1983 January/February issue Part 3

New Zealand Trip

Last August Lars and I spent three weeks in that indescribably beautiful little country of New Zealand. I was speaking for the Church Missionary Society’s “Spring Schools”, one in Hamilton on the north island for four days, another in Christchurch on the south island. It was springtime, of course.  New Zealand is about the same latitude south that Massachusetts is north, so the seasons are reverse of ours, and everything was in glorious bloom. Thousands upon thousands of new born lambs capered and gamboled in the pastures (called paddocks there). We missed witnessing the birth of one of them by about thirty seconds. It was just staggering on its little rubber hoofs. The ewe was busy cleaning it. We’ve seen the Rockies and the Andes and the Alps. We’ve been to Whales and to Norway and Ecuador and Peru, Hawaii and a few other places, but we agreed we’d seen nothing to beat New Zealand. Such miles and miles of lush velvet green pasture land, such sweeping plains, such rank upon rank of awesome snowcapped jagged peaks, such pearly smooth sheets of turquoise glacial lakes. We traveled for six days after the speaking was finished, having hired a small Japanese car (a Daihatsu!). From Christchurch we drove west into a beautiful forest, through the Rakia Gorge, across the Canterbury Plains and up into the high brown grass similar to the moors and highlands of Scotland, then into the Southern Alps. Flew in a small plain around the highest peak, Mt. Cook, and over three or four glaciers (pronounced “glassyuhs” by the natives), then down the Haas Pass to the Tasman Sea. Drove to Queenstown, lake Te Anua, and a fjord improperly named Milford Sound (we were taught the difference between a fjord and a sound) where we took a boat trip through towering mountains to the sea. A little crested penguin obliged us by waddling primly up a rock very near the boat, and two seals yawned with ennui to see another crowd of tourists. On the west coast we picked up drift wood on a lonely wild beach, gathered ferns in a very wet jungle 9rainfall is 300 inches per year in that section), and climbed over rocks to the foot of Fox Glacier.

Ah, but the people! What dear, lovely people we met. Warm, responsive, and we did not feel rejected for being American (except when our fellow travelers on the fjord boat began to play loud country music on a tape recorder and square dance on the deck).

One women, a missionary from East Africa, told me she had been saved just nine months at the time of the death of the five men in Ecuador. The testimony of Jim Elliot had a powerful effect in her life. Three times she had put her willingness to become a missionary. Then she came across Jim’s not in a diary, “Ananias was not slain for not giving, but for not giving what he said he’d given.” That word was a link in a chain of her actually going to Africa.