Moments from my publishing life when I clearly saw God working
My first introduction to the Bible part in Moody Bible Institute came when I became selling floor supervisor of Moody Bookstore in fall 1960. Faculty taught Bible courses, so we carried their class notes for students, some of them still reproduced in mimeograph form.
In 1970 my God Moment, the invitation from Moody Bible Institute to head up the editorial department of Moody Press, became a long-term U-turn in our family’s life. As family we settled back into the Glen Ellyn/Wheaton area 30 miles west of downtown Chicago, the community we had left four years earlier.
Since I’d committed to serve the Lord on a worldwide basis, why should I accept a challenge by a Canadian friend? Answer: because it was a bodacious challenge.
George Derksen and I became acquainted when he was a newspaper reporter in Winnipeg, Canada. What I did not know was that he harbored a dream far bigger than a job at a newspaper. My involvement in that dream started with me daring to criticize a new publishing project of his, a business magazine for his home province, Manitoba.
What can you do when the person who hired and empowered you is demoted? Hope for the best? Pray like crazy? Or all of the above? I engaged in the focused prayer I had learned from Mike Martin’s book, I Live By Faith. Paging through Intervarsity’s His Magazine I spied an ad inviting applications for an editorial position—no indication who was looking for an editor.
To portray how another God moment developed I have to begin at Christmas 1954, when seven of us students at Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg boarded a bus with Intervarsity students from two universities for Urbana, IL. We joined about 15,000 being challenged to be missionaries. I got two interviews, one with the director of Radio ELWA in Africa and the other with Kenneth N. Taylor, director of Moody Press.
A question many ask is, “How does God lead us into our life assignment?” God’s first hint at an answer for me came on a hospital bed in northern British Columbia, Canada.