Little Bee-eaters huddling for warmth outside my tent in the early morning in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania, 1999.

August, 2004. West Kilimanjaro.

Under a month remaining for me as manager of Namuai Farm before I’d fly to New Zealand to begin a new chapter.

Leaving wasn’t easy.

God had made it clear since May that it was time to go, but clarity doesn’t make obedience painless. I was slowly coming to peace with leaving a place I’d dearly loved: a beautiful home, meaningful work, good staff under me, and the best boss I’d ever had.

In those last weeks I’d been talking to God a lot about all I was going to miss. There was plenty. I was excited about what lay ahead in New Zealand, but right then I felt kinda subdued and wistful. Grief and obedience were walking together.

One lunch hour, sitting on my sunset-facing farmhouse verandah, I told my Heavenly Father what He already knew: I hoped to return to East Africa, but only if He was involved in it, and that I wanted to be part of a closer-knit team working on a project I really believed in. But if this was my final farewell, then so be it. Flights were booked and my container was packed and about to ship out.

Right then I couldn’t see any further than helping my recently injured Dad run his farm until I’d start theological studies in Auckland early 2005.

As I sat looking out over the lawns, flowering gardens, and fruit trees, I noticed the arrival of some unusual birds.

Tanzania is full of birdlife, over 500 species, and after nearly nine years birdwatching had become one of my favourite pastimes.

But this was different.

A flock of at least sixty bee-eaters swooped in and all perched together in a tree at the northwest corner of the garden, maybe thirty metres away. I’d never seen a flock of this particular species of Bee-eater before. Not at Namuai, not anywhere else in East Africa.

These weren’t just any birds.

Bee-eaters were my favourite brand.

So rather than racing inside for my camera and tripod, I decided to simply enjoy them while I could in case they all took off after a few minutes. As I watched these lovely creatures noisily sorting out their perches, I wondered half aloud where they’d come from, why they were here, and whether they might stick around a while.

Then, with no-one else around, I heard this very clear whisper in my spirit:

“Andrew, they’ve come to wish you goodbye. Goodbye from Tanzania.”

“Wow. That’s such a cool farewell gift. Thanks, Lord.”

The rest of the lunch hour they flew constant little fighter-plane like missions, darting out in a straight line up to a 100m away to snatch insects on the wing. Flitting back to scoff their prize in front of their mates. Every now and then one would wing over to the radio tower guy-lines above me, giving me a nice close-up view.

They were chatty, occasionally grumpy with each other over prime perching rights, but mostly they seemed to be having a marvellous time hanging about in my yard.

I didn’t want to head back out to work in case they’d leave while I was away in the pickup.

But come 5pm they were still there. At dusk an hour later they suddenly flew off together in the opposite direction they’d come from.

I wondered if that was it.

But they came back to the same tree just after sunrise the next morning.

And the next.

And every single day of the remaining three weeks until I left them behind to wing away from Tanzania myself. My gardeners noticed them - saying they’d never seen birds like that anywhere on the farm, neither wider West Kilimanjaro.

Eighteen months later I was back in Tanzania for a short visit on my way home to NZ from Europe. I stopped in at Namuai to greet old friends and familiar faces, and while talking with gardener Lilian, the bee-eaters came to mind. I asked if they still turned up.

She said, “Manager, those many birds left the same day you did. They’ve never been back since.”

That settled it.

What I heard on the verandah wasn’t sentimentality. Me getting poetic because I was emotional about leaving. The Lord had done something very specific, very personal, and very kind.

Who but my loving Father God would send me a new sub-species of my number-one favourite bird? In numbers too large to ignore, a farewell gift lasting the remaining time I had in the country I loved, even though I knew He was calling me on.

That flock didn’t change my calling.

It did something better.

It reminded me that the God who leads us away from places we love is not cold about it. He knows what leaving costs us. He knows what gladdens our heart. And He is kind enough to leave traces of His tenderness right in the middle of our obedience.

No small thing then.

It still isn’t now.

Hamilton. October, 2003. About 9.45am on a sunny spring Friday.

I’m heading west along Boundary Road in Dad’s Hilux ute for Turners’ weekly cheap car auction in Te Rapa. Need to buy a cheap car for my four month stay before heading back to Tanzania.

Budget: $3,000.

Problem: everything decent, aka reliable, was too expensive, and everything cheap looked pretty dodgy.

