The Joy and Cost of Living the Gospel (1990)

Urbana 90 talk
by Keren Everett

My focus this evening is going to be on the subject of hope.

We're going to hear a lot about hope in these next few days. But what exactly is hope? Why did our creator create us with the capacity to hope in something, to hope in someone? What I'd like to do is share some experiences from my life, experiences of hardship and experiences of joy that God has used to show me what the purpose and essence of hope is in our life. And as I share I'd like each of you to reflect over experiences in your life, experiences in your past, and experiences in your present that have stimulated within you, the emotion, the feeling of hope.

A very simple example from my life took place in 1968. I was riding the school bus, and a song came on the radio. The very words of that song were, "I'm hooked on a feeling, high on believing that you're in love with me." As I listened to the words of that song I realized that I was secretly hoping for the first time, that a young man named Dan Everett, loved and cared for me. Well my hope in Dan's love has only grown over the years. For next month Dan and I celebrate twenty-one years of marriage together and God has given us three beautiful children. That's just one example of hope and I'm sure that each of you can relate to that.

Another example. In 1967 I was living in Brazil with my parents and my two brothers and my younger sister. I had just graduated from the eighth grade at the Amazon Valley Academy – a small little mission school on the mouth of the Amazon. When you graduated from the 8th grade that was it. The school stopped at the 8th grade, so that meant that you had to consider correspondence course or you had to consider coming to the States to live with relatives for high school. My parents at that time felt that it would be best for my older brother Steve and me to come to the States, to this big country, and live with my grandparents, and do high school up here.

I wasn't opposed to that idea at first. In fact, I found it exciting because all my experiences with the US in the past had been on short furloughs, and I had come to think of the US as a magic land. After being raised in a third-world country, and coming to this country with all its wealth and its riches I was overwhelmed. The machines you could put money in and get practically anything out of.

Yes, I was excited about coming to the United States to do high school - until the day it came time to say goodbye to my mom, my younger sister who was four at the time, my younger brother, and my father. I went to say goodbye to Dad, I hugged him, and I couldn't let go. It hit me all at once what was happening. I realized that I wasn't going to see my family for at least two years. I was going to a country that I didn't know the culture. I didn't have friends. And they practically had to pull me away from dad and put me on that plane and send me to the States.

Needless to say those first few months living with my grandparents were terrible and difficult for me. Why? I felt hopeless. I felt like I could no longer put hope in my parents' love for me. For them to have made such a drastic change in my life, to have sent me to a country where I knew no one, a country where I wasn't familiar with the culture, must have meant, I had convinced myself, that my parents no longer loved me. And I felt hopeless, I felt all alone. How did I handle this? I isolated myself. I found it helpful just to spend hours studying and I became preoccupied with grades.

Another thing that I found helpful was to do hour after of hour of meticulous cleaning, something that I could do by myself and not have to face the world. You know I had a grandmother, a very loving grandmother, who realized what I was going through. She never insisted that I talk to her; she never insisted that I explain the feelings that I was having. But there was one thing that Grandma always did, at least one time during the day. She'd find me where I was at, she'd come up to me, she was a big woman, she'd put her arms around me, and she'd say, “Keren, do you know I love you, do you know I care?”

Well at first these words just echoed in my ears, they meant nothing to me, who was this woman anyways? I didn't feel like she really loved me. Until one day I was in the kitchen defrosting the fridge. Grandma came up to me. She put her arms around me and with tears in her eyes she said, “Do you know I love you, do you know I care?” And for the first time I heard what Grandma was saying. Why? Because I realized she really did love me. And for the first time I was able to put my hope in someone's love. Someone who loved me in this big country where I had no friends.

From that point on, my stay here in the US became easier. I was able to put hope in my grandfather’s love for me. I began to open up with kids at school and I was able to trust in their friendship and put hope in those relationships.

The most important experience of hope, though, in my life, took place in 1959. I was living in Brazil with a group of Indians called the Satara Indians, living with my parents and my two brothers. Mom and Dad believed that God wanted them to share the hope that was within them with the Satara people. The hope that comes from knowing that yes, God loves the peoples of this earth, and because he loves, he has made himself manifest in a way that we can know him personally, and we can live in that love.

Mom and Dad knew that God wanted them to share this hope that was within them with the Satara people. A people that would have no opportunity to hear unless someone with another language and another culture were to go and to share.

So our family, my brothers and I and Mom and Dad, were living with the Satara people. It was toward the fifth month of our stay with these people that Mom and Dad became sick with hepatitis and within two weeks they were flat on their backs, unable to care for themselves. This meant that my older brother Steve who was nine at the time, I who was eight, and my younger brother Tim who was seven, were left with the responsibilities of caring for ourselves and also for caring for Mom and Dad.

I was not aware of how serious the situation was. In fact, I felt like I had more freedom because Mom was my schoolteacher when I was in the village, and now I had all morning to myself so I was able to go to the field with my friends, able to go fishing, to go swimming in the river. And there were many days when I would leave my older brother Steve with the responsibility of caring for Mom and Dad, for feeding them, and bathing them.

