to appreciate how close to death I had come, an unwavering conviction that God had a purpose for my life. It would be my job to discover it.

I grew up on a Shropshire farm, during World War II. We children hoed sugar beets and dug potatoes. At fifteen, I quit school and became a shepherd. Later, I learned metalwork.

The door to my parents' home was always open. Their love for their fellow men--especially down-and-outs and misfits--planted within me the belief that people are called to brotherhood.

But it took a young woman named Hanna to help this belief grow into a living faith in God and Jesus. From the moment we met, we knew we belonged together--not fairytale love, but something God-given. Through her childlike, sunny nature, Jesus began to come into my life.

We married in December 1962. Hanna, a seamstress by training, was a nurse at heart and selflessly spent countless nights at the bedside of a terminally ill neighbor. Her faith meant love in action.

In September 1977, Hanna and I celebrated the safe arrival of our eighth child, a girl. Still hospitalized one week later, she complained of a headache and asked for her doctor. I went to fetch him. When I returned, Hanna was in a coma. She died four hours later, of a brain aneurysm.

For years, the sight of a mother holding a baby would bring it all back...

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