INTRODUCTION

 

This is a true story and therefore the names of all characters and places have been changed to protect them. The story began many years ago in the little seaside town of Jeffreys Bay, which became famous as a surfing paradise because of its powerful waves, a fisherman’s dream because of its fantastic fish and a village which transformed to become a holiday retreat for the rich and famous. A wonderful land of sunny beaches that stretch across the pale blue ocean into the shimmering horizon along the curve of the sweeping bay, etched under the majestic ring of deep blue Eastern Cape Mountains.

The theme of this book is Blinded by the Light and the title comes from a famous biblical story in Acts Chapter 9.

There was a certain very powerful official named Saul of Tarsus who was wreaking havoc on the Christians of that time, entering every house and dragging men and women off to prison, breathing threats and murder against the disciples. Saul embarked on a journey to Damascus in order to arrest Christians in that city and on the road suddenly a light shone on him from heaven and a voice said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul fell to the ground trembling with fear and asked, “Who are you, Lord?” and the Lord answered him saying, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Arise and go into the city and I will tell you what to do.”

So Saul arose and he was blinded for three days and his men had to lead him into the city. He was told to meet a man named Ananias at a street called Straight. His followers had to lead Saul into Damascus, because he was blind and when he met Ananias, immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he received his sight again. Saul was baptised immediately and began preaching Jesus Christ as the Son of God. People were amazed and said, “Is this not he who destroyed those who called on His name?” After this miraculous conversion, Saul changed his name to Paul and it is he who wrote many of the books of the New Testament and his inspired writings have governed the course of history for over 2000 years.

Saul was blinded by the light.

Over the last thirty years I have been honoured to meet many, many people who have also been blinded by the light. Men and women of various cultures who have had a powerful religious experience in which they too have personally been confronted by God in such amazing ways that their lives have been changed forever.

This is the heart of this book: to share some of these marvelous true experiences in which God has revealed HIMSELF to man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & THANKS

 

 

 

The writer will always be deeply grateful to Pastor Louis Els, the senior pastor of Victory Christian Church in Jeffreys Bay, for the spiritual guidance and life changing knowledge which he has imparted to myself and to my family over the course of 18 years. We are but a single family of the thousands of families worldwide whom you, Louis, have helped to become passionate for Jesus. You have changed our lives forever! Consequently, we long to know more about this incredible, majestic, loving God and to share our faith in God with others. Our earnest desire is that everyone will become blinded by the light of God’s incredible love.

 

Acknowledgment is given that many of the incredible ideas and the inspired teachings which constitute Part II (Revelations) of this book can be attributed to Pastor Louis Els.

 

We would just like to say a huge, “Thank You, Sir! We really appreciate what you have done.”

 

 

 

DEDICATION

 

This book is dedicated to my loving wife, Alta

and my wonderful daughter, Annabelle

 

ISBN Number: 978-0-620-52683-8

 

E mail: info@ecmirror.co.za

Copies of this book can be ordered from the author at the above e mail address

CONTENTS

 

 

PART I: GRASS ROOTS

 

1. All The Fish Went Away

2. The Power to Dream

3. The Power of the Family

The New House

• An Angel is Born

   

   

  PART II: REVELATIONS

   

  1. A New Day

  2. First Practice

  3. God Speaks to Man

  4. Shout To The Lord

  5. The Next Generation

  6. Water into Wine and Wine into Grape Juice

  7. The Watchman

  8. The Reason for the Season

  9. Boom Town

  10. To the Far Corners of the Earth

  11. The Upside Down Kingdom

  12. Emmanuel Bible School

  13. Living Together

  14. The Groot Brak Outreach

  15. A New Season

  16. God’s Engine Room

  17. The Contract

  18. The Floodgates of Heaven

  19. Young Heroes Event

  20. Jail Song

  21. Consuming Fire

   

PART I: GRASS ROOTS

PART I: GRASS ROOTS

Chapter One: All The Fish Went Away

 

It was a dry and barren year in our little town and we had not seen a decent rainfall in a very long time. The life blood of the local people had always been the abundance of octopus in the deep water bay. Octopus, otherwise known as Chokka or Calamari which fetched an extremely high price in the markets of the world provided a good living for hundreds of families. For generations, the little town had grown fat and content on the lucrative Chokka that abounded offshore and the fishing industry was the heart of the economics of Jeffreys Bay in the old days.

But quite suddenly, without any warning, the shoals of deep sea fish just disappeared and thirty or forty big Chokka trawling boats stood heavy and silent, beached high above the tide, in the center of the big sweeping bay under the bright and merciless sun, their wooden hulls cracked and dry, their big motors silent and rusting in the sea air. The boat people sunburnt and weather beaten by hard years out in the bright sea stood around the boats listlessly waiting for a change to come, waiting for the life bringing shoals of Chokka to return again to the breeding grounds out in the bay. These were a people who lived by the tides, men who were accustomed to a rough life aboard a cramped boat for three weeks at a time. Big, burly untidy men who were born with a fish line in one hand and a fish knife in the other, men who knew the fresh smell of the offshore wind so well and they felt the ebb and flow of the tides flowing through their very veins.