The day came when Dad called my two brothers and myself into this small little thatched room where he and Mom were lying on this air mattress, and he began to explain that we kids were going to have to get out of there. Dad realized the seriousness of our situation. He knew that he was too weak physically to pack up supplies and make the trip out.

It had taken us a month to get in, a month of river travel to get into this village. First by river boat, then by launch, then paddling a canoe for 10 days. My Dad realized there was no way he had the physical strength to get his family out of there. So he told us, he said, "Kids, try and get out of here. Ask the Indians to help you." And he went on to say that Mom and him were too sick and they were probably going to die there in the village, that we were to try and get out.

He began to explain to my older brother where the important papers were on a bamboo shelf there in that small little room. As he was talking, I ran from that room. I heard what dad was saying, but I refused to believe it. I refused to accept the fact that my parents might die. I threw myself down in a clearing outside that small little hut, and I began to cry.

I felt helpless, and I felt hopeless. I felt helpless because there was no way I as a child of eight years could physically get mom and dad out of that setting. I couldn't put them in a canoe and paddle out. And I felt hopeless. Why? Because I felt totally alone. I felt like there was no one I could turn to.

And what was worse, I didn't know how to pray. I realized that all my experiences in the past with prayer had been with Mom and Dad present, at family devotions, at mealtime, at bedtime, at church where they were telling me who to pray for, how to pray, and what to pray for. And I was very much aware as a child of the hope that they had in God's love for them and the hope that they had in God's love for us as their children.

But I personally had not experienced that hope in God's love. And as I sat there and thought of praying, I knew that I would have to believe that God loved and cared for me, totally apart from Mom and Dad, to know that he heard my prayer and would answer it.

And for the first time I began to pray to God as my true father. And I sensed an overwhelming feeling of hope that I could not put into words, even as a child of eight years. And I began to pray. I said, "Lord, my life is yours. I realize that you are my father. I want to serve you just as Mom and Dad are serving. I want to share your word with people that have not heard." But then I had one simple childlike request and that was: "But please God, save my parents, don't let them die."

As I was sitting there on the clearing outside the hut where my mom and dad were dying, two of my friends, my Indian friends, came running up the path, and they said, "Hurry, come with us to the river, around the bend there's a canoe coming with white people in it, white just like you." Sure enough, we got down there, and there were these two men approaching in the canoe and they were white, they were not Indians. They got closer and I recognized them, they were two men from our mission, Wycliffe Bible Translators. They were in this area just doing survey work and had my brothers and I not been down at the rivers edge, possibly they would have rowed on by. Because you can't see the village from the rivers' edge, it's just a small little trail.

We called them over and we said please come, our parents are dying. They ran up that path, ran into this small little hut where Mom and Dad were lying, and they began to move. One began to pack supplies. Another went to the jungle to cut down poles to make a cot for Mom. And I watched these men, I realized that God cared for me. He had chosen to answer my prayer; he didn't have to do that. He had chosen to answer my specific prayer and I knew right then that he was going to save my parents.

The trip that took us a month to get in took us four days to get out. We paddled night and day, we arrived at the small settlement of Paranchis, where usually we would have gotten a river boat, we were able to get mom on an air force pontoon plane, and within 4 days, they were out in a hospital in Belem, a city on the mouth of the Amazon. They put Mom and Dad in the hospital. They told us that Dad would be a while recovering, but Mom probably wouldn't live. She weighed 75 pounds when we got her out; she was in a semi coma. They put my two brothers and me with foster parents, children home parents, and they said "Your mom probably isn't going to live." And we didn't see Mom and Dad for weeks.

But you know, during those weeks, I didn't believe that God was going to let my parents die. Because I knew that he'd answered my prayer back there in the village and that he was going to let them live. Three months later, Mom still flat on her back, being fed intravenously, is talking of her return to the Sartara. The doctors told her she should never go back because her liver had been permanently scarred. Six months later, we're on our way back to the Sartara people.

They believed that God wanted them to share the hope that was within them with the Sartara people. And share that hope they did. Now there are indigenous churches, thirty years later, scattered all up and down the Angida River. These are churches that are springing up because the Sartara now have a New Testament in the Sartara language, and they're reading it for themselves, and they are believing that Christ is who he said he was, and that in fact God has revealed himself to us, to the peoples of this world, in a form, in human flesh, so that we could know him in a personal way, so we no longer have to live in bondage to idols that we make for ourselves, to images that we create, but we can know our creator personally, and live in that love relationship.

The Sartara are growing in Christ now. In 1986, I was able to visit the Sartara for a beautiful celebration. They had a celebration because they were thankful to God that the New Testament had been completed in their language. And they invited Indians from all over to come to this celebration. They invited other missionaries to come to this celebration. And as I sat in those services and I listened to them in the morning service, the afternoon service and the evening service, listening to them praying and singing and worshipping and reading God's word, my heart was humbled by the hope that they had and God's love for them. And as I sat there I couldn't help but reflect back to twenty-six years earlier, to experiences that I'd had as a child in this same village.

