From Kansas to Kalimantan

From Kansas

to

Kalimantan

A Humble Missionary Journey

by Arny Humble

Published by UCS PRESS

P.O. Box 12787

Prescott, Arizona 86304-2797

Publisher’s web site:

http://www.marjimbooks.com

Copyright 2012 by Arny Humble

Smashwords Edition

Cover design by Breeana Humble

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For my grandchildren:

Shenna, Nicole, Joshua, Breeana,

Vincent, Justin, Camille, Kennie & Chrystie

***

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

PART 1 – THE EARLY YEARS

Chapter 1 – Mom – the Golden Thread

Chapter 2 – Farm Life

Chapter 3 – Dad and Brother Marvin

Chapter 4 – School Days

PART 2 – LIFE TRANSITIONS

Chapter 5 – From the Farm to the Desert

Chapter 6 – From the Desert to the City

Finding the Perfect Woman

Beginnings of Ministry

Chapter 7 – Seminary and Church Planting

Planting a Church

Called to Foreign Fields

Chapter 8 – Singapore and Travel to Kalimantan

PART 3 – LIFE IN KALIMANTAN

Chapter 9 – Early Impressions

Chapter 10 – The Good Things of Our New Life

Larger Joy Factors That Affected Our Lives

Chapter 11 – Facing My Fears

Our First Major Perkara (Case)

The Little Major

I’m Taking Over This Church

Modern-Day Headhunting

Chapter 12 – Growing the Church

Laborers in the Harvest

How Dyak Villages Came to Christ

Chapter 13 – Family Life in Kalimantan

Chapter 14 – Leaving Our First Island Home

PART 4 – JAVA AND OTHER ISLANDS

Chapter 15 – Joining a Dynamic Ministry

Chapter 16 – Family Reinforcements

PART 5 – TO FINISH WELL

Chapter 17 – Member Care

Chapter 18 – Losing My Life Partner

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It was primarily my children who first urged me to put my life story into print. I found it a humbling task (no pun intended), to share my thoughts and actions on paper. Only their encourage-ment, as they read the first few chapters, encouraged me to continue writing. They believed that the life lessons and the core beliefs God has instilled in me through the years should be recorded, especially for their own children.

I have been most inspired in life by my wife, Wanda. The reader will discern that it has been my attempt throughout the book to make her the heroine – which indeed she was. Apart from Christ Himself, I owe the most to her for the spiritual formation of my character. I acknowledge that, humanly speaking, her belief in me has, for the past fifty-five years, been the strongest encouragement for me to believe in myself. Her faithful writing of letters to family and supporters for more than half a century provided me with dates and facts that would have otherwise slipped into oblivion.

Fortunately, I have had professional editorial help from a former co-laborer in Kalimantan Barat. Grey and Mary Ann Jeffreys served alongside us for more than a decade during the time our Indonesian Baptist church was in a fruitful growth stage. Since returning to America in 1987, Mary Ann has edited the books of many well-known authors. For mine, she allowed that her effort was a labor of love. I am most grateful for her generosity. She often reminded me of the big picture with statements like, Arny, you can’t write everything – thus keeping me from writing a five hundred page book! At the local level I have had grammatical help from a former fifth grade teacher, and present librarian from my church, El Camino Baptist of Tucson, Arizona. Phyllis Quesnel, who followed the missionary work of Wanda and myself for nearly five decades, has spent many hours poring over each revision of my manuscript. I acknowledge the immense help of Phyllis and Mary Ann, while I hold myself solely responsible for the contents and the accuracy of language and grammar.

Finally, I acknowledge my grandchildren, for being the reason of this writing. If it were not for them, my story would never be recorded. Breeana Humble created the book cover.

FOREWORD

It is an honor for me to write the introduction to this amazing Humble missionary journey, From Kansas to Kalimantan. I have been serving with WorldVenture, formerly CBFMS, for over thirty years. The last twenty have been as the President. During these years, I have had the amazing opportunity to visit our missionary family in action in over sixty countries of the world.  Visiting Indonesia has been a special treat along the journey, and seeing the lasting imprint of Arny and Wanda has been so obvious everywhere I traveled.

In my position I can’t have favorites, but I always say that Arny and Wanda Humble set the standard of what missionaries should be. Being is actually of greater consequence than doing in God’s economy.  This book is an amazing description of a journey from the humble beginnings in Kansas to one of the most strategic international missionary impacts that I have personally witnessed. Arny and Wanda Humble truly embodied the incarnation of Christ as they became Indonesian. I have watched them in action with national Indonesian leaders and have seen the enormous respect as those leaders look to Arny as a father figure.  Many missionaries never achieve that status.  How did they do it?  Read and enjoy.

