“Dad, Dad, two of the ex-prisoners are fighting in the front yard, and one stabbed the other in the face with a Bic pen!” shouted our daughter, Maggie, as she pounded on our bedroom window. It was an early African morning, and I was barricaded in our bedroom trying to have quiet time with the Lord. Needless to say, I was distracted as I finished my quiet time before talking with the wounded warriors, Wilmot and Samuel, one from Liberia and the other from Ghana.
There were so many people living with us, they lined up at our bedroom door each morning before we could get out for breakfast. I was committed to spend time with God before opening that door, thus the delay before going out to the “battlefield.”
The house was small, and—along with our three children, six Christian missionaries, an unwed pregnant mother, and a girl rejected by her Muslim family—there were as many as eight ex-prisoners at a time from eight countries living with us for rehabilitation. And by the grace of God, most of the ex-prisoners never returned to prison.
What fond memories Ihaveforty-three years later of our calling as “lifer” missionaries. Lifer missionaries are those called by God to leave their culture, people, and comfort to spend their lives, often far away from home, helping others fall in love with Mercy Incarnate. But let’s go back to the beginning of our lifer story.
Danelle’s beginnings
God, from the beginning, used everything in Danelle’s and my life to prepare us to be “Mercynary” missionaries. A Mercynary is someone who has been so kneaded with mercy that he or she sees everyone, every crisis, every pain and sorrow through the eyes of mercy. (The term “eyes of mercy” comes from the Salve Regina: “Turn thou, oh most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us . . .”)
Danelle’s grandfather, Alfred, arrived in the U.S. with his mother about 1914 at the age of thirteen. In 1906, all eighteen of the other males in the family died in a mine explosion in Courrière, France. Alfred was angry with the God who had “killed” all the men in the family, including his father. He had escaped death only by being too young to work in the mine.
Alfred began working in the mines around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and married Minnie, who was part American Indian. From their union came Odette, who married Scotty. They became the parents of Danelle.
God knew that we would spend more than thirty years of our missionary lives living in the French-speaking world: seventeen in the slums of Africa and more than thirteen in France. Looking back, it is easy to connect the dots and understand Psalm 139.
“I’ll take him”
My beginnings in 1947 were quite different. I was born premature with Pinks disease (similar to leprosy), a shriveled sickly baby, and the first thing my eyes saw were the other orphan babies around me in the hospital. My birth mother and father had abandoned me. Ten days later, Neda Borgman and her husband, Ernest, who could have no children of their own, gazed down at the lineup of newborn rejects, deciding which one to adopt.
When the couple got to me, squeezed in between two healthy babies, I tell people I preached my first sermon: “Adopt me, adopt me!” Neda stopped and said, “That’s the baby God has chosen for me. I’ll take him.”
The physician said, “Oh, no, you don’t want that baby. He was left here by his mother and is very sick. He will probably die. Even if he lives, he will be sickly and a problem for you. Take another baby.”
“No,” Neda said. “I’ll take him as he is.” She seemed to understand my need; she had been raised by an aunt because her mother couldn’t keep her.
They took me home to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and almost immediately I began to vomit clots of blood. They rushed me back to the hospital, where the doctor suggested taking another baby. “No,” my adopted mother said, “He’s mine, and I won’t abandon him.” (Sounds a little like the gospel. This story is true, as is the gospel of adopting the ones no one wants.)
Three months later I needed a blood transfusion to live. My adopted father went on a radio program and pleaded for someone to give blood that matched my rare blood type. A fireman came forward, saving my life.
I have been sickly my whole life, weighing only 115 pounds at my 5’9” height during our time in Africa. The prisoners would try to give me food when they saw me in the overcrowded prisons. Being sick and abandoned at birth has been the greatest challenge and yet the greatest blessing of my missionary life. When I sit down with the poor in the favelas of Brazil or on the streets of Colombia, they listen to me because of my story.
A miraculous fall
Growing up was a trial, and for everyone close to me, because of a deep wound in my soul. Though my adopted parents tried hard to show me love, something in me was broken and bleeding. I didn’t know what it was and was as frustrated as those around me who suffered from my bitterness and sarcastic tongue. Dad and Mom took me to a Methodist church, but I resisted the love of a God who permitted such sadness and suffering in the world.
I had many run-ins with the police and school authorities in my youth. All authority was my enemy. I did the opposite of whatever I was told to do. I look back now and understand it all, but at the time I understood nothing. God pursued me, while in my anger and brokenness I ran the other way.
At nineteen, the love of my life was rock climbing. I called myself an atheist, but fortunately God kept pursuing me, even at 14,000 feet in mid-winter. I was climbing a thousand-foot overhanging cliff on the Diamond, the sheer east face of Longs Peak in the mountains of Colorado, when I fell 150 feet straight down and bounced off a granite boulder.
I knew I was going to die. I saw my life as a film during the six seconds of my hundred-mile-an-hour plunge. It was comparable to falling off a ten-story building onto the sidewalk. My body bounced ten feet in the air twice and then catapulted into the glacier. Surprised to be alive, I opened my eyes and found myself stuck in the packed snow up to my waist. Getting stuck there prevented me from falling another 1,200 feet.
The first words from my mouth were, “Thank you, God, that I am still alive.” The God in whom I said I didn’t believe had saved me. I couldn’t believe I was alive and knew for certain I had internal bleeding and damaged organs.
My friend who had watched me fall climbed down and hoisted me on his back. He dragged me across the frozen lake and carried me down to a small shelter at 12,000 feet. As I lay there hurting and wondering what was broken, he went out in a blizzard and located a rescue team whose members carried me down from the mountain.
Thirty-six hours later in the hospital in Fort Collins, the doctors took X-rays. They could find nothing broken! I realized that there was a God who loved me enough the save me from that deadly fall, like he had saved me at birth. One week later, I competed in a gymnastics meet at the university.
Anywhere but Africa
Six years later, in 1972, Danelle and I fell in love with the God who had brought her grandfather to the U.S. from France and who had preserved me from death throughout my crazy youth. Jesus became our life, and we wanted to serve him by being full-time missionaries—anywhere but Africa.
Joining an Evangelical community, we prayed about where we could spend our lives serving God. I was invited for one week to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to encourage some missionaries from our fellowship. Disembarking the plane, I experienced the shock of my life. Everyone was black, and the equatorial heat and humidity were oppressive. The week went well for me, because I knew it would end and I could go back to America to prepare to be a missionary in Hawaii or on the French Riviera.
I ran to get on that air-conditioned plane to leave Africa forever. I said three things to the Lord: one, “Thank you, Lord for this difficult time in Africa.” I said it with gritted teeth. Second, “Oh, Lord, please send missionaries to Africa. They need help.” And thirdly, “Thank you, Lord, that I will never have to go back to Africa.”
Happy to be going home, I sat listening quietly, and I heard in my heart, “You are going to serve me in Africa.” I thought, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” But it wasn’t Satan. It was the Lord.
Three months later, with two suitcases each, with fear and trembling and much apprehension, we moved to Africa. If we had not gone, we probably would not be Catholic missionaries today.
After seventeen years, our health gone, we had to leave our beloved home in Africa and move to France. Space is limited here to describe all that God did in us in Africa, but here are a few of the dots that can be connected to see the face of mercy forming in us.
Prison ministry
In Africa, we moved into a slum with our three children and studied French by memorizing Bible verses and sharing them with anyone who would listen. We began working in a big prison, 4,500 prisoners in a prison built for 1,500; thirty in cells built for ten. Many inmates were dying of malnutrition, tuberculosis, and AIDS.
We begged for food to keep them alive, starting with twelve of the sickest prisoners. And we asked God to enlarge our hearts to love them the way he does. Without financing from outside Africa, the feeding program grew and has surpassed a million meals to this day in three prisons. And through our contact with the prisoners, priest, and nuns who worked in the prison, we learned mercy and started becoming the Sacred Heart of Jesus to everyone we met.
Though I was an Evangelical chaplain in the prisons, it was the Catholics I encountered who helped me by their lives to understand the gospel of mercy. Our hearts were drawn step by step and dot by dot into the fullness of the revelation of Christ. Because we were openhearted, we found the Bible full of Catholic teaching that we had never seen—the Real Presence, the Tradition of the Church, the papacy.
Fast-forward to December 1997, as I was praying on a visit to our missionary training school in Abidjan. I needed a verse for the New Year and was led to Zechariah 7:9-10 (see sidebar). What hit me was the challenge to be kind.
A Mother at last
Though compassion had taken hold of my heart, and I was kind to the “crowd,” I had a hard time being kind and gentle to those who were closest to me. I loved the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but seemed incapable of being nice to Danelle and our children. Danelle could ask, “How are you this morning?”, and I would respond sarcastically, suspecting her of bad intentions in her question. There was a ball of anger deep within me.
“O, Lord, show me why I am so wounded,” I prayed. Suddenly, in my mind, I was present at the moment of Jesus’ death. I was the thief next to Jesus, dying with him. I turned and saw Christ, thorns piercing his forehead, his beard torn and caked with blood, his body a canvas of open wounds.
He turned to me in this deep spiritual encounter, and I heard in the depths of my being: “Your problem, Richard, is that you hate your mother, who brought you into this world and abandoned you. And you hate my mother, Mary.”
For the first time in my life, I understood that fear of rejection was at the root of my anger. I began to weep and cry out for help. Instantly, I felt the strangling roots of bitterness release my heart, and I knew that everything was about to change.
Then I heard in my heart, “Here’s your mother, I share my mother with you.” I quickly said “Yes” to Mary, and she said “Yes” to me. Instantly, I fell in love with the Catholic Church.
Two weeks later Danelle had a similar encounter with Mary, and we decided to become Catholic. It cost us many friends, but one drop of Mary and the sacraments is worth more than twenty-five years of being a successful Protestant pastor.
The Eucharist and Mary are like nitroglycerin to our dormant souls. We realized that it is not enough to have Jesus; we need the Church. Building bridges to other faiths is a constant joy for us, never forgetting that our side of the bridge is Catholic.
Living with our bishop in France for several years, our family learned Catholicism from the inside. Our formerly Evangelical son is now a Catholic priest working at the Vatican. As “Mercynaries,” we try to apply the principles of mercy and presence to everyone we meet. Mercy will win in this world only if we are so kneaded with Mercy that we see everything and everyone through mercy’s eyes.
Gazing back over the last forty-three years, it is easy to connect the dots that are making us into the heart of Jesus. From our call to be “lifer” missionaries to becoming “beggars” of mercy, this adventure of becoming God’s heart is our purpose in life.
Mercy wins—always!