I recall as a child being, the Indians coming and waking us up, frightened, because they said there were evil spirits in the form of mighty winds rushing through their homes. Winds that would knock them out of their hammocks, knock over their water pots, knock over their small little kerosene lamps. And they would come to us and they would say "Please pray to your god to protect us from these evil spirits and from the witch doctors."

I recall watching one of my little friends die in the hands of the witch doctor. This young boy had terrible worms, and he began to eat dirt off the ground, he began to eat clothes off the line, and the witch doctor said he's behaving this way because he has evil spirits in him. He took him to his small little hut, laid him out on a mat, began to dance around him and to blow smoke on him. Then he proceeded to make two slits in the boy's throat, one on the right, and one on the left, and massage his arms and massage his legs and to beg the evil spirits to come out of him. I watched that young boy bleed to death that day. Now this village is almost 100% Christian. They no longer live in bondage to the prince of this earth, because they've heard.

My husband Dan and I and our three children have been working with a group of people in northwestern Brazil, in the Amazon Basin, for the last thirteen years. And God has impressed on me, during these thirteen years, the importance of putting my hope first and foremost in his love for me. And putting my hope in his love for the peoples of this earth.

During our first stay with the Pedahong, the women refused to speak to me, for the Pedahong have a custom and that is that their women don't speak to strangers. Their women don't speak to outsiders. Well after weeks of trying to practice the language with the women, and having them turn their back to me and spit, I began to feel that somehow I deserved this response, somehow they were doing this because of who I was, and I found that within a short time my self worth was going, was decreasing. Reaching a point of total despair, God reached down and put his arms around me and he reminded me of the importance of finding my hope in his love for me. Because if I didn't, there would be no way I could cross the barriers I was facing.

Toward the end of one of our stays with the Pedahong after we'd been there for about eight months, the Pedahong became drunk with whiskey. A trader sold them a case of whiskey and said "Kill the American family." The traders don't like us among the Pedahong because we encourage them not to enslave the Pedahong. We encourage them to pay them a fair salary. And we encourage them not to sell them whiskey, because the men are becoming alcoholics and it's destroying their culture.

The traders said, "Kill these Americans." That night as we were crawling into our hammocks, we heard the Indian men begin to yell threats about killing us. And we knew, Dan and I knew, how violent the Pedahong can be when they're drunk.

He said, I'm going to have to lock you in the small little storeroom, the only closed-in room that we had in the village. So he took me and our three little children, Shannon, Chris, and Caleb, and locked us in the storeroom and sat outside with an old unloaded rifle across his lap. The Pedahong men came and began to hurl threats at him and slander us in every way possible.

And when they saw that Dan was not going to fight, that he wasn't going to react, they turned on each other and began to fight amongst themselves. Swinging machetes at each other and injuring each other. The next morning I came out of that little storeroom where we had spent the night, and there was blood strewn all over my bamboo floor. There was blood all over our hammocks. They'd been all through the house. There were men out on the ground in front of the house, some of them sleeping; some of them still stone drunk, some of them badly injured from fighting.

And as I looked at these men I said, "God, how can you love them?" There was one feeling I had, and that feeling was hate. I want to leave and never go back. And I thought to myself, how can I convince these people to put their hope in a God who loves them when I'm feeling hate? I began to gather the hammocks and the linen that had been soiled and walk toward the river to wash.

When I heard two men approaching down the path, one of them was the chief, and I could tell that they were sobering up a bit. He called to me and Dan, he said, "Please don't leave, we don't want you to leave, we need you, our heads are sick with whiskey, we don't mean what we've said." And then he handed me a little package, and in that package were five beautiful polished jaguar teeth.

As I looked at those teeth, they began to sparkle, and I was reminded of Christ on the cross, and he said to me, Keren, I love you and your sin, and I love these people and their sin. And it was like all at once I saw all of my false hopes come up before me. All my attempts to try and change these people through my own power.

I didn't realize that so much of my effort among the Pedahong had been based on my strength and my desires to change these people, and God again reminded me that it was only as I put my hope in his love for me and only as I put my hope in his love for the peoples of this earth that I would begin to experience the power that the world knows not, the higher love that only he can give.

As I started to speak tonight I asked that each of you think of experiences in your life, experiences that have stimulated within you that feeling of hope. If you were to place on one side of a balance the hope that you have in your wealth, the hope that you have in your education, the hope that you have in politics, in social change, whatever it is, because we're all attracted by different things of this world, and you were to place on the other side of that balance the hope that you have in God's love for you and the hope that you have in his love for the peoples of the earth, how would those things balance out?

I pray that you and I during these next four days here at Urbana will discover more of the joy and the freedom that comes from putting our total hope in our creator's love for us and our creator's love for the peoples of this earth. God bless you, thank you.

The Joy and Cost of Living the Gospel (1990)

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December 27-31, 2009