God’s choice chosen servants, Arny and Wanda Humble, are the very kind of people that have made it such a joy for me to serve in leadership in missions. I do what I do so they can do what they do. Here are two lives well lived in their lifelong commitment to the evangelization and discipleship of the people of Indonesia. This is a great read which you will thoroughly enjoy.

Hans Finzel

President of WorldVenture

INTRODUCTION

I awoke with the whole house swaying under me, unable to remember exactly where I was or what was happening. Could it be an earthquake, or was I possibly suffering from vertigo? It was nearly pitch black so at first my eyes adjusted to nothing. In those first few seconds between being awake and asleep, there was a definite sense of anxiety bordering on fear. Then I could at least see that I was under my mosquito net. I could also make out the flicker of two smoky kerosene lamp wicks burning faintly on each side of a large, open room. The one-half-inch-thick sleeping pad under me was stretched across the bamboo slat floor, leaving ribbed marks where I had been lying on it. Then I heard the grunt of a large pig below me, as he rubbed himself vigorously against the pole directly under my makeshift bed. He must have found the pole that stabilized the rest of the smaller stilts that elevated the house six feet off the ground. Now it came back to me where I had gone to sleep the night before. I was in a Dyak tribal village, far back in the jungle of Kalimantan Barat. Soon the rhythmic thudding of mortar and pestle rice- pounding started up just a few feet from my head. The whole floor shook with the impact. Dyak women start their workday at four o’clock in the morning. I knew my night of sleep was over.

Most of you reading these words have, at one time or another, awakened in a strange place and wondered: Where am I, and how did I get here? This book is my humble attempt to explain how I got from Kansas to Kalimantan. As my grandchildren were growing up, they often asked me to tell them stories of my youth on the farm. I began to think how great it would be to know up close the history of my own grandpa or great-grandpa. I decided to write my life story for my grandchildren. I have been a missionary working with WorldVenture (formerly Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society) for more than forty years. So, there was a missionary story to be told as well. At one time my wife and I were supported by forty-four churches and twenty-six individuals. Many friends among this supporting constituency also urged me to tell my story of pioneering two mission fields under the auspices of WorldVenture. It is my earnest prayer that God will be glorified as I attempt to relate some of the high and low points of this life venture.

***

PART 1 – THE EARLY YEARS

Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man is a quote attributed to St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit Order. The obvious meaning is that the soul of a child is most moldable in his or her earliest years. Fortunate indeed is the country boy who spends his early years under the tutelage of a mother such as I had. In spite of my wanderings in later years, God began a good work in me through her influence. Once the mold of my sensitive conscience was set, it was a force to be reckoned with, whether or not my conduct always showed the result of it.

The rigors of farm life in southeastern Kansas also played a part in my spiritual formation. Today most children know about animals only as house pets to be coddled and spoiled. In the thirties and forties every farm animal had a use. Dogs were for herding cows or sheep. Cats caught mice in the barn. None of the farm animals got inside the house! It was a different world. It was my world. The animals were all expected to work for their keep, and so was the farm boy. It wasn’t all work, though it seemed to me to be that way at times. Not many people appear in the early part of this story. That’s because any farmhouse we lived in was usually at least a quarter of a mile from the closest neighbor. The people closest to me were very special people. I will start by telling about my mom.

Chapter 1 – Mom – the Golden Thread

I am mindful of the sincere faith within you,

which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois.

(2 Timothy 1:5)

It was my mother who was named Lois, not my grandmother, but sincere faith it certainly was, and it was indeed passed on to me. In the small town of Humboldt, Kansas, Lois Olive Humble was about to give birth to her first child. Her petite five-foot-two frame promised it would not be an easy delivery. Then came the exquisite anguish of becoming a mother. A few drops of ether from Dr. Chambers helped quell the pain of childbirth. Like every other obstacle Lois had faced in life, her practical nature won out over emotion as she bore down and looked forward to her new joy. Coming out of the fog of anesthesia, Lois was flooded with happiness at having birthed a baby boy. Her first thoughts might have been of her own receding birth pangs, or of how happy and relieved it felt to have a new son, but that was not on her mind. Her initial joy collapsed into one single thought, I have borne a child who has an unbelieving father. I must do everything in my power to be sure this child follows the Lord.