Accustomed to working hard, this dearth of the fishing caught them unprepared and they did not know how to cope with the barren years. Easy come easy go was their lifestyle and no-one had ever taught them how to save money and very few even had bank accounts. Quite suddenly there was no fish and no income and no savings and many a hapless boat owner was hit by disaster when the fish went away.

As the first flush of pink and red dawn spread its fingers across the still slumbering skies, as the early morning seagulls called the fishermen down to the shore with their wild, insistent cry, the air was sharp with the smell of stale fish. The cool night breeze was still blowing fresh across the smooth seawaters, filled with the memories of the disappearing night under the stars. Shadowy figures in the dawn mist along the shore strained on the tow ropes and pulled the boats down the sands to the water’s edge on Main Beach. The waters stretched out across the ancient bay as far as the eye could see beneath the ring of deep blue mountains. The big Land Rovers once they had dragged their boats to the water’s edge were pulled back from the shore break with their now empty trailers and parked high up the beach. High and out of reach of the threatening tide that would come sweeping in six hours later while the boat crews were two kilometers out to sea chasing the shoals of Chokka that lurked beneath the waters. The dawn air was filled with the guttural shouts of the big, brawny boat masters bullying their reluctant boat hands to the task at hand.

“Kom julle! Maak gou! Ons moet uit voor die son opkom!” Afrikaans is the common language spoken here. “Come on, you guys, quickly now! We must launch the boat before the sun comes up!”

In the good years when the fish filled the nets, it took five strong men to haul the wriggling, squirming squid catch over the side of the boat and there was much laughter, for the Chokka price per ton was high. On the factory boats, which track down the shoals with electronic fish finders and sophisticated radar, the big electric winches pulled in the groaning nets that held ten times as much fish and the profit was ten times as much for them because the export market was very, very profitable.

No one who works on the boat gets a wage but everyone takes a monetary proportion of the catch home with him. The owners take the biggest share, the captain takes his slice and the lowly deckhand gets his cut. The deckhand often works with several hand lines at the same time, hooking and pulling the fish into the boat manually and his hands are tough as leather, scarred for life by the cut of the fish lines. How do they keep track of how many fish each man catches? This remains a mystery to be argued over endlessly when the boats are beached and the fish are transported to the factory.

During the good years, there is a good feeling in the air. The town is wealthy because the fisher folk spend their money freely. The shop owners are content because the money flows in, the wives are happy because there is food and over for luxuries: for that new washing machine, for that pretty dress. Some men spend swiftly on the down payment for that new, shiny Land Rover, for the new bicycle for the little boy who one day will grow up to be a fisherman just like his father.

The drinks flow freely at night in the taverns and sometimes the loud and raucous parties of the fishermen last all night until the first breath of dawn. Instead of going home to sleep, the men filled with the bravado of much wine and bolstered by the encouragement of their companions, launch yet again into the generous seas, drunk with the confidence of the Chokka fish that will strain to fill their nets yet again.

The money flows freely on expensive toys for the children, stereo music systems and gold jewelry for the wives and glittering, brand new 4X4 Toyota trucks with the huge tyres standing very high above the road.

“Now is the time to put a down payment on the house that we have always dreamed of. Take a deep breath and sign up for the twenty-year bank repayment scheme, with the huge and binding monthly bond repayment. Turn a blind eye to disaster. It can never touch us. Just look and see how the fish are biting. Just look how much money is rolling in!”

Most of their toys were funded by a fat down payment to the store, the balance to be paid on hire purchase schemes at exorbitant rates of interest. The fishermen boasted of their newfound wealth and spent extravagantly in order to impress their neighbours. There was no thought for tomorrow, no thought of saving for the lean times. But suddenly, the fish just disappeared. Everything just came to a standstill. Quite suddenly the boom was over.

The boat masters hesitated to spend money on petrol when day after day the boats returned to shore empty. The crews grew bitter as the days lengthened into months, and no money came in. Fights broke out where once there had been laughter. Husbands and wives quarreled bitterly as the husbands became drunk with worry. The banks foreclosed ruthlessly on the newly bought houses, and families were evicted, forced to move in with relatives or friends. The shops repossessed the shiny toys. The expensive sound systems and the extravagant vehicles were taken back by the shops. The jewelry found its way to the local pawnbroker’s window, already filled with forlorn trinkets handed in to put food on a desperate housewife’s table for three or maybe four hungry little kids. The big and brawny fishermen fathers glowered over their beer, angry and resentful and surly.

It is a deeply seated matter of pride for a man to provide for his wife and children, and when he fails to perform this basic task, when he fails to put food on the table, there is always big trouble, for the family loses confidence in him as a man and as a father. And this thing of pride is probably one of the most deep-seated human emotions. If a man is robbed of his pride, he turns ugly and the family suffers hell with him. When the source of food dries up the wife packs the bags, takes the children and moves on. Or worse, she takes up with another man, more able to provide for her and then the fabric of society really begins to crack because the essential underlying moral values of faithfulness and honesty are put to severe test.

