God's Substitute Teachers--by Linden Malki

My dad used to say that he'd never met someone he couldn't learn something from.

One day when I was a kid, my cousin and I saw our grandmother sitting on her sofa reading her Bible.  "You haven't read that yet, Grandma?" we asked. Her reply is one I've never forgotten, and learned something very important: "Yes, I've read it several times, and I find something new every time I read it."  The idea that you can--and should--read it over and over again was eye-opening for me, and I have found her answer totally true.

When my uncle, a longtime China missionary, was arrested and imprisoned in China for almost five years, they originally confiscated his Bible. He managed to convince them to return it, and it was almost the only reading material he had for those years. I found out years later that in this small prison in a small town in western China, there were two Englishmen who had been arrested in Tibet when the Chinese overran it.  One was another missionary, and one was a radio operator and also a Christian.  The three of them  were not allowed to see each other, but they were able to keep track of each other to a limited extent. The two Englishmen both wrote books about their experiences, and they heard enough to realize that they were all three believers, and they all survived with their minds and faith intact, thanks to their own knowledge of God and knowing that they were not alone.

It is good for us to know that there are others around us who also trust in God and have strengths that are both like ours but each different in our own ways. My first boss was an Episcopalian, a well-read and well-traveled daughter of an Army officer who had grown up in a variety of interesting places. She had gotten to know me from my being a good patron of a neighborhood library as a child, and she gave me good recommendations for books to read. She also got me a job as a page in that library when I was 15, and there was enough downtime in this small branch library that we had many interesting conversations. I went back and worked there a couple of summers when I was home from college, and part of the next year after graduation when I was figuring out where I was going next. She played a part in what did happen: she was interested in sea travel by freighter--many freight liners have 10 or 12 passenger accommodations, and on her recommendation my dad and I booked passage from New York to Beirut, to meet up with the missionary brother who was retiring from teaching college in Taiwan, and was going home the long way around. The plan was to meet up with my aunt and uncle in Beirut, spend part of the summer in Lebanon and what was then the Jordanian West Bank, and then travel on through Europe. What happened was that on the freighter was a young Lebanese man from San Bernardino, whose mom was taking him back to Lebanon to find him a nice Lebanese Christian girl.  Those two weeks on the freighter totally changed my life--God does amazing things--for which I am eternally thankful.