In Lois’s soul was a golden thread of faith. She was a born again Christian in the days before that terminology had lost much of its meaning. When she married my dad, she knew she was out of God’s will, because Charles was not a believer. Charles was a handsome, brown-eyed man, five years older and eight inches taller than Mom. They met one summer when my dad boarded in the Gray home during haying season. Albert Gray, my grandpa, was running a haying crew, and my dad was one of the hired hands. Mom helped Grandma Gray prepare meals for the haying hands, and there she met Charles. For Lois, it was apparently love at first sight. Much later, when her curious granddaughters would ask her why she married an unbeliever, Lois would only say, It had to be Charles. He was the man for me.

Just eleven months after my older brother, Marvin, was born, Mom informed Dad that she was pregnant again. She said Dad was quite disappointed. Apparently he thought one child was enough. In a little house, just a few blocks away from where Marvin was born, Lois gave birth to an almost-ten-pound baby boy, with about five pounds of the weight owing to an overly large head. That was me, Arnold Leon Humble, born on October 24, 1934. My brother and I were the only two children she bore, and she never wavered from her earliest pledge to do her best to see that we follow the Lord.

By default I ended up spending a lot of time around the house with Mom. I think it was because Marvin was twenty months older and more useful doing outside work with Dad on the farm. Not long after I was born, we moved to a farm close to Rose, Kansas. Farm wives in the midthirties did not have it easy. No plumbing, no electricity, and no labor-saving devices were available. Clothes had to be washed in a tub with a scrub board. Every meal was cooked from scratch. In the late summer and fall there was canning to be done, which meant boiling pint and quart Mason jars full of garden products in a pressurized canner. That was very hot, steamy work in temperatures that often topped 100 degrees. Canning could be done only when food had been thoroughly processed by hand. Even butter had to be churned by hand.

Mom was small but strong. I can see her even now, vigorously beating up a cake in a crock bowl, with a little frown on her brow that almost made her look like she was mad at the batter. I believe she made biscuits for breakfast all but about ten mornings while we lived on the farm. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but Dad loved biscuits, and she enjoyed pleasing him in her cooking. She never seemed to sit down and rest during the daytime.

Mom’s domain was mainly the house, the garden, and the chickens. We often bought the fuzzy baby chicks in town, and Dad would contrive a homemade brooder house, using kerosene lanterns for warmth. Mom fed and cared for the growing chickens and eventually gathered their eggs when they became laying hens. She not only cooked the young frying chickens, she also wrung their necks, scalded, plucked, and then singed them to get off the little pinfeathers from their skins. She would take a fryer’s head in her right hand and whip the body of the chicken around fast like she was cranking a Model-T Ford. It only took a couple of turns before the chicken was flopping around on the ground like a chicken with its head cut off. Later I liked to stand up to the counter and watch while she gutted it and cleaned out the entrails. I would gag and gag as she got to certain yucky parts of it, and she would always tell me to go away if it made me sick, but I had to stand there and see it all.

When I think of my mom’s determination to put God first in her life, I think of it somehow as the beginning of that golden thread that started with her and carried on through many of her children and grandchildren. I am not speaking of her personhood as being the golden thread. The thread was her absolute commitment to seeking the will of God for herself and her family. Nothing else would do. There was a right path and a wrong path, and only surrender to God would take you down the straight path. She believed we boys should have the influence of church and Sunday school, so it was church every Sunday for us, rain or shine. There was a little Methodist church close by our home when we lived near Rose, Kansas, but somehow it did not seem to meet her ideals of a place to meet God. So, dressed in her Sunday best, she herded us into the ’36 Ford sedan and drove a few miles farther east, sometimes over muddy, rutted roads, to Ridge Baptist Church. There the gospel was clearly preached. A preacher from town would show up from time to time, but often it was just Sunday school that was offered. I did not care much for the preaching, so she would spread a small handkerchief on her lap and let me put my head down to sleep and sweat during what seemed to be long sermons, especially in the summertime.

