On Wings Like Eagles
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
One of the few lads that were in that small country church at Ararat when I arrived was thirteen year old Ken Selwood. Ken was a big boy, over large for his age, noisy with cheeky grin and infectious laugh, rebellious and already the concern of his parents.
His father asked if I could take him in hand and make sure he joined the new boys club that I had announced on my first Sunday. I asked Ken to join the boys “Explorers” that I was commencing and regretted it almost immediately.
Ken was coming to Boys Club not to join in and become a constructive member, he was there either to take over and run the club or, if he could not take it over, to ruin it. He disobeyed orders, yelled out at the wrong time, grabbed balls from smaller boys when we were playing competition games and generally did everything he could to mess up the proceedings.
I very quickly exhausted my patience. It would have been so easy to through him out as a trouble maker. I just felt exactly like his teachers did at school. This boy was there to cause trouble, and for the sake of the rest of the students he would have to go. He was causing difficulty in the community as well. His Dad had been forced to take him from school before he had completed his education, and there were some very wary people around town as he would drive his father’s green Holden utility at breakneck speed around the streets.
Mr. and Mrs. Selwood lived on a poultry farm where they not only reared their children, but reared thousands of day old chickens. Most of the chickens were sent off by rail on the early morning train from Adelaide to destinations at poultry farms closer to Melbourne. However, quite a few thousand chickens were kept to replace the laying stock and a few hundred each week were killed and plucked down in the plucking shed and sold to the Tarara Cafe, the other restaurants around town, and our major hotels.
Ken was supposed to work on the poultry farm alongside his father, but if there was any work to be done Ken was generally missing. I recognised the problems that they were having with this second son of theirs and instead of just dismissing him from our Boys Club I set out on a programme to win his allegiance and to help him become a constructive leader. I had always worked on the basis that the troublesome, rebellious, noisy and wild ones were, when properly directed, the best leaders of all.
So it was I started inviting him round to our home on the excuse that I wanted Ken to teach me how to play table tennis. I knew how to play table tennis of course, but that was the means by which I could get close to the young fellow. I asked him to become my special helper in the boys “Explorer” club and asked him to come early in order to set out the equipment and help me get things ready for the younger boys when they arrived. I then asked him to attend a couple of junior boys camps as an assistant leader and the remarkable thing was, that the more responsibility we gave to Ken the more he responded positively and co-operatively.
His was a very adventurous mind and he had made a name for himself in the community for a number of daring exploits, one of which concerned his determination to fly.
Like many of the young men around town Ken was fascinated by the Australia wedge tailed eagles that used to fly in circles around Mount Ararat, not far from his poultry farm. Like most of the other boys in town he owned a .22 rifle and had frequently fired at eagles hoping to bring home a trophy. But the eagles always flew beyond the range of their .22s.
Ken wanted to fly like an eagle. He had made model aeroplanes and knew how a wing had to be shaped with a rounded leading edge tapering away to a thinner trailing edge. He understood some of the principles of the shape of a wing but had worked it out that the reasons why people could not fly with the such wings is that they did not have the lifting power of feathers. So he devised a pair of large wings, shaped like those of an eagle, from light wooden slats covered with paper. The paper had been wet and had shrunk taut and then over the two large wings he had stuck with paste thousands of chook feathers which he had taken from the plucking shed. He joined the two large wings with a long piece of piano hinging. His idea was that by manipulating the wings the feathers would give buoyancy and the aerodynamic shape of the wings would provide him with lift.
He must have spent hours sticking down the feathers but the day came when he attached the straps on the underneath sides of the wings to his arms and ran along the length of one of the chicken sheds and took off to fly downhill to land on the roof of the plucking shed.
From what I was told the scene was quite incredible. With his mother walking out the back door just in time to catch him running along the chicken shed roof emitting a scream for him to stop, Ken launched himself into space with his arms outstretched waiting for the air to start to lift him. However his arms were no match for the weight of his body against the pressure of the wings. The wings wanted to hold him up, but his arms were not strong enough, and bending at the piano hinge where he had designed them to bend, the two wings went straight above his head and he plummeted down like a stone to land on the top of a pile of chook manure that had been raked out of the shed. His flying days were temporarily abandoned.
Ken had left school early and worked with his Dad rising very early in the morning, but no amount of hard work around the chook sheds seemed to burn off the excess energy that he had whenever he came to our home after work at night.
