Happy 90th Birthday Dad - a photo on Flickriver

Happy 90th Birthday Dad

            Today would have been my father's 90th birthday. He would have been thrilled to see it fall on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, Good Friday. He was a truly extraordinary man and we miss him. Fine character, strong physical disposition (he played numerous sports at a high level in his youth), a managerial mind that I certainly never possessed, and a deep commitment to his Christian faith. 

It was this faith that led him and my mother with two young sons to the highlands of New Guinea in the early 1960s. These were the most exciting years of my life, of which I have almost total recall. As a young boy I believed my father could do anything (and I wasn't far wrong). In rapid time he learned to speak the lingua franca of the Papua and New Guinea territories (Neo-Melanesian or Pidgin English as it is sometimes called), and then learned as much of the local Enga dialect as he could.

It was this feature that allowed him to work with his two closest pastoral aids, Kopene and Arenda, to begin a translation of parts of the Bible and even hymns into the Enga language. But this was only half the matter, as mission schools were established to teach the people how to read their own language for the very first time. This was quite an achievement with minimal resources.

Later this year the family will make a pilgrimage back to Dad's second home in Papua New Guinea, and there some of his ashes will be deposited in the land and among the people he loved so much.

Happy Birthday Dad. It really is a Good Friday, for this is the reason you lived your life the way you did in service of your Lord Jesus Christ.

Maranatha.

Taken on: March 29, 2024

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Happy 90th Birthday Dad

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