Brother Hazen lives in Washington State, USA
Posted 5/24/08
In 1959, the year I left our Spokane home for college, my parents along with my brother and sister, moved from Spokane to Lahore, West Pakistan. My father was a civil engineer and quite provincial but the various lures of this expatriate assignment induced him to make the huge geographic and cultural leap to become chief planning engineer, responsible for the entire Indus River Basin, on a consulting basis for the Government of Pakistan. He loved both his work and life there, and my mother did even more. Unlike my father she had dreamed since childhood of life in the “exotic East” and read everything available on the subject, so when Dad got his chance she was ecstatic and lived the Asia life to the fullest 1959-72 when they retired to Bellevue. In 1966 they moved to Bangkok, Thailand where they enjoyed life and work even more than in Pakistan, and through their letters infected me with the “SE Asia expatriate bug”. So after college (BA, Econ), Army (two years, draftee), graduate school (MBA) and marriage to my precious Judy (at that time widowed, Christian husband, Army helicopter pilot killed in Vietnam) and her two children who I formally adopted as my own, in 1969 I took a job with Chase Manhattan Bank of New York not because I particularly desired to become a banker but solely because they promised to assign me/us to Bangkok where my parents were.
After three marvelous years there we moved to Seattle which I considered “home” and where my folks planned to retire. There I joined Seattle-First National Bank’s international department and traveled SE Asia doing international banking business for them. In 1975 they moved us to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to live and from where I was to continue my work for the bank from a more “on site” location. 1975-77 we thoroughly enjoyed life and work in KL and throughout SE Asia. Meantime our third child had been born in Bangkok and our fourth between Bangkok and KL assignments while in Seattle. In 1977 we returned from KL to Seattle for what I planned would be two years at head office after which we’d return to expatriate life in SE Asia for the rest of our career and lives. The Lord had other plans.
We were church goers but I was dead in trespasses and sins. In about 1982 I met a missionary headed from Seattle to China, the Holy Spirit gave him discernment of my spiritual condition, he preached to me the Gospel, I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as God gave me life from the dead, seated me in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus, placed me in Christ and He in me, opened my being to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, chose me, adopted me, as the result of Christ having bought me with His blood, all by the grace of God, His doing, none of mine, all while I was yet a sinner. Amazing grace.
Since then it pleased God for us to not return to our beloved SE Asian lands and their wonderful and varied peoples. Our connection with those precious folks for thirty years had been through missionaries only. Last summer’s chance to return, paid for by our son, was a gift from the Lord our enjoyment of which is impossible to overstate. There is so much more I could say, and I never tire of telling the tales, but hopefully, and only if you truly desire it, we could continue whenever we get the chance to meet. Meantime I’d be glad to field questions.