I embarrassed her a couple of times at church, and she reminded me of it later. Sunday school classes were divided by only a thin curtain hanging between them, so individual voices were easy to hear on the other side. One Sunday morning she heard me telling my Sunday school teacher in a rather loud voice: I’ve tasted beer before, I’ve tasted whiskey before, I’ve tasted wine before, I’ve tasted brandy before… and so on down the beverage list. Actually my dad often gave us just a sip of whatever he was drinking, so it was not totally a lie, just not a good place to be bragging about such information. Another time as Mom exited the church, she saw a group of people gathered around a couple of boys fighting. They were really kicking up the dust in the churchyard as they thrashed around on the ground. When she got through the circle, it was Marvin and me that she witnessed in one of our usual vigorous combats, but this time in our best church clothes. She was pretty upset and got us straight into the car without bidding folks good-bye. I can’t remember what she said to us, just how she looked as she laced us down on the way home. She had no problem showing anger that bordered on wrath when the occasion demanded it.

It was usually Dad’s job to do the spanking (more about that later), but she did not always wait to turn us over to him for discipline. Direct disobedience or defiance could earn a spanking before Dad got home. Dad always used switches from the elm tree. Mom used the butter paddle. That’s a fairly heavy piece of wood about ten inches long and a half-inch thick, perfectly shaped to be grasped by the handle and applied with rapid-fire motion to the seat of learning. She always draped me over her knees where I was upended with overalls stretched tight. It was not two or three good whacks as a gentle reminder, but a staccato warming up that gradually turned to white-hot heat by the time she was finished. I won’t say she wasn’t angry. I don’t know of any parents in those days who didn’t spank when they were angry. But it was never brutal or overdone. She seemingly could detect when the pitch of my wailing showed the point of my full repentance was reached, and then she would stop. She never apologized for spankings but once, and that was when I had kept hitting at, and finally hitting, her while she was telling my uncles some embarrassing little thing I had done. She spanked me especially hard that time, but I could tell somehow by her later words and actions that she felt bad for punishing me when I’d just reacted because of her embarrassing me.

I made my first public decision to follow Christ at Ridge Baptist Church when I was about ten years old. An evangelist from a nearby town came out to preach a week of revival meetings. We went every night, and I was getting some of the meaning of what he was saying about following the Lord. What I remember mainly today is his emotional fervor, zeal, and sweat when he preached. Every night there was an invitation to go forward to accept the Lord as one’s Savior. After several nights of this urging, Mom spoke to Marvin and me, asking if we thought we should go forward and accept Christ. Toward the end of the week we did go forward. As I approached the altar, the preacher took my hand, leaned down close to my face, and, looking very serious, asked, Son, are you really sure you know what you are doing? Thinking back later I realized I was a bit embarrassed and may have even had a little smile on my face that belied my sincerity. In fact, I was not absolutely sure what I was doing, but I was earnest about it, whatever it was. I cannot remember any surge of joy or peace, but I can remember my mom’s satisfaction that we had done the right thing. We were told to tell someone about our decision, so I talked to my teacher, Mrs. Peck. She was a serious Christian, and she also asked me, Did you really mean it? I believe questions like that drove the decision a bit deeper than it might have been otherwise.

A week later we were baptized at a Southern Baptist church in Yates Center since we had no baptismal tank at our church. Some other country boys were baptized with us. My clearest memory of that day was the Stoll boy panicking and thrashing both of his feet above the water while his head was briefly immersed. Not the most pious memory that should be held after such an event. My public confession and baptism were just the first step toward a surrender to God that would be truly meaningful.

Mom’s church life was exemplary, but her home life of devotion engraved far more lasting impressions on my young mind. She was a long ways from perfect, but she had a great passion for God. I was three years old or younger when prayer before bedtime started. She had us down on our knees at our beds beside her every night before going to sleep, saying the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep prayer. Then she started adding other little prayers to our routine. I can’t remember when we first started praying for Dad to get saved. I am not even sure it was said exactly like that, so directly. I just know we learned from her prayers with us that Dad was not right with God and needed to be. Somehow she did that without showing disrespect for him or making us feel judgmental toward his person.

Mom was a woman of prayer. She used to say, I must be the meanest woman in the world. If I don’t pray forty-five minutes to an hour a day, I am not fit to live with. She often went to her bedroom during the daytime, letting us know she was not to be bothered during her hour of prayer. It sometimes irritated me because I would want to ask her something and was not supposed to disturb her. By this time I was in junior high or high school, and my needs were not that pressing; she never did that while we were younger. She loved to sing old hymns around the house, and while her voice was not solo quality, there was pathos in it, a yearning for God that was palpable to my young mind. One of her favorites was In the Garden:

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;

and the voice I hear falling on my ear,

the Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me and He talks with me

and He tells me I am His own.

