Matchmaker
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
As a relatively young minister still in his twenties, I began to see that part of the role of being a minister was to be the confidante of young people, many of them not much younger than myself, as they navigated the shoals of romance. Over the next dozen years or more in the Church of Christ I found frequently that I was involved with people in love. I never considered myself a romantic up until that time. My own love life had been very limited – after all, Beverley and I fell in love when we were thirteen. We had been going together ever since.
But with all these young people falling in and out of love, going through terrible heartaches of betrayal of first love, of lovers’ quarrels, and of personal tensions as their relationships built, I became quite accustomed to having the doorbell ring late at night announcing one of a couple come to pour out his or her heart in anguish about the other, or on some occasions to have both of them present going over the rocky shoals upon which their young romance was being shipwrecked.
I found a lot of time which could have been usefully spent doing other things was being spent on helping young couples in love. Sometimes it was the first romance and people were unsure of each other. Sometimes it was heartbreak following the first quarrel. Sometimes it was because of sexual tension that had been building up in those days when people did not have sexual relationships until after they were married. Sometimes it was because someone new had arrived on the scene and broken up several young people who were going steady at that time – like Rajah, the dark Sri Lankan, with flashing black eyes and pearly white teeth. Didn’t the girls swoon over him! About half a dozen girls broke off with their rather dull unromantic Australian boyfriends and made open play for Rajah. That in turn led to at least five of them being disappointed after he played the field for a while.
Frequently in youth fellowships and young adult fellowships, romance was something like a game of musical chairs where partners broke up and everybody moved round to the right.
And our church was just the church for weddings, being a beautiful church with a high white tower on top of a hill, with a grand drive up and around for the wedding cars. It was the most natural setting for a wonderful wedding and over a period of years I performed the wedding service for more than two thousand young people who came to me to be married. I was just developing as an old stickybeak and a wonderful romantic. Time and time again I would see people looking at each other for the first time with a different light in their eyes, and taking one or other to the side I would say “Is there anything going on between you two? You know I’ve got to be the first one to know? I won’t tell anybody about you at all – except the first five hundred people!”
That whole business of a pastor and his flock of people falling in and out of love was one of the most enduring and beautiful aspects of being a suburban minister.
And there were older couples too! We built our first retirement centre and moved in a whole lot of widows and a few widowers – it was rather like putting one poor rooster in a henhouse. Old Tom told me that he had more bowls of soup offered in the first week he had arrived, and more offers to darn socks than he had ever had in the rest of his life!
I admired Jack greatly. I guess he was in his early fifties when I first went to Cheltenham. He was a hard working officer with the Australian Customs Service, a dedicated Christian, a devoted church member and a very fine husband and father. At the time of the birth of their youngest son who was now just twenty one, something had gone wrong in the complications of birth and as a result his poor wife having delivered a son was struck with a terrible nervous problem which left her thin, debilitated and unable to nurse the baby and unable to have any strength in her body at all. She wasted away until she was only a matter of three or four stone and for the next twenty one years or so Jack faithfully nursed her at home, looked after the baby, cared for the children and did all the washing, ironing and cooking by himself.
Then came the time when his mother-in-law, known to everybody as Mrs. Em, became ill and he was constantly going to the other side of Melbourne in order to care for her, do her washing, cooking and housework. He made the sensible suggestion of bringing her to his home and there he nursed his wife and his mother-in-law for several years. Eventually his wife died and I felt sure his old mother-in-law would not last much longer than her daughter. One month later, to the day, Mrs. Em died and the two deaths in that family were another burden for poor old Jack. Yet with faithfulness and diligence and with tremendous humour Jack cared for the rest of his children until the youngest married. He was now living alone, looking after himself, washing, ironing and cleaning the house as he always had done.
Then he decided to take early retirement. He just wanted to help around the church. And help around the church he did. Whenever help was needed he would be there willing and able to do it.
At that time I was being invited to preach at missions in churches all over the nation – little one-week-long missions, and sometimes wider crusades around the State on behalf of the denomination. It sounds a good life, but frankly living out of a suitcase, travelling constantly around the country, preaching, teaching, speaking in schools, on radio, to local newspapers, elderly citizens clubs, womens’ activities, Rotary and Lions Clubs and the like, isn’t that easy. In fact, every one of those missions became a physical, tiring burden.
