Category Archives: Friendship

My Friend Nel

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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)

Ready, Set, Go…

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All systems are GO for the immunotherapy, and the first two potent pills will arrive at Nelson and Ann Sophie’s apartment via FedEx on Tuesday. Nelson will have to wait for the official go-ahead from his medical team, based on how his daily health monitoring is going, but in every way possible, he’s ready.

Ann Sophie is still draining his left lung daily, yesterday getting 700 milliliters, which is a lot. But the good news is that his right lung, which used to be of significant concern, has dried up completely. Cancer cells there are not producing any fluid—a dramatic change from the preceding five months. The team has talked tentatively about removing the drain catheter from that lung, which sure sounds like progress to us!

Nelson’s limbs are still swollen with fluids, but some of that is due to the clot. Doctors have said it will take three months or more for the large clot to begin to dissolve, if the blood thinners are working. We’ll have to be patient.

Today Nelson’s brother Hans, who is in the States from England with his family of eight, is on his way from Michigan to Minnesota. He’s looking forward to spending a little time with Nelson, with whom he is very close. There’s nothing like a bout of cancer to make us all value our relationships more than ever before. And amidst all the hard stuff that’s  happening every day, that’s a really good thing.

“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17)

Nelson’s Sister Linnea, Conclusion

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All Christians are called to disciple others. We’re all supposed to influence each other for good. But some people do it more than most, and Nelson is that kind of Christian. (I wonder how many of you reading this right now would say Nelson discipled you in some way? Probably a lot!)

I’m not sure who I would be without my big brother. I definitely would not have gone to YWAM, so I wouldn’t be Adam’s wife and we wouldn’t have our six wonderful kids.

I’m also not sure where I would be spiritually. As a kid, I thought of Christianity as a lifestyle. We were good people and we went to church every Sunday because it was the right thing to do. But Nelson showed me that a true life of faith is so much more than that! It’s an adventure.

It’s about meeting with God when you first wake up. You open your Bible, read and pray, but you also listen. You wait for God to speak, and you trust that He will guide you. You expect that God has good things planned for you, and you look for His hand in every circumstance.

People in YWAM have almost no money, but somehow they go all over the world! I watched Nelson do it and then I did it, too. During my YWAM years, God took me to China, Taiwan, Nepal, India, Japan, Thailand, and New Zealand. In between, I lived in Hawaii and then Montana.

I held the sweetest orphan babies, hiked through the Himalayas, and met Christians who had left everything familiar to be lifelong missionaries overseas.

Those years shaped me in a way nothing else could have. How can you complain about a van without air conditioning after you’ve watched a mother in Calcutta nurse her baby while lying in the gutter on the side of the road on a 90 degree afternoon? I will always be grateful for the gift of YWAM in my twenties and the brother who encouraged me to go.

Right now our children are ages 3 to 13, and they all love their Uncle Nelson. We live way down in Florida, but Nelson still finds a way to visit. He has always gone out of his way for people, including us. Our six year old is named after his uncle, and out of all our kids, little Nel asks me about his Uncle Nelson the most.

I read updates from the blog to the kids in the mornings, and we then pray together for him and Auntie Sophie and baby Will. Even little kids understand the power of Nelson’s thankful spirit right now. Even now in this season of battling cancer, Nelson continues to influence the people who know and love him, always toward God and His faithfulness.

I am thankful to have a little time in Minnesota this week, to chat with Nelson and Sophie and hold baby Will as much as possible! And I’m thankful for the things I’ve learned from my big brother—mostly that a life following God is the best kind of adventure, full of laughter and strong coffee, wild stories in faraway places and friendships that never end.

It’s a life of peace and gratitude even when circumstances are crushingly hard. Nelson has suffered through so much this year, but he is still the Nelson we all know and love. Still strong, still optimistic, still up for a good conversation about what God is doing in our lives.