And So it Begins

 Chapter One - The Early Years

“God gave you a body and a bright healthy mind;

He had a special purpose that He wanted you to find,

So He made you something special, 

You're the only one of your kind.” 1

It was July 4th, 1976 - the bicentennial of America’s independence. We were singing “You’re Something Special” at a performance at the old airport in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii as part of a brand new children’s performing arts ministry called King’s Kids. I was nine years old and loving life. I wasn’t really thinking about the future but in King’s Kids we were learning about how God had a special plan and purpose for our lives. Decades later, some of us performing that day wondered where in world those special plans had gone. We felt like we had been built up to take over the world with ease, only to find that life could actually be pretty dang hard.

Thirty years later, I was living in Virginia. I was working as an outside vendor doing paintless dent removal in a reconditioning assembly line at a large car dealership. In a lull, I sat down and looked around me at all the other people working away. I thought, here I am living a normal, ordinary life when I have been to and lived in more places in the world than anyone in this assembly line and probably ninety-nine per cent of people on the planet. It was as if I had lived an entirely different life. In the words of one of our favorite family sayings, “’Ow did we get ‘ere?”

As with most families, it all began with my father. His name was Alan and he was born in 1933 in the suburb of Huyton in Liverpool, England. They say good art is fired in the crucifix of suffering. That may be why the Beatles were so good. My father used to say the north of England has nine months winter and three months bad weather. At the time, Liverpool was a rough environment to grow up in but it wasn’t like my father didn’t contribute to the unpleasant atmosphere. 

He was the second of four boys and a girl. The three oldest boys used to terrorize the neighborhood with minor exploits like throwing rocks through the stained-glass windows of the Catholic church, stealing from a local orchard and selling flowers door-to-door that he had taken from graves at the cemetery.

He escaped as soon as he could. At seventeen he joined the army and at twenty-one, he immigrated literally half way around the world to New Zealand. There he became a drunken, violent, immoral seaman. But it was also there that he had the life-transforming encounter that set the course for the rest of his life. Tired of his miserable existence, he called out to God and asked Him to show him the right way to go in life. 

One day he sat down next to a Christian in a restaurant in Auckland who told him all about the faith. As he left the restaurant, another man handed him a small pamphlet explaining Christianity again. Later in his hotel room, he got down on his knees and asked God to take over his life. My dad took to Christianity with the passion that he took to everything. He began preaching on the streets and many people responded to his dynamism, including a shy young lady named Fay.

My mom (or “mum” as we pronounced it in New Zealand) was from Auckland and she was very insecure. Her mother had left her when she was young and she spent the rest of her childhood living with her drunken father. A family friend had also sexually abused her growing up. But her life also dramatically changed when she became a Christian at a youth camp.

After my parents were married, they wanted to do something radical for God. My father had been working on a cargo ship going from New Zealand to Rarotonga - the main island in the South Pacific chain of the Cook Islands. The Cook Islands are now a very popular tourist destination, especially for New Zealanders. They even have the distinction of being a location for the reality TV show, Survivor.

But back in the sixties, the Cook Islands were an isolated backwater in the middle of nowhere. My parents decided to become missionaries there. Rarotonga is an island 100 miles around with lush vegetation and rugged volcanic mountains, surrounded by brilliant white sand and crystal clear ocean water and ringed by a reef. It also had oppressive heat, copious bugs and semi-primitive conditions.

The Cook Islands were settled in the 6th century A.D. by Polynesians who migrated from Tahiti. The Spanish were the first Europeans to visit in the 16th century. British navigator, James Cook visited in 1773 and 1777 and named them the Hervey Islands. By the 19th century they were being called the Cook Islands in his honor.

They became a British protectorate in 1888 and were annexed by New Zealand in 1901. In 1965, two years before I was born, New Zealand gave the Islands self-governing status. The native people are called Cook Island Maoris and there are far more of them living in New Zealand than in the Islands themselves. 2

Birth to 15 months, The Cook Islands

So May 15, 1967, I was born a poor white child on a small island in the middle of the vast South Pacific. My family was probably a little more well off than most of the locals but within the white minority, they were certainly at the lower end. It was a home birth with the help of a midwife and I was the youngest of three. My sister, Joy had been born in Liverpool five years earlier and my brother, Samuel was also born in the Cook Islands 18 months previously. Backwater places usually have a plethora of diseases and I still bear the scars from almost dying of complications from the chicken pox.

My father had a job at a meat freezer during the day where, I’ve been told, he had the boss from hell. He would do street outreaches during the weekends with help from my mom and a team from local churches. For most of the three years they were in Rarotonga, my parents saw very little fruit from their efforts. Then, just before they left, with much prayer and help from a team from New Zealand, things began to pop as people finally started to respond.

But soon after, my parents believed it was time to move on. We were to go by ship back to New Zealand. Planes had also started running from Rarotonga to New Zealand by this time and as my mom gets very seasick, she jumped at the chance when a spot opened up for her and I on a plane. So at 15 months, I had my first experience of what, later in life, was to become a regular mode of transport.

1. 1974 William J. Gaither

2. “Cook Islands.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc.. last modified 24 August 2016, at 18:46. Web. September 4, 2016. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_Islands>.