13 January 2013
Dear Phyllis,
I have found that the spiritual life is much different than advertised. This is a huge problem. We have such expectations and are told that this is the way it is supposed to be, but we find that our life turns out radically different.
It is a sign of senility to repeat stories. I know I have told you about Dennis Turner several times before but his story bears repeating.
I have never known a man who suffered like Dennis Turner. As a young man he was working in a packing house in London and saw scraps of newspaper with Japanese writing on it. This captured his imagination so much that he began a life study of Japanese. This saved his life.
In 1942 he was with the British army with Percival in Singapore. Three days before the fall of the city he was given an assignment to take a box out to sea and dump it. He had no idea what was in the box, but it turned out to be radar, which the Japanese didn't have. Because of his voyage at sea, he wound up on Borneo, and was instructed to surrender to the Japanese army. He said they looked for days before they could find anyone who would take them captive. It was almost like getting home when they finally found someone in a green uniform. Then he spent the next four years as a POW in a Japanese prison camp. He is the only man I ever met who had a good word to say about the treatment he received as a POW. Needless to say, life was an unending series of atrocities. But he said that most of his guards were farmers from Nagano-ken. They were family men who were not the typical kamikaze fanatical soldier. But their suffering was none-the-less unimaginably horrible. At one point he was with several thousand prisoners who were being transported from one location to another in three ships. During the voyage, the Australians had them penned up in a harbor, bombing them. One of the ships was sunk, and the Japanese transfered the survivors to the remaining two ships which were horribly over crowed. Thousands of men were jammed below deck so crowded that they couldn't even sit down. As men were dying, all they could do was throw their bodies into the sea. Men went out of their minds as they saw their buddies' bodies floating with fish eating them beside the ship. Because he was the only one who spoke Japanese, he was the interpreter, and was permitted to sleep on the deck. That saved his life. At one point, a man came down with cholera. Dennis got ill. There was a Dutch doctor among the prisoners who gave him some medicine. He declined it saying there were many men far sicker than he was. The doctor replied, “If we lose you, we are all dead men.”
Dennis credits his salvation to one brave little Japanese soldier. He was Korean, but was one of the guards. He studied English in order to share Christ with the prisoners. One day he asked, “Tana san, do you have a Bible?” Dennis laughed and held up his Japanese dictionary saying, “This is my Bible.” But he saw that boy take beating after beating for talking to the prisoners. He saw that boy had something that his Anglican religion didn't provide. It was some years later that Dennis finally discovered Jesus, but he credits the testimony of that boy with the force that brought him to Christ.
Dennis was a business man in Hong Kong after the war and married a single missionary there. Because of his love for Japanese, he wound up coming to Japan as a missionary. His first term was somewhat traditional working in Numata and Shibukawa of Guma-ken planing churches. The Lord gave him some excellent fruit. Among many others, Iida san became one of the top evangelist in that area. Twenty years later Iida san was still going on strong reaching many in central Japan.
In 1970, through the introduction of one of his former prison guards, he was invited to come to Nagano-ken, and bought land in Ina. He had high hopes of repeating his pattern of planting churches in that area. It was at that time I first met Dennis. I was tremendously impressed with this obvious man of God, and considered it a great privilege to be his close friend for the next 30 years.
Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to in Ina. He had a somewhat large building put up for a children's home. The building was terrible, and his own family was coming apart at the seams. He had been living in denial for many years, but his wife's (...........) boiled over shortly after they moved to Ina. I was 34 at the time and had never heard such terrifying stories. They had five children, and, predictably, the children were not doing well. His second youngest daughter was 14, but a very mature girl and could pass for 20 in any Japanese bar. You can imagine the heartache she was to her father running around with unsaved boys. In answer to prayer, it was two years later, when she was in England, that the Lord finally got a good grip on her. All three girls turned out to be fine Christians, married well, and have wonderful Christian families.
In desperation, Dennis took his family back to England to try to save his wife. A psychiatrist advised him that his best shot was to return to Japan, and watch the situation with a microscope from there. The next several years were terrible. For some time his youngest daughter, Christine, stayed with her dad in Ina, which helped immensely, but he spent several years is desperate loneliness is a freezing house alone. He was despised by many in his former mission for the failure of his marriage. He tried several times in vain to get meetings going to start a church. It was the usual pattern of gathering a few believers together to worship the Lord. From time to time there was encouragement, but, ultimately, something would come up, and that was it.