Then Jack offered to drive me to some of the nearer ones, or to travel with me and look after the baggage. Using an old American saying he said “I’ll be happy to travel with you even if all I do is sweep up the sawdust”. So Jack came with me on many a mission. He was always there in the prayer room or in the prayer tent, in prayer supporting everything we did – looking after my baggage, making sure the tickets were right, and generally just being good company at a time when I felt lonely or exhausted.
When I went to the United States of America and Mexico and did a lot of research on how churches grew, Jack also came with me. He was my constant companion, great encourager and dear, dear friend.
One of our widows at this time was hit by a bus. The bus took an unexpected turn around a corner, mounted the kerb and knocked our member, Gwen, over breaking both legs. Gwen was a widow. I visited her in the accident ward in hospital and realised it would be a long time before things were right with her. The immediate problem was to get some of her friends in to visit her. The hospital that specialised in the rehabilitation of people with broken legs was the other side of Melbourne and all of her friends were widows like herself and none of them drove cars.
Answer? Ask Jack to take the ladies to visit their friend. So each afternoon Jack took two or three widows in the car to visit their friend in hospital. Eventually, after waiting outside in the car, he came and sat with the ladies while they visited with their good friend. Then she came home, but once home she needed help to get groceries, fix meals, and have the laundry done. Who else but my dear friend Jack. One day he came to me and said simply “You asked me if I would go down and get a drum of kerosene to keep her kero heater going. When I brought the drum of kero back to her house I realised I had caught a case of love.” He was a most wonderful man and she was just made for him. They fell in love, had a beautiful courtship and then it was my privilege to conduct their wedding.
Years later, as they both became our dear friends and shared in every aspect of our life, he would take me to one side and thank me for getting him to take the ladies to visit their friend. He would say over and over again “A man is the luckiest person in the world to have a woman who really loves him, and in this life to have been really loved by two women is heavenly.” Jack remained a constant friend and companion until his death and his dear Gwen stays one of our closest friends still.
But I guess the role of matchmaker was most valued through a quiet service we had of introducing single adult young people to each other. My wife and I never set out to be matchmakers, but frequently when travelling in a car we would talk about some single person in our congregation, usually a female, and then say “You know who would be really well matched to her?” And then one of us would give the name of some other person we had met elsewhere. And frequently we had the joy of introducing those people. Usually, I would say to a person “Now it’s none of my business and if you want me to I won’t say another word about it, but if you would like to meet a nice Christian person, your own age, a person you could really learn to love, then it would be a privilege if I could introduce you to him”.
For example, I remember the time conducting a evangelistic mission down in Caveside in Tasmania, just near to Mole Creek. Neither of those places is very big or significant on the map but they both contain Churches of Christ and I have conducted evangelistic missions in both of them as I did with every other church in the denomination in that State and many other States on the mainland as well. I was staying out on a farm, a dairy farm, and there was this tall, lanky Morris – son of the elderly couple who owned the farm. The trouble was the elderly couple had several sons and they had gradually divided the dairy farm up into segments as each of the sons got married, which meant that the home paddocks became smaller and the number of cows that mum and dad used to milk became fewer.
While I was staying in their home dad said one day in front of Morris “This farm’s just got too small for us. We can hardly afford to live what with Morris having to get his living out of these cows as well as ourselves. And not only that, Morris does everything around the place and there’s nothing for me to do.” Looking at his son the rather insensitive father continued “What he really needs to do is get married, get off this place and go and start his own farm and let us get on with the business of looking after ourselves.” I felt sorry for Morris but the big lanky fellow just sat there with his head hung at the end of the big kitchen table, realising that he was really in the way because of his failure to be married and run his own farm.
