Today is my Dad’s birthday. He would have turned ninety-five today. He was born on June 28th, 1918 to Gothard and Hulda Christensen. My grandfather was a bridge carpenter for the railroad. On the morning of the 28th he left for work knowing that he would likely be a father for the third time by evening. When he returned home from work he met the doctor at the door of their house. The doctor said, “Well, you have three children now.” “Yes, I know,” Grandfather replied, “Lilly, May and now my new baby. Is it a boy or a girl?” The doctor answered, “No, you have three new children: a boy and two girls.” My poor grandfather went from a family of two to a family of five with no warning! Prior to his marriage to my grandmother, he had served in the Boer War fighting against the British. During the war he was captured by the English and put in a prison camp where he lived out the duration of the war until 1902. He was married to Hulda Johnson in 1908 and by 1918—in just ten years—their family grew to seven. Six years after my dad and aunts were born he died of tuberculosis, a disease he had contracted while in the prison camp in South Africa. Gramma was left with five children. She took three jobs to provide for her family. A few years after Grandpa died, their oldest daughter, Lilly, also contracted tuberculosis. As a result all five children were quarantined in a TB sanitarium for an entire year. Gramma went from a family of six to a family of one. Sometime during his high school years, Dad dropped out of school to help support his mother. He took a job at Western Union as a delivery boy, riding the hills of Tacoma on a bicycle.

During World War II he served as a SeeBee in the Pacific. On the first wave of the invasion of Guam three-thousand Japanese soldiers fought to the last man. My father went in with his unit in the second wave on that first evening; they set up their tents on the battlefield amidst the bodies of so many Japanese soldiers. While in his tent that night, in the sweltering heat of a tropical July night, the still small voice of the Holy Spirit spoke to my father, asking him to go to Japan after the war was over to share the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the midst of that gruesome scene, my father said “yes."

After his return from the war, he would finish his GED, enroll in college at SPC in Seattle, marry my mother who was a nursing instructor at the college, enroll and graduate from North Park Theological Seminary and serve for two years at Martha Lake Covenant as an intern. Just before leaving for Japan, standing on the porch that he had just finished for his mother, he said his last goodbye to her. She said to him, “I’ll not see you again here on this earth—but I want you go.” A few years after arriving in Japan he received the telegram, sister telling brother that mother was gone. He would spend twenty-one years in Japan sharing the gospel of Jesus with a people he came to truly and deeply love! So today I remember my father on the anniversary of the day when God decided to bring him into the world. I am thankful to God for taking a man who struggled in so many ways yet transformed him—however slowly—from one degree of glory to another—and all this through the power of the grace of Jesus!