Can it be me?

Marjory Foyle served as a medical missionary in India before God called her to specialise in psychiatry. She is the author of Honourably Wounded, a classic book on the psychological needs of missionaries. From a broken home, she suffered from a bad stammer. Here she tells how she became a Christian …

I went back home for the long summer vacation, saying a regretful goodbye to St. Andrews. The medical school had decided to move again and reunite the first and second years in Exeter. I now had to get a job for three months and offered my services as an untrained nurse in a local ward for the elderly bedridden.

During this period I had another brief incursion into religion, but only because I really liked the look of the Canadian pastor of a local church. When I moved on, to Exeter this time, I soon forgot the lovely Canadian and thought little about the God he was presenting.

Exeter is a Cathedral city in beautiful Devonshire. As we did in St. Andrews, we took all our own staff with us and worked in premises borrowed from the University. A friend knew the local Methodist minister and he and his wife were delighted to take us as their official lodgers during the wartime.

New life

Living in their house proved to be the beginning of a new life for me in every way. They were a lovely couple. He was English and she was Scottish. They quarrelled like all people do, but always made it up, and their love for each other and their two children was a deep and constant thing. I watched them very carefully although they never realised it. I was trying to learn how a couple could relate together, how my own parenting could have been had the troubles not arisen. I decided to attend the church and see what he was talking about. It was fascinating, not brilliant rhetorical preaching but good solid stuff that we needed to know if we were to live properly. We began to argue (poor man, he got it every meal time I was at home), but they were loving and patient with their lodgers. I decided it might be worthwhile having a new look at Christianity, so went along to the Student Christian Movement (SCM) meetings at irregular intervals. I wanted to see if there was any connection between the Christianity I saw practised in the home, and the Christian faith. I found the SCM people fairly sensible, most of their concerns being social issues rather than the meaning and content of the Christian faith.

Climax

My arguments with the Methodist minister continued, becoming stronger each week, and I went on attending his church to see if I could understand what created the loving atmosphere in their home and relationship. The climax came one night in the Methodist Church where my host preached an admirable sermon, although I have no memory of its content. At the end he invited anyone who wanted to belong to Jesus to go forward. I felt a strong compulsion to do so, and rushed out of my seat and down the aisle to the communion rail where I stood crying my eyes out. I had no idea what was going on, just that I was overwhelmed by a personal need to belong. Mary Stokes joined me to make an act of rededication, and Gertrude Klatzkin, a Jewess, also came forward. The minister spoke to each one of us, said the final benediction, and gave us a booklet.

Invitation

Next day I was surprised to receive an invitation to tea from a Miss Norah Nixon. She was the women’s travelling secretary of the student Christian organisation called IVF (Inter-Varsity Fellowship), now known in the UK as UCCF (Universities and Colleges’ Christian Fellowship). I learned later that she had arrived on a regular visit, someone had told her about me, and she felt it would be good if we met. We sat in the window of a tea shop overlooking the cathedral, and she explained the gospel to me. She told me Jesus loved me, that he had died for my sin, for my loneliness and need, and that by believing in him I was given a new life which he would share with me through the Holy Spirit taking up residence in my heart.

He was promising me a life in which I could serve him, find refuge, and begin to grow in God. We talked and talked, periodically ordering more tea to keep the waitress a bit happier. The whole time she was telling me what the Bible said as if it was a really true book.

Personal need

After saying goodbye to Norah I went for a walk. I realised I had not come to Jesus because of a major sense of sin, but out of enormous personal need. I needed someone to help me live, to change my personality and help me forge good relationships, to look after my inner loneliness by being always with me. I thought of a verse Norah had quoted, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you’. I could never be alone again. I might feel lonely but was never actually going to be alone. There was a security ahead, a sense of cohesion and purpose, and I would become a member not only of my own family but also of a far larger worldwide one, the family of those who accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

I did not of course put all this into words, but as I look back on it today these are the small seeds that God put into my mind and heart as I walked, went home, ate supper, studied and went to bed. Next morning I got up a little earlier than usual, picked up my school Bible and went to university via the cathedral. I found a warm place and opened the Bible at random. It was Psalm 72 in the old King James Version. I knew little of the context in which it was written but certain words shot out at me. ‘He shall come down like rain on the mown grass’, and I had often felt somewhat mown down during my past life. ‘He shall deliver the needy when he cries, the poor also and him that has no helper.’ I was exaggerating, of course. I had known helpers, I had been supported, and I was not all that poor. But nothing had filled the gaping inner void I always seemed to have, and these words were like oil pouring down inside.

I got in contact with the local student whose name Norah had given me, and in a few days’ time decided to join the IVF group. From them I began learning something about what it really means, according to the Bible, to be a Christian. I began to realise that when Jesus died on the cross it was not just a brave deed, the rationale for which I could not understand. He died as the Son of God, to restore the world to relationship with God, which our sin had spoiled. I learned that Jesus died for me personally, to restore me to fellowship with a living, loving God, and that I could find out all about this by reading the Bible, his word to me, and by praying to him and learning to trust him.

Witnessing

Students talked a lot about ‘witnessing to others’ but I was not much good at it. I felt hampered by my speech and my lack of social skills. But one day I was invited to go with other students to help conduct a ward service in a local hospital. The leader was a formidable middle-aged medical student, a friend of my sister’s — her story would demand another book! She knew nothing about me except that I had recently become a Christian, and as we moved to another ward she suddenly turned to me and said, ‘You are the next speaker’. What on earth was I to do? I had never done anything like that before, but I felt I should have a go. I asked someone where the parable of the prodigal son was in the Bible, asked her to read it for us, and then stood up and spoke! I am sure I stammered, but I spoke out loud, completed my little talk, and felt it was right for me to be doing this. I was absolutely weak at the knees as I finished, so I said goodbye to the others and went straight back to my room.

‘My grace’

I knelt down by my bed and asked God to show me what was going on. I flipped open the Bible and read ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:9). Then it said, ‘Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me’. I promised God then and there that I would speak for him in public whenever I was asked, and I never went back on this promise. I did not really expect anyone to ask me to speak in public again, but later events were to prove how wrong I was.

This is an extract from Can it be me? published by Christian Medical Fellowship (020 7928 4694, http://cmf.org.uk) at £10.00.