A Given Life

The Encouragement of Grace

McAllister

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532609831
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Pivoting upon her ten-year stay as a missionary in Rwanda, in this memoir McAllister reflects deeply on her experiences of redemption and transformation. A Given Life: The Encouragement of Grace is intensely personal, incorporating the author's insights about cross-cultural Christian service, and how God brought inner healing while strengthening and stretching her faith. With the stated purpose of encouraging readers, the author shares hard-won wisdom gained over eighty years, emphasizing God's role in rescuing her and giving her a new life, "a given life."

1

Memory and Faith

This book is an attempt to reflect on some parts of my journey as a follower of Jesus Christ. It is, as Gilbert and Sullivan say, “a thing of shreds and patches,” but it has a consistent pattern, if only known to the God who created me.

From the moment I arrived in Rwanda, aged sixty-eight, people called me umukecuru, a term of respect used for women old enough to know something of the way of the world. It can mean either “old woman” or, most often, “mother.” This designation was for me both warming and humbling. I was not a good mother, nor did I have my own mother to nurture me growing up. Further, I had a neurotic, brilliant, and damaging stepmother whom I both loved and feared. Now in Rwanda I was being called “mother.” This theme of “mother” threads from my birth through my own failure as a mother to this new land in which no one knew what sort of person I was. People simply took me for a wise woman, a nurturer, a mother. This perspective colored and shaped my years in Rwanda.

Concerning my time in Rwanda, a few things have come clear: First, I knew I was called to live in Rwanda; second, it was hard; third, God sustained me; and last, God used me. This is not only a book about a relatively short period of my life, the Rwanda years; it is also about redemption, transformation, and renewal. I am a witness to God’s grace, kindness, patience, and mercy, poured out to me and to everyone who believes in an unrestrained stream. It is that which I hope will shine through. My self is only of value as it is renewed after the image of its Creator, and that is a life-long process, a journey. As they say in Rwanda, “I’m on my way coming.”

As I begin, I am confronted with a problem: my memory is “fallen,” along with the rest of me; it functions poorly, inconsistently, and usually unfaithfully. I find this out, of course, after the fact—long afterwards, in most cases. Someone sheds light on a piece of my past, and I suddenly see that I had it all wrong, that I had an incomplete framework or perspective. This phenomenon continues; even within a ten-year span, such as forms the major part of this book, I learn how unreliable my memory is. Reviewing and musing on the journals I have kept, I discover not only incidents I had forgotten, but patterns and insights that recur—many discovered as if for the first time.

When I think of my childhood, I “remember” certain things which have later been shown to be incorrect, or imperfectly remembered. I suppose I’m not alone in this respect. For example, I had thought for years after leaving home that my family was poor. It was a “memory” based on the extreme anxiety of my stepmother about finances, but I didn’t know that until years later. One day I happened to be considering the benefits I enjoyed growing up. These included lessons—piano, ballet, and voice—summer camp for eight weeks each year in the Adirondacks, and private girls’ school. I lived in a house on fourteen acres of meadows, gardens, and orchards—graced by two-hundred-year-old maples and other grand trees for climbing; a house with so many rooms I had to count them up in my mind (small rooms, but still . . . ). It dawned on me then that my memory of being poor couldn’t be correct. It was an unsettling new awareness, shifting something within me to make adjustments. The truth was that I grew up in a well-to-do home, but with a mentality of being poor. This created an awkward inner tension, the effects of which no doubt have been working their way through my life orientation ever since.

Again, just recently, I realized something else about my childhood home. This wasn’t exactly a memory correction, but rather, a pleasant revelation springing from a new awareness. I was reading a book called Gods at War by Kyle Idleman, in which he writes about how all of us can get caught up in “worshiping” something other than God (as revealed in the Bible, and especially in Jesus Christ). As he invited his readers to consider “old gods”—those we may have mindlessly carried with us into adult life—I looked again at my childhood home, to see what my parents (who were not Christians) believed in, or “worshiped.” I was struck by God’s grace in setting me in such a home. My parents valued things I consider to be good: intellect, books, nature, all kinds of creativity, and peace in the world. My dad was passionate about trying to get the government to change its military priorities, which he felt resulted in depriving people all around the world of basic necessities. My folks valued doing things the right way (not slipshod or inefficiently), speaking the truth, and working hard. They also valued a world perspective. My dad did a major development project (business-oriented) in Liberia, in connection with the Liberia Company, a United States government venture started in 1948 by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. Every Thanksgiving we would have guests from some foreign place at our table.

My dad was a man of integrity, I always felt. He tried to understand what was the right thing to do and then to do it. These are all terrific values to be immersed in growing up. There were difficulties in relationships with my parents—both between them and between them and me—but the setting, the ambiance, and the rich matrix of benefits were a gracious mitigation of the difficulties I experienced.

The “gods” my parents worshiped were limited in their effectiveness, but I believe my parents were true to them, and they could have been stepping stones to a deeper and more complete understanding of reality for them. As far as I know, they never came to see the truth as it is in Jesus before they died. I see those “gods” as a kind of tutor in my childhood—much as Paul views the law’s purpose for the Jews (see Gal 3:24). One can serve and try to live up to its requirements—and discover one’s immeasurable limitations—but ultimately there is an all-encompassing God, who is the source of all these good things and who extends far beyond all of them.

So how can I write about my life in any true sense if this is the case with my fallen, faulty, misguided memory? It must be a work of faith. I must enter into the task with humility, knowing at the start that I may not always get it right—even about myself, which I should know more about than anything else.

I often read Psalm 139, and I love the flow of David’s ideas, starting with his awareness of God’s searching spirit, which has probed so deeply into David’s inner being, causing him to cry, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it” (Ps 139:6). God is the one who knows me, having made me, putting his infinite mind to my very molecules so as to arrange them in a particular and unique way. There is no possibility of fathoming God’s knowledge of me. But, as David does at the end, I can invite this God who knows me to search me—so that I may know something of what God knows of me.

