Many of us have said at one time or another, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Events brought to our attention this week bear this out. As I’ve mentioned earlier, my brother, Frank Ballew, and his wife, Jean, are visiting from McPherson, Kansas for our 75th Anniversary. (Frank is the artist who was commissioned to paint the portraits of Calvin Butts and Albert Sergeant, which hang in our Retreat Center.) Jean is a granddaughter of the late Rev. Fred Van Sickle, an early superintendent of this conference. Rev. Van Sickle had three daughters, Jean’s mother, Dorcas Campbell, Clara Jones, visiting this week from New York, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth Van Sickle was a registered nurse and Free Methodist Medical Missionary to Africa. The name Van Sickle figures into tonight’s history highlight in several interesting ways, so please keep that name in mind.

Jean and Frank Ballew

While sitting on our cabin porch this week, Jean told a story about becoming aware of a man named Pastor Bruce Van Sickle, while she worked at Winona Lake writing children’s curriculum for the Free Methodist Church. Pastor Bruce, she noted, wrote the song that replaced the CYC theme song when it became CLC. Jean had hoped to meet him someday. Some years later, while Jean was on staff with the Free Methodist Church in Indianapolis, she attended a work-related conference in Colorado and discovered that Bruce Van Sickle was also there. She sought him out to see if they might be kinfolk. It turned out that they were not related; however, he told Jean that he had some of her grandfather’s books. Here’s how that happened.

Pastor Bruce once lived in Seattle and had been at a Christmas party for Pacific Northwest’s pastors during which they held a white elephant gift exchange. Everyone had to draw a number to choose a present. He drew #1, so he got to pick the first gift. It happened to be old books with the name Fred Van Sickle written inside. Pastor Bruce was very surprised to see the same last name as his. At the end of the evening, he had the option to exchange the gifts, since he had been the first one to draw, but he chose to keep them because of the coincidence of the name. In the ensuing conversation with Jean, they discovered together that the books had somehow traveled from Maryland to Seattle (where the party took place). At the time of their conversation in Colorado, Pastor Bruce Van Sickle was a pastor in Kansas, where he still had the books. Tuck this little bit of information away for now.		Glass in the Museum

Yesterday, again while sitting on the front porch of my cabin with Frank and Jean, we had a visitor named Angie Lynch. Angie is a member of Pastor Dan Norheim’s Fort Washington (Bethel) Free Methodist Church. Angie came by to tell me she had a Bible that I might want for the Camp Museum. She said it had the name of someone she believed to have been a famous missionary in Africa, but she couldn’t remember the name. Angie told us that she had found the Bible in a thrift store somewhere in Maryland, and picked it up for her WMI table in the church. The Bible has been on the WMI table for many years. She said it was actually in an African language and was very old. I agreed that it sounded interesting and Angie said that she would bring it to me. This morning at breakfast, Angie came over to my table with this little black book. I opened the cover, and to my astonishment, were these words: Elizabeth Van Sickle, and in French, Dispensaire (or Dispensary), Kibuye, January 23, 1953. Elizabeth Van Sickle was my sister-in-law Jean’s Aunt, better known to the family as “Aunt Libby” and to her missionary counterparts as “Van.” She was one of “Grandpa Fred’s” daughters. I could hardly wait to show this Bible to Jean. Elizabeth Van Sickle received her nursing degree from John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Upon graduation, she became a nurse at John’s Hopkins Hospital and eventually rose to become head of its nursing department. Her story is legendary. When the call came for a nurse at Kibuye Hospital in Africa, she gave up her very successful position and headed for the mission field. She served as a medical missionary in Africa for 20 years, working with Dr. Esther Kuhn, also a legendary missionary from our Maryland-Virginia Conference, and as wondrous as all this is, they worked at the same hospital in Burundi that our missionaries, Dr. Frank and Rev. Carol Ogden, have been telling us about this week. Don’t you just love God’s surprises? We have no idea how Missionary Nurse Van Sickle’s Bible, written in an African language, made it into a thrift store in Maryland where Angie Lynch would find it, place it in the library at the Fort Washington Free Methodist Church where it stayed for at least ten years, then deliver it at this precise moment for display in our new Camp Museum. God must have His angels watching over this special book. And, how did Rev. Fred Van Sickle’s books make their way through so many states and then by an unusual coincidence come into the hands of an unrelated Free Methodist pastor with exactly the same last name? Then, let Jean in on it? Only God could orchestrate that. As I conclude this History Highlight, please listen for another name familiar to many of us. When Rev. Van Sickle was a very old man, he invited a young Rev. John “Ike” Owen to take books from his library in Rockville, Maryland, when Rev. Owen was the new pastor there. “Rev. Ike” eventually moved from Rockville to Seattle, and it was he who wrapped the books as a “white elephant gift” for the Pastors’ Christmas party so many years ago. As of this writing, Rev. Ike is back in our area serving as Chaplain for the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D. C. As far as we know, Pastor Bruce Van Sickle still has the treasured reference books in Kansas, and who knows? Since Frank and Jean now reside in Kansas, maybe someday those family relics will make it full circle. In any event, now you know the rest of the story.

Update 6/2/2007