publications

Sentiers paisibles

Présentation

Née en Angleterre en 1943 de parents britanniques, j’ai passé mon enfance en Zambie avant de venir en France, à Tours, en 1961.  Après mes études à l’université de Liverpool dans le nord de l’Angleterre et à l’université de Besançon, je me suis mariée avec Derek en 1966.  Nous nous sommes installés à Genève où nous étions tous les deux professeurs à l’École internationale et où nous fréquentions l’Église baptiste dont nous sommes membres depuis 1968.  Après une année d’études à l’Institut biblique de Nogent-sur-Marne, nous avons répondu affirmativement à un appel que notre Église nous a adressé.  De retour à Genève, ayant pris des responsabilités au sein de l’Église, nous avons été sollicités aussi par un groupe de chrétiens anglophones, groupe qui s’est constitué aussi en Église - the Evangelical Baptist Church of Geneva - dont Derek était le pasteur jusqu’à sa retraite en 2003.  Responsable pendant 17 ans du journal mensuel de l’Église anglophone, j’ai aussi été contactée par une maison d’éditions en Angleterre en vue de contribuer à leurs notes bibliques.  Plus tard c’est une maison d’éditions aux USA qui m’a demandé d’écrire une trilogie sur la prière.

Testimony
A rescue operation

All eyes were on the two new children who shyly entered the classroom.  Blond, dressed in school uniform – a green dress with white collar and cuffs – the twins looked round uncertainly at their new class mates.

From my desk I in turn examined the ten year-old girls hesitating in the doorway.  At break we clustered around them: ‘What are your names?’  ‘Where are you from?’  ‘What are you doing here in Lusaka?’  Gradually we learned that their parents were missionaries.  ‘Missionaries!  What’s a missionary?’ I remember asking them.

Little by little it emerged that the parents of Anne and Elizabeth had come to Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia was then called) to tell people about Jesus.  There in Lusaka in 1953 they began children’s meetings in their home and invited me to attend.  The twins and I soon became fast friends.  We were the same age and we would spend a lot of time together, at school and at each other’s homes or riding our bikes through the bush.  They would talk to me about Jesus and how he had come to earth to save people.  I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about and what it meant and what it had to do with me.

Attendance had grown at the children’s meetings, and they took place now in a local school on Sunday mornings.  I was perplexed about a word I kept hearing there.  What does this word ‘salvation’ mean, I wondered?  I wasn’t very sure either of the meaning of a verse that the twins’ mother showed me in her Bible as I prepared to cycle home after playing with Anne and Elizabeth on the swing in their garden one afternoon.  It comes in a letter the apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Rome, and it says: ‘If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord”, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved’ (Romans 10:9).

I knew now that being “saved” meant that God would forgive my sins, because Jesus had taken my punishment upon himself when he died on the cross.  Even though I understood little else at that point, I went home that day and told God that I did believe, and I thanked him for saving me.

Many years later, in 1999, I was telling my story to a group of children in Geneva, Switzerland.  I remember telling them that salvation was like a rescue operation.  It was soon after the disastrous accident in the Mont Blanc tunnel linking nearby France with Italy.  An Italian fireman kept going back into the tunnel and bringing out injured people until he finally succumbed himself and died.  He gave his life to save those people.

In the same way, I told the children, Jesus died instead of me so that I might live.  ‘For the wages of sin is death’, writes Paul, ‘but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6:23).

Publications