And this is what I do. I invite God to look into my heart, to see if there is some hurtful way that needs to be brought to the light and dealt with by his consuming love. I believe I can trust God to do this searching and exposing, right to the end of my life. And this is the basis on which I can establish my writing: I report what I learn along the way—knowing it is incomplete in many ways—and trust God to weave this reporting together so that others may be encouraged to let God search them, and reveal them to themselves. In the process—the real encouragement—we find out who God is. In revealing us to ourselves, he reveals himself. Seeing ourselves as God sees us necessarily reveals God’s values and holy standards, as well as his steadfast love.

Moses wanted to see God. He, more than perhaps anyone else in the Bible, knew God—he had countless encounters with God, who treated Moses as a friend, sharing all his great plans with him. But Moses still longed to see God (see Exod 33). He needed to know that God’s presence would always go with him. That longing is planted in me. I believe it is deep in every person. No matter how long I’ve known God and have had amazing, intimate, and surprising interactions with God, I still long to know him. He is beyond my human knowledge, so such longing will always be appropriate.

This writing is about God-in-me, and me-in-God. I hope to show who I am and am becoming as God works and moves in me, speaks to me, and empowers me. Anyone can do this. Everyone has a me-in-God story, if they have begun to walk with God. And each story is unique and valuable, worth sharing with others. This is my attempt, and my prayer is to be authentic, to encourage others with the encouragement God has given me, and to glorify his name.

2

Intimations

I imagine that when I am face-to-face with Jesus in the new Earth and new Heaven, I will be able to look back over the ways he had led me, from the earliest days of my life, until the day I found out who he truly was and wanted to have him at the center of my life. I can find out hints of his ways through reflection, and more and more are revealed, the longer I live. There has been a gradual pulling aside of a curtain, letting me see some of the simple, ordinary events of my life as preparation for his coming into my heart for good.

C. S. Lewis wrote his story of being “surprised by joy”—coming to faith through the pathway of delight in beauty, literature, and creation. I recently was considering the question of what, and how, I love, because what one loves or takes joy in can be what God will use to bring a person to faith in him as the giver of all delights.

Here are some of the things I love:

• snow-covered mountains against blue sky

• new buds on trees

• warm sun, for basking

• lying down after a full and tiring day

• Christian fellowship, and experiencing the movements of the Holy Spirit

• children’s voices at play; a comfortable and familiar cat

• flowers

• Adirondack lakes, canoeing; Lake Kivu—mysterious, vast, silent

• faces of friends

• colors, birdsong, woods

• my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; and that they love each other

• the Kinyarwanda language

• singing; dancing

• music—classical, opera, country, spirituals, hymns

But here’s a question: the things I say I love—am I true to them? I am steeped in George MacDonald, fierce nineteenth-century Scottish advocate of God’s consuming love. I have read his sermons, novels, and fantasies. Everywhere, he encourages me to ask serious questions about myself, and to live the truth I know. Can I know myself, or probe myself truly, so as to understand the quality of my love? I know I have not been and am not true as I should be, as a child of the Truth. I often say to people, I love such-and-such—as in the list above, but if it is true that I love these things, how is my love borne out or manifested?

Music, for example. I say I love music. What should that mean? To be engaged in it somehow, for a good part of one’s time; to do it, to the extent of one’s ability, and to grow in that ability; to listen to music, and to learn about what one listens to; to know the heart of it; to learn why one loves music—and which music, of all that is available to know, is best, or best-loved.

It appears on reflection that I have never loved music thus. I have at times enjoyed music—especially singing—have often delighted in it, as I had the gift of a pretty voice. But enjoyment is mostly superficial. It is not to love—as to know, to enter into, to appreciate what is in a song or a symphony or an opera. I have been only a superficial lover of music. I despised and wasted so much opportunity to be more, learn more, become more. Or, to be truthful, not entirely so. I did enter into choral singing fairly deeply, but still, not usually because of true love of the music, but because of the enjoyment I took from it. And it was easy for me to go pretty far without too much effort. I had a good instrument and a good sense of pitch, and I could sight-read well enough to not have to really learn the music. I coasted along on the surface of it, therefore, and was often praised, which didn’t do me any good.

What I have written should lead to repentance. Indeed, I feel an inner grief that I so carelessly treated the gifts and opportunities I was given. But the deeper wrong is to have pretended a love that was not true. Here is an amazing idea: God may have given music to me as a child, as a potential pathway to himself. How much pain I could have spared myself and so many others if I had opened myself and given myself to truly loving the music that was in me and so abundantly available! Even so, I must also acknowledge that God graciously accepted me at the level I could respond to this gift, and I have been truly blessed by it, by music, and by singing, all my life. He didn’t, in other words, withdraw the gift because I couldn’t fully enter into its potential. He did use it as one means to find out about his love. Music, now, isn’t for the same purpose in my life as it might have been when I was young and so badly in need of clear truth and beauty and love. But I praise God for teaching...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Memory and Faith
• Chapter 2: Intimations
• Chapter 3: While Still an Enemy
• Chapter 4: Hearing God’s Voice
• Chapter 5: Invitation to Rwanda
• Chapter 6: Led into God’s Calling
• Chapter 7: Beginnings
• Chapter 8: What to Do?
• Chapter 9: Better Together
• Chapter 10: The Healing Crucible
• Chapter 11: Stress and Growth
• Chapter 12: Reflections on Ministry in the Culture of Rwanda
• Chapter 13: The Return
• Chapter 14: Home Again?
• Chapter 15: Gleanings
• Bibliography