And so week after week, month after barren month, the big boats lay huge and limp and dry in the yellow beach sand with their hulls cracked in the burning midday sun under the ring of mountains in the bay. The South East wind was dry and hot and merciless and blew unceasingly for week upon week. There was nothing to do and no money to be made. Many fisher families took the lonesome, sad road out of town on the Greyhound bus, their meager few possessions crammed into battered suitcases, on the highway to God alone knows where.

Spiritually it was a bad time for us.

There was a little church, known as St.Michaels, which attracted fishermen and surfers and people who loved the sea. This was a strange thing and probably this was due to the efforts of Pastor Michael who also had an affinity for the people of the sea. A rather scraggly, wizened little man in his late fifties with untidy grey hair and a beard with huge boundless energy. He quite obviously was driven by a power bigger than himself and people recognized this force within him and respected it. Pastor Michael had the gift of talking to his fellows in a way which they could understand. He would boast with a smile, “My mouth is my toolbox!” because he had the gift of the gab. Pastor Michael would walk the shores during the hard times and spend hours comforting the fishermen and helping them to cope with the realities of little food, no work. Their pain was his pain and the simple fisher folk admired him for the love he showed them. Consequently, his little church grew over the years and St.Michaels became a source of refuge and a source of hope. But the problem started when Pastor Michael was invited overseas on an evangelistic mission and in his absence he left the wrong man to take over St.Michaels.

The brand new pastor, Petrus Oberholtzer, was a biblical scholar who abounded in dry, boring sermons but who couldn’t relate to people very well. He talked a great deal but said nothing new, he instituted new rules into the church, but never knew how to love his fellow man and slowly he squeezed the life out of the church. He left us in a dry and barren land.

In the years before this new man came, we had been confident in our faith. No matter how big the calamity in our daily lives, we always had this huge guiding light of our faith to turn to. St.Michaels had been a place of spiritual comfort for us. We were reminded of things higher than ourselves and we were built up and made stronger in the songs we sang to a living God and the prayers we shared refreshed and encouraged us.

Pastor Michael cried with us, he laughed with us, he scolded us. Our tears were his tears, our joy was his joy. He would sit up with a family brought to the brink of divorce and desperate for guidance; Pastor Michael would come to your braaivleis and sit around the fire with you, laugh at your jokes and listen to your problems. On Sunday morning he would rant and rave at us from the pulpit, scratch his grey beard and glare at us for our sins, and we loved him the more for it. We wanted him to point out how we had all missed the mark and how Jesus Christ had paid the price for our sins. Pastor Michael had the authenticity to do this because he didn’t just Talk the Talk. He also Walked the Walk.

There was a little group of long haired surfers with their wives and girlfriends who used to sit in the back row, known affectionately as “Sinners Row.” Joe the fisherman and Maresa his wife and two squalling kids together with David and his new bride were just some of the regulars and they began their own crusade out in the surf inviting surfers to come to church and to join them in Sinners Row on a Sunday. During the sermon they would cheer Pastor Michael on when he was preaching and shout out enthusiastically, “Hallelujah” and “Amen” amidst the general hubbub of squirming children and complaining babies. This was a church that was alive and well. The people felt comfortable here.

The people loved Pastor Michael for he loved them and they were proud to put one tenth of their earnings into the collection plate. The little church grew and the people came and went home satisfied with their God and happy in their simple faith. Even a sheepish fisherman would arrive on a Sunday morning, coaxed on by his wife, to put a clean shirt on and to comb his wild, unruly hair. To come to the holy house, to repent, to be encouraged and to go away refreshed. This also is one of man’s most deep seated needs. The hunger for religion. The need to know God, to understand the mystery of our little time spent on this little planet. To feel that all is well with my soul.

And when this fragile faith of a man becomes damaged by a pastor or by a bad religious experience, it is a very terrible thing. The Hope is taken away. The Confidence is all gone. The Song within dries up and we lose direction. This surely is the greatest sin of all: to take away a man’s religion from him, to cut off the communication between him and his God. And I have seen this sin performed in many places and this greatest of all sins is usually performed in the Name of Christ!

And so it was for us in this new dry and barren season in our little town. The fish were all gone, the economy was suffering, people were desperate to make a living and now our faith was coming under serious threat by a new, well meaning but dangerous pastor. Petrus Oberholtzer and his theological phrases were unfamiliar. His autocratic laws stifled the soul. The Bible lost its meaning for us. The joy dried up beneath the legalistic laws, which this new man gave forth in subdued whispers from the cold pulpit. The passion was gone. The prayers were meaningless mumbles. The songs tired and outdated and boring.

Swiftly the number of people who came on Sunday dropped off. The children stopped coming and this is one of the sure signs of a dying church. When the children stop coming. Just as one of the sure signs of a growing church is the gurgle of little voices, the pitter-patter of little restless feet in the aisles, the scream of a hungry baby demanding fresh milk. This spells life in a church and the people are comforted for their God is real and present and with them in their families and in their daily predicament. Where once there were 300 people on a Sunday within weeks there were now 100 then 80 then only 50 faithful people left in the flock.

And so on a hot, dry Sunday morning David Samuelson and his wife, Sarah, would sit in the back row, (which his friends affectionately had called, “sinners’ row”) of the dying church, and listen to a lifeless sermon from the new, bald headed pastor. They would stand to sing lifeless words to tired tunes from long ago. David’s wife would nudge him awake with an indignant elbow when he nodded off to sleep. In the good old days of Pastor Michael, David’s friends would smile indulgently when he wore sunglasses during the sermon. They would slap David on the back after the sermon was over and say, “We know why you wear sunglasses. It’s so no-one will see you sleeping in church!” And they were right. But the sadness came when the pews grew vacant and silent and the people silently stopped coming and there were no more friends to share the laughter and the nudging in Sinners Row. Church became a lonely place on a lonely hill.

The sad thing was that many of the common people, many of them fishermen, who had been coming to church regularly for some time, now dropped away. For a year they had actually changed their ways, given their lives to Christ and been attracted to a power bigger than themselves but now they gave up in the face of this new deadness. And you could not really blame them. People are not fooled for very long by flowery speeches and when they are preached at with meaningless words, they become silently offended and leave the church silently. There is usually no big explanation given, they just simply stop coming to church.

There is no more laughter in the now empty rows of seats and no one to keep you company, no one sitting in sinners row any more. And this is a very sad thing because next a hopelessness sets in and the same friend who used to sit next to you in church on Sunday, now lands up in the pub instead because he feels the need to share his bewilderment with someone who will listen, There is an anger against the sins of the church which cuts very deep and which is very hard to heal. It hurts so badly when your precious faith is interfered with and the bitterness in your soul takes a long time to go away. For some people, the bitterness never goes away and they leave the church forever, unwilling to take the risk ever again of someone “playing with their souls.

Twelve years later David met up with Pastor Michael again and they had the chance to reminisce about what had gone wrong when Michael had left the church in the hands of Petrus Oberholtzer. Pastor Michael was the first to admit, “I take responsibility for that and yet it is important to realize how, “All things work together for the good of those who love God and who are called according to His purposes,” as it says in Romans 8:28. Even in the early days of Christianity God allowed the Diaspora, “scattering of the seed,” because of persecution. The result was the removing of believers from their comfort zone and the taking of the gospel to far and distant places.

I am sure that Petrus would be the first to give God the glory in this process of Diaspora. Petrus was after all trying to work for the Lord to the best of his ability. It was never intentional that he caused the split within the church. He was basically a good man. However he was a biblical scholar more at home in a Bible college. He was never cut out to be a pastor, loving other people and guiding them through the course of their difficulties.”

But in Jeffreys Bay, twelve years before this reunion, the pain was very deep for many people. One Saturday night in the Beach Hotel, Big Andrew, the fisherman, was sitting at the bar, nursing a beer with one massive hand and chain smoking with the other hand, which was reddened and nicotine stained. By the stormy look on his bony, weather-scarred face, covered by an unruly black beard, you could see Big Andrew was well into his pots and his anger was brewing.

David Samuelson walked into the Beach Hotel bar, also drawn by an inner loneliness and seeking companionship. Now David was a tall, rather thin, intense man in his late forties, with a squint in one of his eyes so that you never quite knew where he was looking. You always wanted to look over your shoulder because you felt as if he was not really looking at you but rather at someone behind you. As well as this idiosyncrasy he had a nose that had broken once long ago and it had never healed quite straight. Instead it had a curious bend to it. When questioned, David would laugh, “Oh that! Yeah I was surfing in Hawaii when I was a young man and a giant wave caught me from behind out at Rocky Point. Easily a 12-foot wave. I was so scared that I turned my back to the wave, lying down on my surfboard and this monster wave hit me from behind with all its power and ground my nose into the top deck of my board. That hurt a lot, I can tell you! I’ve had two nose operations and it never grew straight again.” He laughed depreciatingly. “But even now I am still surfing Super Tubes every day and that time in Hawaii was twenty years ago!”

People liked David Samuelson because he was friendly, easy to talk to and because he had been surfing all over the world and was a surfing veteran. David was a never ending source of tales and amusing anecdotes. He was a retired schoolteacher, now living in Jeffreys Bay with his wife. “I live to surf!” he boasted “And Jeffreys Bay gives us some of the best surf in the world!” David became well known locally when he started publishing his stories in the local newspaper and he ran a little column every week in which he interviewed interesting people and researched local history of the area.

So on this particular Saturday night, David walked into the Beach Hotel and looked around for someone he knew and there was Big Andrew, slouched at the bar in a thunderous mood, just looking for someone to vent his rage upon. David smiled at him and said, “Hi Andrew. How’s it going?” Andrew turned a bleary eye on him and roared out slowly, “Hey Davie! Davie, the newspaper man!” He thumped David on the back so hard with a massive paw, that the breath was almost knocked out of the unsuspecting man.

David choked, “Easy, easy, Andrew!” You don’t know your own strength! Thank goodness you’re a Christian and you sit next to me in sinners’ row on Sunday. Otherwise I would run a mile from your massive big paws!”

Big Andrew turned back to his beer and scowled into the tankard. “Not anymore! I am fed up with the church. Hypocrites and fools, every one of them. And as for that Pastor Petrus! I never want to hear another word from him and his scriptures ever again. When I greet him, he just mutters something under his breath and walks on! I suppose I am not good enough for him because I am a fisherman! Huy!” Big Andrew spat on the floor of the bar, heedless to everyone around. “I am a better man than he will ever be! Even if I do take a drink and even if I do smoke thirty cigarettes a day. At least you know where you stand with me. I will always greet people in the street. How can a pastor be so rude to just ignore you?”

David ordered a beer for himself. “I agree with you; however you must admit that Pastor Petrus DOES have the best of intentions. He sincerely DOES try very hard to be honorable and just. I think the problem quite simply is that Pastor Petrus has not yet learnt the compassion of Christ himself. He has not been blinded by the light himself and therefore he cannot inspire others towards truly experiencing the love of Jesus. No one can ever get excited about God unless they come to know His tremendous love, kindness and mercy for us sinners. I miss Pastor Michael so much. Now he is gone, I realize just what a wonderful man he was. He loved ordinary guys like you and me with all his heart.”

“Ja,” nodded Andrew. “There was a man for you. I remember the time when the fishing just died and I was standing next to my boat one hot day out on the sands wondering what the hell I was going to do. My wife took my son and she just left town on the bus because there was no food on the table. Man that was the worst time of my whole life. And then Pastor Michael came trudging along the hot sands with a litre of cold coke for me. And he stood next to me by the cracked up boat and said he was so sorry. He had heard that my wife left me and the fish had gone away and he just wanted to invite me to have supper at his house that night.”

David mused. “That was a good man. He was just how a pastor should be. Visit you in your time of trouble and not tell you where you slipped up and then try to help you get it back together again.”

Andrew was still passionately reminiscing. “I remember that night at Pastor Michael’s house. He asked me if he could pray for me and when I said, “Ja, but I dunno if that’s gonna help,” he started praying all these good things for me. For my wife to come home, for the fish to come back, for me to stop drinking. And it felt wonderful. I felt like God really loved me and that’s when I started coming to church and sitting with you in sinners’ row. They made me feel like God loved me.”

Just then a short, wiry little man with long shoulder length hair came sidling up to the two men at the bar. This was Schalk Van der Merwe, a fisherman who worked alongside Andrew on the big deck boat. He said in Afrikaans, “Hello julle. Maak ‘dop vir ‘n ander ou maat!” “Hello you two. How about buying your old friend a drink also.”

Andrew swore at Schalk affectionately, “Jou donder! Is jy al weer in die drank? “There is no literal translation to describe the terms of rough affection between two drinking men.

Schalk switched to English for the benefit of David. “Hello Davie, are you getting drunk before the service tomorrow morning?” David had no chance to reply before Big Andrew exploded because this was like a red rag to the bloody nose of an enraged bull and Andrew swore horribly.

“That church and that ********* pastor!! I never want to see either of them again! They can keep their prayers and their dead hymns and their dead words and shove them where the sun don’t shine.” Andrew was on fire now and David saw with great sadness that Andrew was in very real pain. When you take a man’s religion away from him, you leave him in a very vulnerable, unholy place and it shakes the core of his existence.

David tried to restore reason to the troubled man. “It wasn’t always like this, Andrew. Remember when Pastor Michael came to visit you. He was real. He was true. He was honest.”

Big Andrew waved away these words and sunk his head towards the beer tankard. “What does it matter? It is all gone now. There is nothing to be done. It is finished.”

That dry and barren year, David saw quite a number of his friends leave the church and at the same time go through a personal hell as the fishing industry dried up and there was no money for food or for their families.

This is a very bad thing for a man to experience: to lose his precious faith and at the same time to go through extreme poverty. If a man’s faith is strong and secure, he can “move mountains.” He can endure incredible hardships, but when his faith grows weak, a man becomes weak and confused and easily gives up his Hope. In that year there were many heartaches amongst former believers and there was many a wretched “believer” who became drunk with despair and quite a few who left town hopeless and desperate. In the course of his newspaper interviews, David Samuelson met many people who said bitterly, “If that’s what church is like, I don’t want anything to do with it. Hypocrisy and sham. That’s what it is.”

And so as the little church became smaller and smaller in numbers, on a Sunday David would sit alone in the back row while his wife, Sarah, sat alone in the baby’s room with their two year old daughter, named Angel. Sitting in sinners’ row alone, David would earnestly write down the exhaustive list of scriptures, which Petrus the pastor gave from the pulpit. The pastor would urge the dwindling congregation to go home and look up these scriptures. Then the feeling of deadness would come over David and the hopelessness would set in. When they got home, Sarah and he would look at each other and say, “What is the point? Why do we go to church?”

David would reply in deep despair, “But I remember the time when I first gave my life to Jesus twenty years ago in Hawaii. My faith was fresh and new and lovely and the singing was beautiful. The words of the Bible were so true and life-giving and I was sold out for Jesus. I remember I used to catch buses along the Kam Highway in Oahu and hand out little Bible cartoon books and Bible tracts to anyone who would listen on the bus. And people used to be curious about this Jesus and to accept the little books gratefully. And now, today, twenty years later, it’s all gone! I feel as if I have been robbed of something very precious.”

And then one glorious Sunday, David and his wife, Sarah, played hooky from the dying little church and went to a brand new church instead and their lives changed forever and ever when the great white light came afresh into their lives.

This is the story of a new life, of the unfolding of something true and simple and beautiful and shining. The purpose of this story is to give new hope and comfort to everyone who has ever been badly burnt out by churches and pastors and dead religion.

 

 

 

Chapter Two: The Power to Dream

David and Sarah Samuelson had moved to the little town of Jeffreys Bay some fifteen years before, because David was a fanatical surfer who lived to ride fast waves. Jeffreys Bay is a world famous surfing point break, which offers the fastest breaking right-hander in the world. On a good day in the heart of winter, in the right swell direction with a howling Southwest wind, an experienced surfer can ride a thundering wave for nearly a kilometer. A tricky, dangerous surf which breaks onto sharp rocks that threaten to break your legs, if you don’t know what you are doing. The icy Cape waters demand that you wear a full wetsuit and boots too for the rocks. The currents are notorious in the Bay and demand respect if you don’t want to get pulled helplessly out to sea. In fact the local surfers look more like warriors armed for war than youngsters out to have fun on a sunny day. Indeed this place is famous for its power and renowned for snapping boards in half.

Consequently, Jeffreys Bay has become world famous over a span of forty years and annually the Billabong Pro Contest attracts some 10,000 visitors in July and offers prize money totaling millions of rands. This is a fascinating story in its own right and David devoted twenty years of his life in trying to write about these fascinating events and to capture some of the history of this little town in the making.

Since he was fifteen years old, David had been in love with the sea and with surfing, which was then a very young sport. Only a handful of youngsters, in those days, had big ten foot, heavy surfboards in the cities of Durban and Cape Town but in the 1960’s there was an explosion of interest worldwide. New polystyrene foams were developed which made it possible to make very light surfboards and this made surfing accessible to all. Suddenly hundreds of youngsters were starting to catch waves up and down the coasts of Africa and America and a brand new subculture was born. Along with it came surfing clothing styles, surfing films and surf music. The Beach Boys really put the sport on the map with their immortal hit song, “Surfing USA.” The multi million-dollar surf industry was born and the kids who had at first become surf fanatics in their youth, later started making surfboards for a living when they grew up. And so a second generation of surfers evolved- those who derived their income from the sport.

When the early film makers like Bruce Browne brought out their surf films showing epic waves in romantic places like Hawaii and Indonesia, Australia and Africa, a whole new era of surfing safaris was born. In one of these films, “The Endless Summer,” the unknown town of Jeffreys Bay was filmed with Super Tubes breaking at ten to twelve feet in all its glory and suddenly the rest of the world had a new dream: to fly to Jeffreys Bay one day .

This was the birth of a new vision in the hearts of thousands of surf kids world wide: to one day surf at Super Tubes. Of course only a handful ever realize the dream, but it is the power to dream which gives the strength for thousands of hapless people to carry on in the day by day boring routine of life. For those caught up in a rat race, to face yet another dreary day and to perform in a job that they do not enjoy. The power to dream gives man the strength to perform the impossible.

When you are a boilermaker, a fitter or a turner in an oily, hot workshop, and your day is packed with harsh metallic sound, and the foreman is shouting at you above the scream of grinding machines, you long to escape. When you know that your wage packet will never satisfy the wife and hungry children and there is no hope of getting out of this horrible system, then your mind escapes to the magical surf film you saw. You have a fresh new vision of the bright sunshine falling on the crystal clear waters of Jeffreys Bay with a golden surfer cruising down the early morning wave on a long board with the little breed of surfing brothers paddling back up the line. You remember so clearly the gentle offshore breeze that fills the silence broken only by the waves breaking along the shore under the ring of deep azure mountains. This is new Hope. This makes it all worthwhile. The boilermaker, the fitter and the turner say silently to themselves, “Yes, one day I too will escape to that wonderful place. Yes, there is more to life than this beastly existence in the factory where I work so hard in order to make someone else rich!”