One day I was with him in the home of one of his former prison guards. Matsuda san said, “Tana san, the camp commander is out of prison.” Dennis exclaimed, “I must see him!” The prison camp commander had been tried for war crimes, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Some days later, Dennis and I drove two days to Waijima on the west coast of Japan. That was a page in history. The camp commander was a broken old man now living with his wife in a traditional Japanese house that looked like a post card from 1930. What an afternoon! We sat there for three hours joyfully sharing with this pleasant old man the love of God, forgiveness of sin, and eternal life through Jesus Christ. Just witnessing that scene must have been one of the reasons why the seraphims in heaven were crying “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
The stories I could tell about Dennis witnessing are legion. It was something that just naturally flowed out of him. One day I said, “I would give anything to be able to witness like you.” He later told me, when he heard that, he thought in his heart, “Man, you are mad! You have no idea what that costs.” I know now that he paid a very dear price, but the fruit of that is eternal.
One of the major feats of his life was an event that history has never recorded. In the mid 1970s Joni Erickson Tada's book, Joni, was a huge best seller. Dennis was thrilled when he read it, and, when it came out in Nihongo (Japanese), he bought 20 copies to pass out like tracts. He got some bewildering feedback. One day he was trying to show a failed suicide patient in the hospital how Joni wanted to die, but he couldn't find that chapter in the book. Dennis wrote a letter to Joni suggesting that there was a problem with the translation, and got a form letter back thanking him for participating in the blessing in Japan. Several months later another friend of ours, met the co-author, Steve Estes, in the states. Steve asked, “What is wrong with it?” Dennis came over from Ina to Karuizawa, and we spent three days with a bilingual teacher with the language school going over that book one word at a time. Zondervan book publishers had sold the copyright to a large publisher, Non-book, in Japan. The secular Japanese publisher had turned it into a sex novel. I mean to tell you it was ripe! And the illiterate missionaries were pushing the sales in Japan, big time. A few months later I was in the states and drove to Grand Rapids to personally talk to the number two man in Zondervan about it. He had the copy we had marked up in his desk and showed me the correspondence that he had had from Non-book. The short story is that Non-book backed off, the book was re-translated and re-published in Japan. Joni later wrote another person, “I can never thank Bill Cook enough for what he did for me.” But I told her, “You owe everything to Dennis Turner. He did it all. I was only a by-stander.”
He had very few friends. Because his life was so desolate and void of natural comfort he became a man uniquely immersed in the Word of God. This gave him unique insight into small details that few men have ever noticed. One day he remarked, “It is interesting that in John 21:11 Peter caught 153 large fish. This is the same number of workers building Solomons temple in 2 Chron. 2:17 – 153, 600, minus the 600, which is the number of man. This means that the early converts would be the builders of God's new temple and the energy would be of God – not man.” His face shone with the glory of God like few men, and he was as cheerful a man as any I have ever met.
Dennis prayed and waited for his wife for 24 years. It was with some mixed emotion that he told me that she had repented and he was returning to England to be with her. Some time later I received one of the bewildering letters of my life. She wrote me how she repented and was now pleading with younger women not to destroy their families like she had. I could scarcely believe the signature I saw at the bottom.
When Dennis finally finished his course, and made it safely to the home towards which he had been plodding for many years, his daughter sent me a video of the funeral. I wept as I saw that glorious scene of his family united, standing around the casket. There lay the earthly remains of a man who had followed Jesus. What he left was a marvelous heritage. The testimony of his family was a story that few can match.
But what was the fruit of his life? How can you rate it? By mans standards, I suppose you could say that his ministry for the last 30 years was a failure. He had his dreams of what he wanted to accomplish in Ina. His early years in Guma-ken had been reasonably successful. He had seen some outstanding conversions and left a thriving gathering of Christians who were self-propagating. That is the way it is supposed to work. He had hoped to repeat that in central Nagano-ken. Nothing like that ever happened. Today there is no gathering in Ina that can be attributed to his ministry. He had led a considerable number of souls to Christ by his ministry in a hospital and other places. All of these were one-on-one conversions. Where they are today the Lord alone knows.
We have our concepts of spirituality, and who is a successful missionary. I have known some very successful men. But Dennis Turner was different. When we line up men with their credentials and visible success, I know very few, if any, that come to the stature of this man of God. Before God and man; before angels in heaven and the demons that infest this world, here stood a giant.
Lord, thank you for the privilege of knowing Dennis Turner,
bill
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