We visited an old couple yesterday who we had met at Church, Mike and Margaret Gardiner. The 1st Sunday after we had arrived was Father's Day and Mike had led the service with great vigour and enthusiasm. He is 84 years young and he and Margaret have been in the Canadian Arctic for 60 years. Margaret's physical health is not great, she uses a wheel-chair, and her memory isn't what it once was.
As a boy at school at the age of 12 he had heard a presentation about missionaries and felt he might do that. But he said to God that he didn't like heat so could he go somewhere cold! He went to University and then trained for ministry and was sent directly to the Arctic without firstly being an assistant anywhere. The bishop said that serving firstly in the UK would distort his thinking and that he needed to get directly into the field. He had met Margaret during his training but they weren't allowed to marry until they had come here to ensure she wanted to stay so at the age of 24, in 1955, he was ordained and sent to Kimmurit, a trading post 75 miles south of where we are staying, a journey by sea from England to Canada and then 3 planes and a boat. Margaret travelled to another community Pang some 120 miles north of us where she worked as a cook in the hospital for the one year.
He arrived in Kimmurit and despite having no knowledge of the local language, Inuktitut, apart from a rudimentary idea of the syllabic alphabet, on the 1st Sunday he had to lead a service and preach in Inuktitut. They had no language school, no Wycliffe bible translators support, no phones, no computers. Yet they accomplished it by sheer hard work, the same strength of character they saw in the local Inuit people.
Mike and Margaret were married a year later on a ship in the harbour we look out on from our window as there was no church here in Iqaluit at that time.
Kimmurit was a trading station so a small number of Inuit lived there to hunt for the whites who lived there but mostly the Inuit came in from their hunting camps only to sell pelts. Mike travelled out to their camps by Dog Sled to care for their spiritual needs and had Sunday services for those who resided locally.
They subsequently served in other communities in Cape Dorset, Pang and finally here in Iqaluit for 11 years before retirement. Their 3 daughters all live in the Arctic. One of their daughters and her family live in the High Arctic in Grise Fiord, one of the coldest inhabited civilian communities in the world, with an average temperature of -16.5C and a recorded lowest temperate of -62.2C.
Mike and Margaret are such gentle, humble people. It is hard to fathom how and why they did what they did. He is from Runnymede in Surrey and Margaret is from Birmingham. Yet they travelled and lived in the wilderness for the sake of communicating God's love and care to the people here.
When I get up to speak and see them sitting in the congregation I think what can I say that they don't know better. It makes it clearer that we have a model of learning, even in church, which is about imparting information. Real learning, however, comes from lived experience. They shared what they had experienced of the love of God. They recognised that they were recipients of God's grace and they wanted others to know that same grace for themselves. Even today that is what they communicate in their hospitality and demeanour, even in the very tone with which they speak.
I feel my inadequacy here and yet I am trying to share something of my lived experience of following Jesus and of being known by God. I am searching for what I have truly learnt, not just in my head but in my heart, and I am trusting that people will sense God's grace to them and love for them.
Blessings,
Mike