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

none other has ever known.

I’d stay in the garden with Him,

though the night around me be falling…

The tenderness and intimacy in her voice almost raised uneasiness in my mind as a young child. In my immature thinking I had a feeling like, Does my dad know about this relationship? I had the sense that she was really expressing her heart, not just practicing her singing or filling a quiet farmhouse with noise.

She also loved to read the Bible and did it faithfully, probably more in later years, but also when we were young. She believed The Book from cover to cover, never doubted a line of it. And she never wavered from that position until the day of her death. Her complete confidence in the Bible gave her a strong assurance of salvation, and she would take His Word over anybody’s word any day. In retrospect I can see how much she depended on the Word for strength when she had an unbelieving husband and how much comfort she got from it. A hymn she often sang was Precious Book:

There’s a dear and precious Book,

though it’s worn and faded now,

That recalls the happy days of long ago.

As I sat on mother’s knee with her hand upon my brow,

And it told at last of that bright home above.

Precious Book, Holy Book,

on thy dear old tearstained leaves I love to look.

Thou art sweeter day by day as I walk the narrow way.

And it leads at last to that bright home above.

Her strong confidence in the Word was what also gave her absolute hope toward the end of her life. She never wavered as to whether she would go to heaven when she died. More than once, she would assure me during her last days of terminal cancer, Oh, I know where I’m going, I know where I’m going… But I’m getting ahead of my story here in talking about her death.

Mom was also very discerning in matters of what I call the powers. She had good discernment in areas of recognizing the spirit world. Before Peter Wagner and others ever wrote about spiritual warfare, my mom was already practicing it. She had a very real concept of a real Devil and was aware of his devices. I often heard her say, You don’t fool me, ‘old boy,’ I know who you are. She was referring to Satan’s attempt to seduce her thought life. She admitted there was a time when he could have fooled her, but she had learned by experience to detect when he was trying to influence her, and she addressed him directly to cut him off.

Perhaps the most meaningful thing to me was my mom’s nonjudgmental spirit and tender treatment of people who did something wrong. We used to have testimonies on prayer-meeting night at church, and it could be a temptation for some people to boast a bit by name-dropping. I recall one deacon who liked to talk about such things as some big shots from DC that I met on my job this week… As a high school kid I saw this as hypocrisy and told her how disgusted I was. She knew the man was a full-fledged braggart, but she just said, Well, Arny, haven’t you ever said things in public and then gone home and wished you hadn’t said them? She gave him the benefit of the doubt. It was just her natural tendency to treat people like that, believing the best about them. She was especially tolerant of preachers, their conduct, and their preaching. A preacher would have to be a real scoundrel to draw a word of criticism from her.

She treated me the same way. When I was in the fifth grade, the Connor family with their two boys moved into a house across the gravel road from us. They had been living in the city and come back to the farm. In those days there was a huge difference between city kids and country kids. Bill and Jim were a couple of years older than Marvin and I, and they lost no time bringing us up to speed on the facts relating to the birds and the bees. We had been taught, even by our dad who did cuss, that it was not right for us boys to cuss and swear. But these guys were determined to enlarge our vocabularies to include all the words we’d been missing out on. And so after their badgering and cajoling for several weeks, I also started using those words when we were around them, so as not to feel left out. They were immensely pleased and showed how proud they were of my new courage to cuss. But it was not long before God just gripped my conscience, and I began to feel ugly inside. One night at dusk, talking with Mom outside the farmhouse, I could stand it no longer and confessed to her: Mom, I’ve been cussin’ a little bit. I didn’t know what she would say, but I knew I had to get it off my chest, as it seemed to be crushing me. She was surprisingly gentle and understanding. She even said it was not unusual for boys to say some of those words, but that I should be very careful not to use Jesus’ or God’s name in vain. She wasn’t exactly giving me permission to keep using the lesser cuss words, but she seemed to be taking it easy on me so I would not feel like dirt. It was kind of her, but it did not salve my burning conscience. I lay in bed that night unable to sleep, and finally around 10:30, from the upstairs bedroom I yelled, MOM! She came up and asked me why I couldn’t sleep. Was it because of the bad words I’d been using? I admitted it was. Then she said something that stuck in my mind forever. She said, God likes to forgive little boys when they have done wrong, so we need to ask for His forgiveness. I can’t remember if she or I or both of us prayed the prayer of confession, but I remember the wash of relief that came from feeling forgiven when it was over. It was probably my first real