The Power to Dream is the need to see beyond the despair of the present moment. This Power to Dream is also one of man’s most important needs. As long as the Dream is alive man can endure almost any hardship. When the Dream dies, the soul of man dies too, and he becomes a mindless machine.

David Samuelson was a great crusader for the independence of the human spirit. He used to say to anyone who would listen, “Beware of people who step on your dreams with their hobnailed boots! Beware of the many prophets of doom who will insist on telling you how you will never make it! They try to persuade you that your dreams will never work out, how it is just not possible. Watch out for these Prophets of Doom! Steer well clear of these dangerous people. Never lose your dream! Always believe that it is possible and never, never give up!”

When they heard that he was writing a book on Jeffreys Bay, David’s friends would sneer contemptuously at him and say, “David, you are wasting your time writing a book about Jeffreys Bay. It is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, of little interest to anyone. You will never find a publisher for it and you are just wasting your time.”

But David refused to accept this. He would light a wood fire all by himself at 3.30 am behind the garage in the garden of the little house which he had built himself with his own two hands. And warming his hands before the hot blaze of the fire in the chilly hours before the sun dawned, he would take heart from one of the few Bible verses that he knew and say, “With God, all things are possible.” And David would say aloud, “I’ll never give up my dream. Never, never, never. Never will I give it up!” then he would sit down at his desk and carry on writing the book that was etched on his soul, the story that cried out to be told.

It is never easy when everyone is telling you, “You’ll never make it.” And it got harder because when David’s first book was finished, he sent it off to first one publisher and then another and then to another and each publisher replied, “Thank you for submitting your manuscript to us. Unfortunately we cannot use it at this time.” And David paid hard earned money to an expensive literary critic to proof read his manuscript and it came back underlined in red pencil with many a ruthless criticism. They advised David to totally re-write the book and explained exactly why there was no market for such a book. And it hurt very, very badly. For each and every writer, his writings contain large fragments of his precious soul and a rejection cuts very deeply into the writer’s spirit. But David took every failure as a stepping stone to success and he became very strong through these many rejections.

“I remember reading somewhere,” said David to his wife, “that Ernest Hemingway had 96 rejection slips from publishing companies before his first book was accepted. That book was called, “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” And only after this was published did they go back and look at his earlier books that had been rejected and decided to print them as the masterpieces that they actually were. In the 1960’s Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his simple little book about a fisherman, called “The Old man and the Sea.”

“That tale of Hemingways’ 96 rejections has given me great comfort over the hard years of my failures,” mused David.

Chapter Three: The Power of the Family

Sarah Samuelson was very different from her English husband. She was seventeen years younger than her husband and she came from a conservative Afikaans home in which the father ruled the household with a firm, traditional and autocratic power. It was a wonderful home that Sarah came from. Filled with the sounds of many pet dogs that overflowed the home, of chickens roosting in the large back garden and birds in the shady trees that protected the lush green lawns. There was a vegetable patch that yielded onion and lettuce, mint and thyme and in season the fruit trees groaned with the weight of bananas, papayas, avocado pears and mulberries. The kitchen was the heart of the home and Sarah’s mother had the gift of cooking that all three daughters inherited from her. At breakfast time, while they were enjoying mealie meal porridge, and golden toast covered in home made marmalade, bacon and home grown eggs, the talk at table would turn towards the lunch time meal. Maybe a trip was planned to Baconsfield Butchers to buy sausages and to invest in a leg of lamb for Sunday and possibly a ham or two for the midweek. Meantime the stove bubbled with the satisfying sounds and smells of frying mince and on the shelves sat the bottles of preserved apricots and tomato tree jam with their coating of white wax to keep them snug till the winter.

Sarah’s home was the farm. Her home was safe and set apart from the rest of the world. Only rarely did visitors come and only rarely did outsiders phone. But the phone buzzed constantly with calls from members of the family. The family ties were tremendously strong and they spread all over the land of South Africa to include many brothers and many sisters and aunts and uncles and all their offspring on both sides of the family. If anything happened within the fabric of the far-flung family, the rest of the family members would be instantly aware of it. And this was a great strength. The power of the family. There was an old world charm to the family, a flavour of days gone by when the times were more noble, where a man’s word could be trusted and relied upon, where dishonesty was unthinkable. Yes, this was a wonderful family and David was attracted by its nobility immediately and desired its warmth and its truth and he was overjoyed to be included into the loving warmth of this tight knit family circle.

Their marriage was a happy one because they allowed each other to breathe. The one thing about Sarah that David loved was that she respected his need to surf every day. While other wives could not understand this compulsion to surf and nagged their surfing husbands continually to stop wasting their time, Sarah did not do this. She seemed to understand that this was something almost holy for David. And so when he was packing a surfboard onto the truck and the big, black Labrador hound was pulling David’s wetsuit off the washing line, so as to remind his master not to leave him behind on the surf trip, then Sarah was placid and smiled and said, “Enjoy your surf. See you later.” And David loved her for this tolerance that she had for his idiosyncrasies.

