Growing up, I (Hans) viewed my eldest brother, Nel, as the biggest of my big brothers. We were nine years apart.
From my childlike vantage point he was an august and likable personality, though also somewhat distant and unpredictable. However, in time, I would go on to develop an enduring bond of friendship with Nel, a friendship that has proved to be one of the most formative relationships of my life.
It happened that, after I had graduated high-school, I moved down south to study at Belmont University, which is located in Nashville Tennessee, a place where Nel lived at the time. It didn’t take long before, in addition to my studies, I was employed in Nel’s lawncare business on the weekends to earn some extra cash.
(L. to R. Nels, Hans, Lars, Klaus)
It was in this context – living far from my childhood home for the first time – mowing grass, sharing meals, telling stories, mowing grass, drinking coffee, listening to and talking about music together, and mowing yet more grass, that my friendship with Nel was sealed. In addition to working well alongside one another, we went on boating adventures, road trips, we camped, and generally held court in all sorts of places together, animatedly discoursing about all sorts of subjects with mutual delight.
Nel and I have quite different personalities. He is naturally intrepid, practically minded, with an aptitude for logistics, and restless for motion. I am naturally more contemplative, a reader, cautious, imaginatively minded rather than pragmatic. However, we do share our family upbringing and a common Christian faith.
Also, we both were born with minds that just about never stop thinking and we process externally, having the habit of ‘test-driving’ our thoughts and feelings aloud in the process of working out what we believe and how we should live. Apparently, a measure of difference, mixed with some similarities and shared experience, is a sufficient chemistry for a good friendship.
On account of Nel, I was encouraged to make the move away from home and grow in independence as a man. Nel listened to me and showed me respect. Nel trusted me, as a 20-year old, to run his lawn care business for a month whilst he was travelling in India one summer. It was on the strength of Nel’s reputation that I got a job back up North after leaving college.
It was Nel who, through his travelling stories, encouraged me to look to the horizon and consider the big wide world out there, full of different people from other cultures with different customs and histories. It was Nel who told me about YWAM (Youth With A Mission) and encouraged me to seek God by giving it a try (I met my English wife in New Zealand doing a Discipleship Training School and we now live in England with our six wonderful children and have been happily married for fifteen years– thanks Nel!).
Nobody asks to be born. God determines it. We simply find ourselves, having been born, alive in a particular family embedded within a wider cultural context. Yet, the scriptural narrative is that God’s love abounds to all people and that he is reconciling the world to himself in Christ. Moreover, this amazing work of God is carried out amidst the familiar personalities and routines of our lives. I can attest that God worked graciously in my life through Nelson as a part of his story of redemption, and continues to do so.
“[God has] determined allotted periods and the boundaries of [peoples’] dwelling place[s], that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17:26-27)