He had no interest at all in education and therefore I was quite surprised when he showed amazement at the size of my library and asked if he could look at some of my books. I showed him some of the books and very quickly discovered how interested he was in Australian animals and birds. One large book I had of Australian animals and birds he really loved. He read about the Australian wedge tailed eagle, and after reading that long article told me he would never again try to shoot an eagle.
I gradually introduced him into other books and gradually a world beyond Ararat opened up to him. One book was “A Hundred Great Australian Lives” and he was amazed to see how many country boys became significant Australian sportsmen, business men and community leaders.
I gave him a copy of J.B. Phillips’ translation of the New Testament and he was absolutely amazed to find how easy it was to read the Bible. Books by C.S. Lewis and Leslie Weatherhead followed afterwards and he learnt more about the life and person of Jesus Christ.
In fact Ken became my largest borrower of books, just inviting himself into our house whenever he was in the area and going up to my library to take home another armful of books that he might read. So it was that Ken Selwood committed his life to Jesus Christ and I baptised him in the Ararat Church of Christ. At his baptism I chose a special passage of Scripture from Isaiah 40, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary and young men shall fall exhausted; but those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagle, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
That passage of Scripture read at his baptism became his favourite verse.
Ken helped in the young peoples work and by the time the next two years had rolled by and we left Ararat he was a Sunday School teacher, boys club leader, youth leader and although still only a young teenager was acting most responsibly. He then came to visit us at the Cheltenham Church of Christ where we had moved. We looked forward to his visits as he would talk over what he was reading and what he was thinking. A couple of years later he sat down in my study and asked me seriously “I think God is calling me to be a minister. What should I do to prepare myself?”
I spoke to him about God’s call and said, “You should only enter the ministry of Jesus Christ if you cannot possibly do something else.” He thought about this for a moment and then replied, “Do you mean if I could be a teacher, then I should be a teacher. Of if I could work in a bank, I should work in a bank. But I should only enter the ministry if I had such a strong compulsion within me that I had no other possible alternative?” I replied that is exactly what I meant. A call into ministry is a tough and hard one and a man had better sort out that he had no other option right at the beginning.
He went home with more books, this time about the ministry and its calling. I was proud of his growth of mind and the leadership that he was giving.
However, Ken had a number of hurdles to overcome. He first had to gain his HSC and he had been away from school now for years. Then he had to gain entrance to The Federal College of The Bible of Churches of Christ, but he passed the HSC and he gained entrance to the College and it was proud day that I stood at the opening of the College and looked at all the new students as they were introduced and there was Ken Selwood, the first young man to have entered the ministry under my leadership.
I felt just as proud as any mother would in giving birth to her first son. I just felt the Lord had something special in mind for Ken Selwood.
He made a good first year student. He developed his capacity to preach and speak and I heard him once in a youth rally and was really thrilled by the excellence of his presentation. He struggled hard with learning New Testament Greek and with some of the other subjects that he had to undertake but his first year was completed with flying colours and I knew that a very fine young minister was in the making.
His second year started full of promise. He was appointed to a country church as a student minister and each week he would ride his motor bike 200 miles into the country to complete his assignment of visiting the people, of teaching the Sunday School, looking after the young people and preaching in the morning and evening services. Ken was on his way to becoming an outstanding young minister. He had every capacity to care for people and ability to proclaim the Gospel clearly.
And then one night the ‘phone call came. On his way to his student church, his motor bike had skidded in the rain, had hit a tree and Ken Selwood was instantly killed.
His parents asked me to return to the Ararat Church of Christ to conduct his funeral. Never had I travelled to Ararat with such a heavy heart. I thought of all of his exploits from the time I first met him as a rebellious young teenager who had dropped out of school and was just full of mischief, to the time I had watched him being introduced as a first year theological college student and a minister in the making.
I spoke about Ken’s life at the funeral and then, although most of the other people would not have understood the reason, I finished with the words, “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Ken Selwood now flies with wings like eagles.
Meanwhile the books that he read are still on my shelves. Other young men have come into my study and have taken down books and read them and found God’s call to the ministry through friendship and through the witness of great thinkers and writers of the ages. More than forty-five young men have followed in the footsteps of Ken Selwood and entered into theological colleges to train for the ministry. But there is always a special place for that first young man, who once tried to fly like an eagle with chicken wings and who caused us so much trouble. Yet whom God called to be faithful, and in his example many other young people were helped and blessed.
Yet Ken never knew how close he came to being thrown out of the Boys Club because of his boisterous and noisy behaviour. He had set himself to either run it or ruin it. We decided to give him some help so that he might become one who ran it.
That was a significant decision that I had made one night after a very rowdy Boys Club meeting as I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES