FACING A TASK UNFINISHED

By Frank Houghton, 1930

Facing a task unfinished,
That drives us to our knees,
A need that undiminished,
Rebukes our slothful ease,
We, who rejoice to know Thee,
Renew before Thy throne,
The solemn pledge we owe Thee,
To go and make Thee known.

Where other lords beside Thee
Hold their unhindered sway,
Where forces that defied Thee,
Defy Thee still today,
With none to heed their crying
For life, and love, and light,
Unnumbered souls are dying,
And pass into the night.

We bear the torch that flaming
Fell from the hands of those,
Who gave their lives proclaiming
That Jesus died and rose.
Ours is the same commission,
The same glad message ours,
Fired by the same ambition,
To Thee we yield our powers.

O Father Who sustained them,
O Spirit Who inspired,
Saviour, Whose love constrained them,
To toil with zeal untired,
From cowardice defend us,
From lethargy awake!
Forth on Thine errands send us
To labour for Thy sake.

(c) Overseas Missionary Fellowship

Found At Last!

Here is the MBE medal and original citation from King George VI awarded to Captain Francis William Fielding White, 6th Gurkha Rifles.
Her Majesty The Queen presented me with this medal on Friday 13th November 2009 at Buckingham Palace.
It was a great privilege to be presented to her, and both she and members of her staff expressed great interest in my Father's story.

TO LONDON TO VISIT THE QUEEN

Stuart and I leave for London soon to receive my father's M.B.E. from Her Majesty The Queen. This is the Honour awarded to my father by King George VI in 1946, and only discovered in May this year.


Getting ready to go to Buckingham Palace has been a joyous experience. Our grandchildren, Harry, Georgie and Lucy helped me collect emu feathers at the Tamworth Animal Park to be attached to my hat by my mother's silver Chinese broach. With them is a lyre bird feather our elder son, Stuart James brought home from a school excursion in the 1990's.

And that is not all the Australiana! My handbag is a gift from my friend Judy and is made of kangaroo hide at 'Aussie Bush Leather' in Tamworth. I am wearing a silk Chinese Gown tailor-made in Beijing last month, with a wool jacket.



Every Sunday at morning tea after church, I practise my curtsey guided by some excellent coaches. I'm afraid not much can be done about my accent, with the best will in the world, though I am trying to say 'Ma'am' the English way! All my friends here have entered into the spirit of this amazing event and we have shared a lot of joy and excitement. I look forward to sharing our experience with them when we come back.

Our preparations include printing a copy of 'My China Mystery'for Her Majesty, and this is yet another way our loving God has picked me up and carried me along. Family members were valiantly helping me with proof-reading when another friend, Betty, rang up for a chat. Now Betty is not only an experienced proof-reader, but she knew my parents well from the time Dad became her minister at Bald Hills, Queensland, in 1959. She readily agreed to help me in this way. How thankful I am, and I am much happier to print out now.

I can't help thinking that if meeting Queen Elizabeth is such a wonderful experience, what will it be like to meet the King of all Kings and Queens!

How marvellous are the works of God, and His ways past finding out!

BACK TO CHINA

It has come to pass! I have been back to China and it is everyting I anticipated and more. The 'old' is incredible and the 'new' blows your mind away. The people are prospering, especially in the cities, and we felt safe and welcomed. Meeting Chinese Christians was a rare privilege, and the highlight of our tour.

Update 27th August 2009

This is what my parents and I looked like in 1949 before we left China. My parents returned for a brief visit in 1983. Now, for the first time, I have the opportunity to return, thanks to the love and generosity of Mum Andrews. Stuart and I will leave next week for a fortnight in China with the Bible Society Vision Tour, visiting Beijing, Nanjing, Xian and Hong Kong. This is the trip of my lifetime!

Update Friday 14th August

Last Saturday afternoon, Stuart and I hosted a Data Projector Slide Show of 'My China Mystery'for about 60 people. It took about two hours, and we also showed a Bible Society DVD of the state of the Church and Bible distribution in China. Some estimate there may be 290,000,000 Christians in China. The Bible Society has been able to distribute 13 million Bibles in the last 15 years, and hope to print another 2 million this year - so few to be shared among so many.

Our thanks goes to both ABC Rural Radio and the Northern Daily Leader for the excellent coverage they gave this meeting.

PROLOGUE

I see my parents now, standing together singing a song. We are at the bottom of the back steps of my Grandparents’ farmhouse at Redland Bay, Queensland, Australia. I see and hear my parents now, their voices blending in pleasing harmony. Dad is tall, athletic and fair, though at this time his once round face is rather gaunt, his ‘Roman’ nose is more prominent and his grey-blue eyes are bloodshot from the privations of war service. Mum is short, sturdy and trim, with the dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin of her Scottish-Spanish heritage. The lines of her face are classic. She is a beautiful woman. Altogether they are a striking couple.

My parents, Frank and Ella White, are very much in love. This is a time when couples do not make outward display of romance, holding hands or hugging in public. So my parents express the joy of their love in song. They are singing “The Love of God”, and if I am cute enough I may persuade them to sing “Nor Silver Nor Gold” as well. To hear their voices interweave, one taking the melody, and then the other, both capable of rich harmony, is brilliant. And those wonderful rhyming words – “human comprehension”, “infinite dimension”, “broad in its intention” – I love the sound of them, the rhythm of the verse enriching the vowels and consonants, though their dictionary meaning is not important to me. They really are good, these parents of mine! I’m so happy!

But even at the exalted age of three, I know there is a limit. You must not push my father too far. My mother is ever vigilant and intervenes whenever she senses his strength and patience are running out. There is time for only one song today. He must get back to work. He must not waste time. The chipping of the tomatoes needs to be done…

My parents found each other in North-west China. It was love at first sight, and they became engaged immediately. Dad was 35 and Mum was 31 when they met and it was the first and only love for both of them. That may be hard to believe in the modern Australian setting, but it is true. They were both far too busy preparing for and pursuing their missionary vision to have romantic entanglements in their early twenties. And then came the war. In 1945, my mother caught the first boat to India after the war at the same time as my father was sent home to a military hospital in Brisbane to be treated for Amoebic Dysentery and possibly Tuberculosis. It wasn’t till January 1947 that they met at Lanzhou on the western reach of the Great Wall of China.

As the years of my childhood passed, and God did not “open the door” for my parents to return to China, a bitter melancholy settled on my father and “China” became a taboo subject. My parents gave up the spontaneous duets as well. I never gave up asking, and occasionally they would sing together. That was when we were all happy. I risked my own disappointment and Dad’s annoyance by questioning him. I knew he was capable of telling stories. After all, I had been sitting in meetings and Church services listening to him since I was a baby. He was an arresting public speaker and preacher, and all I wanted was a little of this at home.

“Please tell us a story, Daddy!”
All too quickly came the rehearsed answer:
I’ll tell you a story of Jack and his glory,
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another, of Jack and his brother,
And now my story’s done.

“Ooooh!’ I exclaim in disappointment.

Very occasionally, he would forget himself and start on an interesting account. Then something would seem to constrict his throat, his face would lose its expression, tears would come to his eyes and he would come to a full stop. He became angry with himself, though I was too young to realise that. I thought he was angry with me. Nothing would convince him to continue. I learned not to try. Even in the pulpit, once or twice, this happened. It was embarrassing for me and no doubt for everyone. Mum told me later that she made him promise not to try telling those stories again.

When I was about twelve years old, news bulletins recounted how a delegation of Christian leaders from the West went to China and assessed that there were no more Christians in China. Madam Mao proclaimed this and relegated Christianity in China to the museums and history books. I was under the house at Bald Hills, Queensland, looking through a box of tobacco tins with little black and white photos and negatives in them. [Dad never smoked, but he was happy to use the empty baccy tins of fellow soldiers to preserve his photos and negatives.] As I examined these photos, trying to find someone I knew in them, Dad came along. Gingerly, I asked him if he thought there were any Christians left in China. He picked up a tin, turned some photos over, tossed them down and said with a voice full of emotion, “No.” That was all. The finality of it staggered me. From the advantage of present knowledge of the huge Church in China today, this may appear a lack of faith, but any Christian Pilgrim may lose hope whilst under attack in the Valley of Humiliation.

So China remained a mystery to me. Occasionally, small crumbs of information would fall from the table for me to devour, and in my teens, Dad started using the story of our evacuation as a Children’s Story in Church. Mum taught us Chinese choruses when we were little, encouraged us to read missionary biographies and wrote her story before she died, but Dad remained silent. Mum was humble about her China story, letting us know that she was not there long enough to learn the language fluently. For the first ten years or so, she and Dad often spoke Mandarin when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. Actually, Dad did most of the speaking, with Mum answering “Yes” or “No” to his questions.

So Mum wrote her story, because she wanted us to know something about our Chinese heritage. But what Dad did, the how, when, where of life in China during those eight years before their marriage remained hidden. We had no idea, and no way of finding out.

And so the years went on. Dad did not know that Mum had written her story, and he found it on her desk after her funeral. It affected him greatly. Many people outside the family tried to persuade him to write his story, both at this time and through earlier years. Mum accepted invitations to speak at Rotary Clubs about China, but Dad declined. He sent out clear unspoken signals that writing, other than sermon notes, was not for him. When Mum died, I thought that was the end of the weekly carbon-copied letter to the seven of us. But no! I was thrilled that Dad got out the old type-writer and took on this weekly discipline. So he could write!! But, beyond an account of what he was doing, and what each of us was doing, he told us no stories.

But there I am wrong. If I was in the right place at the right time, he did occasionally start to talk. Immediately after Mum’s funeral, he talked about the trouble he had finding employment after China. When the news bulletins were full of Chou En Lai as he drew near to death, Dad talked about the Chinese premier as a “ruthless killer”. The media painted him as the kindly grandfather of the revolution. “Not when I knew him!” said Dad. And so, during the 1990’s, I wrote little snippets of stories in my diary, as they escaped from his lips. He did not, like so many elderly people, tell the same story over and over. What he did tell was worth hearing, especially as, with the telling, he seemed to lose some of the bitterness that choked him.

One experience was quite therapeutic for him. In his late eighties, he lost his sight for reading. The Christian Blind Mission sent him talking books, and one was Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans”. Dad soaked up the story like water on dry ground.
“That was the China I knew,” he said to me.

However, these snippets did not make a complete story. I had few names of people, places and dates of his 10-year China experience. I had some flesh but no bones. In 2001, my father died. I brought home a small old-fashioned album full of little greyscale photos of China. I turned one of them over, and discovered on the back a closely written story of the photo. I lifted another and found the same, and another, and another. I could hardly contain my excitement! Here was a photo account of Dad’s first year in China, his year at language school in Tali, Yunnan and travelling through Szechwan. How I gave thanks to God for this insight of my father as a young man. This is a man I hardly knew, a man at ease with his own emotions and with other people. But it created an even bigger question in my mind. “What happened between 1940 and 1950 to change him so?” This question agitated my spirit.

Then, in the mail one day at the end of 2008, a package arrived from my cousins Ruth and Roslyn in Melbourne. “Thank you so much! You could not have sent me a greater treasure.” Here were Prayer Support Letters my father wrote from China from 1939 to 1949, full of people, places, dates and stories. Ruth and Roslyn’s mother, Auntie Halley, was the kind sister who printed and circulated these Prayer Letters to Dad’s supporters. It gave me pause to praise God who preserved these documents in full until the right time. I could not read them with dry eyes. Here was far more than I ever expected to know.

“Thank you, Lord God, for preserving these letters for this time.” I am sixty now. I have climbed Jacob’s ladder high enough to get a clearer view. Now, with these letters, I have both skeleton and flesh for this story, and I pray God to breathe spirit into it, that this story may live for you.