Sarah loved all animals and all animals loved Sarah. She never passed a dog or a cat or a cow in the road without saying, “Hallo” to it. Dogs would always come wagging their tails and searching the tidbit in her hand. Kittens would work their way into her arms for Sarah had inherited this love of the land and of animals from her father. And David had this love of nature in common with her, though his excitement lay in the excitement of the ocean. His soul thrilled to the fresh new offshore South Wester that sprung up because this would bring the surf after a hot dry spell of onshore South East winds. David’s thrill lay in the coming of winter and the big winter swells that thundered against the rocky point. Like Sarah, his joy lay also under the peaceful spell of the clear night skies near a quiet home fire that warmed them in the star studded night. His joy lay in the mint fresh dawn that brought pinks and reds to the eastern sky and the promise of a thundering wave at Super Tubes before any other surfer ventured into the waiting sea.

One Christmas, Sarah’s father gave them a black Labrador puppy as a gift. Because this dog was ever restless and on the move, they called it Roamer. It was highly intelligent and easily trained to do exactly what it was told and soon it became a part of the family. It took the place of the unborn child and the family unit grew stronger because of Roamer. There is a strange thing with dogs. Although they may live with a family, they in fact only belong to one specific person. There is always that affinity between the dog and that one specific person. So it was with Roamer. He was always David’s dog and although he loved and obeyed Sarah and she always fed him, he was devoted to David. Where David went, Roamer went too and this dog loved the sea. From a young age he went bounding up and down the steep sand dunes at Surfers Point and chased the seagulls in huge circles across the far-flung dunes of Kabeljous Beach. The seagulls quite obviously enjoyed this game with the black dog and they flew in circles just ahead of him, crying mockingly to him and never leaving him far behind, then alighting on the shore while he rested, before they all rose again to resume the game of “Catch me” once again in huge circles across the sandunes.

This dog loved the sea. Roamer would wade out into the icy waters at Surfers Point, climb up onto a rock and shake the waters briskly from his sleek black coat and watch David paddle his long board out through the rock channel into the outgoing tide, out to the back line three hundred meters into the bay. When David took off on the big waves that curved for two, three hundred meters across the sunlit bay, Roamer would follow along the shoreline, watching his master and following him. When David emerged from the sea a half a mile away from where he had entered, Roamer was always there, awaiting him. If there were fifty surfers in the water and they all looked much the same in their black wetsuits, all catching waves and moving restlessly across the face of the waves, somehow Roamer could always identify David from the mass and he would track him relentlessly down the sweep of the bay and be waiting on a rock to emerge from the sea, half a kilometer down the line.

The excited Labrador would stand on a rock above the water, throw its head back and give a long howl of greeting. This phenomenon of a dog howling his greeting for his master caused curious stares from passers-by. It was typical of David’s playful nature that he would also throw his head back and howl too! And this really made people stare! To see a dog and a man howling at each other. The two were inseparable and they had many friends at Surfers Point, who loved Roamer as well. Soon many of the other surfers would howl at Roamer and he would throw his head back and howl back at them too. It was very strange and very touching.

Sometimes on a very low tide, when the sea receded far back exposing vast sandunes, all the black rock pools were exposed and laid open for a mile or more along the point. In the oyster pools there were lazy red starfish and brownish sea anemones and tiny shoals of shiny, miniature fish moving through the iridescent pale blue waters in the sunlight. Roamer had a specific hunting ground, a certain rock canyon where he loved to fish. When David came looking for him after a two hour surf session, he always knew where Roamer would be and sure enough, there he was, leaping and bounding through the pools intent on catching a fish, panting with his long pink tongue outstretched in the heat of his labours. It is a very fine thing for a man to find such a dog and the friendship was very strong between the two.

Sarah got a job at the local veterinary clinic and her days were filled with caring for beloved dogs and injured penguins, other people’s cats and pets. The strange thing was that although she was quiet and extremely shy, people just loved Sarah. Complete strangers would open their hearts to her and confide in her the most intimate details of their lives. This was Sarah’s great gift. She had a hidden calmness and a quiet confidence that attracted other people like a strong magnet. Only her husband knew how people actually frightened her with their brash talk and their painful confidences and how she longed to be left alone.

The one thing that they had in common was their love for God. Although they came from completely different churches, they had this common love for their Creator. She had been brought up under the strict Calvinistic dictates of the NGK church where the pastor held terrific powers over his congregation for generations. Indeed, during the realm of Apartheid in South Africa, an NGK pastor would frequently visit one of his parishioners on a Sunday and demand that they cease watering the garden or washing the car because this went against the teachings of Scripture! And the pastor had so much authority that the people obeyed unquestioningly because the pastor’s power was so strong. Racialism was freely advocated from the pulpit in those troublesome years of political dictatorship before democracy came to South Africa. The ways of the NGK church were strict but they were holy

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 22.04.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-3765-0

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