As dusk fell after tea and it was time to go off to the church to commence the evening evangelistic mission, I asked Morris if instead of going up in the car he and I could walk through the cold night air and talk. On the way I asked him “Do you want to get married Morris?” He replied with frankness “There’s nothing I would like to do more but there are very few girls around here and the girls I meet from across the other parts of the State aren’t that interested in a dairy farmer. They’re more interested in school teachers. And I don’t move that fast. By the time I get round to asking anybody, and by the time I’ve plucked up enough courage even to sit beside a person, I find one of these city fellows has got there first and I’m always left behind.” I asked would he mind if I thought about the suitable girls I might know and if he would be willing for me to introduce him. He certainly was.
And so I left Caveside wondering what on earth I could do for Morris. He was a good living, clean, upright, hardworking Australian citizen – just a bit slow off the mark and constantly ran second to all these smart city fellows.
Some months later Jack and I were down in western Victoria at Port Fairy. There was a good church down there and we were having another fine evangelistic mission. Once more I was staying out with some farmers. They suggested I should go round and see a former church member who didn’t come over very much in those days because he was ill. He had Parkinson’s Disease and wasn’t able to get out of the house at all. Furthermore, his wife was a chronic sufferer from weariness. We didn’t have the term Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in those days but that’s what I guess she had. They had eighty cows and lived on a dairy farm, but he was unable to milk and she was too weary to do it – and the milking was being done by their twenty-six year old daughter, Heather.
I visited the family and had prayer with them, and encouraged the two sick parents. While we there the old man stammered out very slowly how uncertain he was about the future, wondering how long his daughter could keep up the pace of milking eighty cows by herself morning and night. In his very shaky voice he stammered that it wasn’t fair on her. She couldn’t get out and meet anybody and she was having no life of her own just looking after the pair of them. He really wished that she would just decide to go somewhere and then they would sell up and he and his wife would go into an old people’s nursing home where they could be nursed better.
I wandered down to the milking shed where Heather was busy rounding up the cows in her overalls and gumboots. She was rather embarrassed at having a minister come to talk with her, but I put her at ease and started talking about the difficulties she was encountering. Her hands were large and strong and very red from being plunged in hot water in which suction cups from the milking machine were kept before being placed on the udders of each cow. She worked as hard as any woman I have ever seen and I realised she did this morning and night and not only milked the eighty cows but then had to manhandle the big metal milk cans out to the front of the property and up on to the wooden landing stage where the milk company truck would pick them up. And then after most people were home and going to bed she would be hosing out the milking shed and washing in steaming water all the cooling and cream separation equipment in the dairy. It was only when everything was done and the lights turned off that she would walk home late in the night – a fine single woman with a job that was being done expertly but which was stopping all hope of her having a life where she would meet someone of her own age.
After I had been in the mission a day or two I called back on Heather and asked her the same question “Would you mind if I introduced you to someone your own age? Perhaps you might like to come up to Cheltenham for the weekend and I could introduce you to a friend of mine?” She instantly demurred, saying that there would be no-one around to do the cows. I indicated that I would ask the various members of the church and I was quite sure that a weekend could be covered by a roster of willing people from the rest of the church who were dairy farmers themselves and wouldn’t mind pitching in to do a bit of extra work if it meant that Heather could get down the city for a weekend off. And that’s exactly what happened.
I invited Morris over from Tasmania and I invited Heather up from Port Fairy and said to them when they came together and I introduced them on the Friday night “From now on this has nothing to do with me. Go out, go to the pictures or a show, have a meal together, and if nothing else happens you will have had a good weekend together in nice company. And if something does happen that will be magic and it will be a bonus, but from now on it’s over to you.”
They saw each other constantly all that weekend. They had neither the clothes nor the sophistication to take on any fancy place for dinner, but they went out for dinner on Friday night, Saturday night, and went to a show and the pictures, and down to Luna Park, and went to several long walks along St. Kilda Beach. And then they left, each to go in their different directions.
But the mailman began to get busy as letters flew across Bass Strait. And then the letters came to me as they started to tell me about their plans. They were in love and hoped to become engaged. Would I share in their wedding?
Of course, we were delighted and went down to Port Fairy to share in the wedding in the country church. Morris came over and they moved into the home with mum and dad and continued on that farm where they are to this day. The old parents died and Morris and Heather carried on the dairy farm business. Today they have three children and are active in the local church and the local community. Indeed I doubt if the local church and community could today get on without them.
That night in my study I spent some time writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES