Saint and Elliot, etc.

Since my sister’s death two months ago, I’ve found myself reflecting back a lot on my early childhood and how it is that me, my sister and my brother got to be where we are (she being at the right hand of the Father!).

Some things are just innate, I’ve realized, and are the inevitable results of a child’s conditioning. My dad could not have done a more monumental thing in our lives when he suddenly dropped the beautifully ornate Lutheran Church in downtown Akron, where he was a distinguished member of the choir, to go to “redneck” Dallas Billington’s Akron Baptist Temple. I was only three years old at the time.

My mom, to this day, somehow thinks my dad goofed up. I don’t think she will ever realize the absolutely incredible thing he did by subsequently, willingly and anxiously, selling our beautiful family home in Old Fairlawn, to become an independent missionary for HCJB in San Jose, Costa Rica and then in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador starting in 1969, paying our whole family’s way for our whole gig there (1969-73)!

He was a missionary doctor who helped save a lot of lives, not just by his expertise, even as a surgeon (something he did in the Korean War for the U.S. Air Force in Fairbanks, Alaska), but by the generous shipping of barrels and barrels of prescription medicine he personally brought down from Akron as a physician who had earned his own pharmaceutical license!

About 11 years ago, shortly after 9/11 and my dad’s shocking death one month later, my sister called me one Sunday to tell me she had just run into a very tall man at church who turned out to be a fellow missionary for HCJB and knew about my father’s work in Shell, Ecuador (home of Nate Saint and Jim and Elizabeth Elliot)! He was just-retired from his long-standing career in Quito, Ecuador and had recently moved to Mansfield, Ohio with his wife to be near their daughter and her family!

When I called this man, he gave me the phone number of Dr. Wally Swanson, who he informed me was now retired and living in California with his family. Wally was my dad’s sole partner at the little hospital in Shell, and the two of them handled hundreds of native tribal people who were regularly flown in from the jungles by HCJB pilots for medical attention.

Wally, who preceded my dad in the field by a decade, was actually mentioned in the mainstream-release movie “End of the Spear,” which gives the amazing account of Saint and Elliot, etc.

(Write more tomorrow—I’m just getting started on finishing this kind of personal stuff to be included in my book.)