It was the night of her baptism. Just 17, she had recently been converted under the preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel, but . . . .
When she arrived at her grandfather's house, where her family were staying while their own house was undergoing repairs, Janice Wiseman was denied entry by the butler.
When he announced: 'Miss Janice is here', her father came to the door. 'Who?' he asked pointedly. 'Who? I know of no one with that name.' Then her grandfather, her Aunt Mag and her parents did a surprising thing. In Janice's own words: 'The four, as one, rent their garments, buttons falling to the floor in front of me, denoting they had not only severed all connections with me, but that I was dead.' How dead she was in their eyes was brought home to her a year later, when a friend found her tombstone in the cemetery with these words carved on it: 'Janice Rebecca Wiseman, May 1946 - February 1963'.
By now you will have guessed that Janice is Jewish. She was born into a family that took its religion seriously, for they were Orthodox Jews. Her maternal grandfather was a rabbi in an ultra-Orthodox synagogue, where he performed the office of cantor. A man of some wealth derived from the famous Flowers Brewery, Sir John Flowers was the dominant figure in the family. Given his prominence in Orthodox Jewish circles, it is not surprising that he was so bitterly opposed to his granddaughter's conversion and baptism. What is yet more remarkable is that a few weeks before his death in 1964, he came to faith in Jesus-Messiah. The instrument God used was his barber, Jim, who was a member of the Christian Brethren. Jim used every opportunity to tell Sir John that Jesus is the true Messiah.
Someone to believe in
The opposition of her family no doubt had deeper roots. One cannot ignore what long centuries of 'Christian' anti-Semitism have done to the Jewish psyche. Janice's father was victim of it in its most virulent, Nazi, form. At the end of 1942, while serving with the Eighth Army in North Africa, he was captured and, when it was realised that he was a Jew, he was sent to Auschwitz. There, he survived by pretending that he was a cobbler, for those who had no trade were the first to be herded into the gas chambers. On one occasion, he found some grass which had grown in the mud. He ate it before anyone else was able to do so. After the Russian forces liberated the prisoners on January 27 1945, Janice's father was sent to a military base in North Wales where he was nursed back to health.
Because she had suffered badly at the hands of an unsympathetic teacher, Janice was sent as a weekly boarder to a Roman Catholic convent school. The pupils found it a bit strange to have a Jewess in their midst, and occasionally a couple called after her: 'You killed Jesus! You killed Jesus!'. At home for weekends, Janice was obliged to share in the Jewish Sabbath whether she wanted to or not. So she lived in two worlds - that of her convent school and that of her Jewish home. She recalls: 'Some-times I felt very Jewish; at other times I felt myself to be something else. What I was sure of was my need to find something or Someone to believe in. I felt that there must a Power behind the universe; there must be a meaning for my life on earth and beyond into eternity.'
Lady Chatterley
God began to answer her pleas to make himself known to her. Caught reading D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover at the back of the English class, Janice pretended that she had been reading the Bible! When she afterwards confessed that she had lied, the student teacher asked her whether she ever read the Bible. Janice had to confess that she never did.
The student teacher had been sent to the convent by her training college because of an administrative error. She was a Protestant and due to be transferred to a school in Cheam the following week. But more than a Protestant, she was a Christian of six months' standing and a member of Westminster Chapel. She invited Janice to hear her minister preach. Despite the objections of her parents, Janice went, as much out of a spirit of rebellion as anything. Of her first Sunday at the Chapel, she says: 'I could not see what all the fuss was about, catapulting me into a further state of religious doubt. I was jolly glad to be on my way home.'
Isaiah 53
But Janice continued to attend the services. The first glimmer of light came through attending Fred Catherwood's young people's discussion class. Things were beginning to make sense. Yet Janice had a stumbling block. It was the zealous Betsy, the student teacher who had first invited her to the Chapel. 'She only told me about hell,' Janice recalls, 'and I began to feel enraged. With a tremendous sense of relief, I decided one Sunday evening that I would never attend Westminster Chapel again - or any church, come to that!' She determined to pass the time by reading from a Bible which someone had left behind on the ledge before her. Turning over the pages at random, it opened at Isaiah 53. She read through the whole chapter and prayed to the Lord Jesus to save her from her sins. She is very precise about the time of her conversion. 'At 7.22pm on August 22 1962, I moved from uncertainty to faith, from darkness to light.'
India and joy
After a spell at art college, Janice trained first as a nurse and then as a midwife. She then went on to study at a Bible college, convinced that God had called her to missionary service in India. Having been accepted by a faith mission which worked in North India, she decided to travel overland to save expense. Answering an advert, she joined a group of Australian men who were returning home overland. After many adventures, she arrived in India and began a work among lepers, for which she was later awarded an OBE. To her great distress, she was refused a visa to return to India after her first term of service.
Having returned to England, Janice went through a time of serious backsliding. To her mind, it was as if God had forgotten her. Life now had no particular purpose. She drifted away from church and Christian service.
Then one Sunday evening, she switched on the radio and listened to the hymn-singing. Over the airwaves came the haunting words of William Cowper: 'Where is the blessedness I knew, When first I saw the Lord?' Janice sought out the Baptist minister in the northern town where she was working. She blurted out her story to him, telling him how sad she was because she would never see India again. He listened and then pointed out that what she had experienced was a kind of bereavement. When he prayed for her, Janice records: 'The Lord's presence filled the room like a sweet-smelling perfume and I experienced joy unspeakable and full of glory.'
For the rest of Janice's story, you must read her forthcoming autobiography. It is entitled Cast out - but not forsaken: my spiritual pilgrimage, published by Bryntirion Press in October. Janice has written a very honest account of her spiritual journey thus far. She does not conceal her failures and her mistakes, but throughout she challenges us to obey God, however costly obedience may prove to be.
She has abundantly proved the truth of Psalm 27.10: 'When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.' And God has shown mercy to her parents. Her father became a Christian shortly before he died, and her mother now walks in the light of the gospel.
David Kingdon