Car yards were asking silly money. Online, TradeMe had nothing worth chasing atm. Turners looking thin too. About the only thing on offer was a tiny 1000cc Toyota Starlet. I didn’t fancy folding myself into that all summer long.

I’d spent the previous two days since my arrival asking God to provide me something suitable, so I was out for a scout rather than sitting around.

As I came up to the Heaphy Terrace roundabout, planning to head straight through, I said to myself,

“Oh well, guess I’m humble enough to drive a sewing machine Starlet if I must Lord.”

Then I heard the Holy Spirit whisper:

“Go see Terry. He has the perfect car for you.”

Straight away I said, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of him?”

Probably because I hadn’t heard of or thought about Terry for at least four years.

So instead of going straight on, I swung a right around the island onto Heaphy and headed for Grimmer Motors.

First stop: his small car sales yard.

Nothing there except a Legnum wagon the salesman wouldn’t let go for under $4,000. Too much, and too much risk with a fun but old turbo.

He tells me Terry sold the car sales business to him a couple years ago.

I went to hop back in the ute, thinking I’d better carry on to Turners real quick.

Then I recalled,

God hadn’t said, “Go check the yard.”

He’d said, “Go see Terry.”

So I boosted out, trotted into Grimmers workshop, and found him there.

I asked whether he knew of anything cheap but reliable for sale.

First he said no. Since selling the yard, he didn’t really keep up with that stuff anymore.

Then he paused. Thinking. . .

Actually, yes!

He’d sell me the Corolla his wife had been driving for the last three years. He needed some quick cash because a really mint Corolla from an elderly customer had just come up, and he wanted to nab it for Alison.

Her car had done quite a few k’s, but was tidy, reliable, and properly serviced.

Price?

$2,000.

I came back two hours later when Alison arrived for her shift at Grimmers till. It checked out beautifully.

Done deal.

By lunchtime, I was driving a grey 1993 Toyota Corolla 2L diesel sedan with 252,000 kilometres on the clock — mint inside, a bit faded outside, and exactly what I needed.

Worth $3500 retail at the time.

Got her for two :)

That Corolla turned out to be an absolute beauty. Over the next six years it clocked more than 100,000 kilometres with me and various family members driving it. Apart from the usual expenses of diesel, oil, filters, and tyres, it cost me nothing.

A couple of Alpha-type mates reckoned they wouldn’t feel much like a man driving a little slow boring grey diesel.

I didn’t care a hoot. Loved driving it.

Because my Father in Heaven picked it out for me Himself.

Proof, yet again, that God cares about ordinary things. He’s not above helping a bloke find a cheap, reliable car. He’s not too lofty to guide us in practical matters. And sometimes His guidance comes, not with fireworks but with a clear whisper at a junction. Turn, go that way . . .

The key moment wasn’t buying the Corolla.

It was the right turn of obedience beforehand.

The step of faith. Laughably small. But on the other side of it was a provision I could never have arranged for myself.

That’s often how it works.

God speaks.
We obey.
Later we realise how kind He was, not to mention His impeccable timing.

Abba Father provides.

The morning after the night before it’s eerily quiet. No 2IC stirring the farm troops towards their assignments, no house-girl greeting the gardner as they arrive to work.

Oh yeah, it’s New Years Day. Whoopee. I shambled into the kitchen to brew a cuppa thanking God for my gas stove.

Then, crawling out from the rubble of our once-upon-a-time romance, came the only honest thing I could say.

“Lord, I don’t understand what’s happening. I know something had to change in my marriage. If this marriage is done, I don’t know how to handle that.

Tried so hard for years but nothing worked. Never gave up hoping. Was hope a fantasy built on denial?

Whatever happens, I want to start hoping in You alone.

Swap my wisdom for Yours. Otherwise I’m dumb enough to repeat this crap with a different woman if I don’t change.

Don’t let me waste this pain.”

That day wasn’t a rock of remembrance I celebrate. But admitting the impact of arriving at ground zero was important.

My private powerlessness being revealed to the world.

The long slashed up guts of our marriage finally spilling into view despite my vain graspings.

No healing.

Not yet.

Just plain honesty.

The sort God can begin to work with.

When I gave up hoping in hope.

My wife had been away nearly a month. The plan had been two and a half weeks on a timber-sourcing trip, home in time for Christmas. The promise anyway.

Christmas came. Went.

No wife. No text or HF radio call. No way of finding out what was going on except leaving my work commitments to go search for her. Who knows where she might be except that it’ll be many hours of hard driving away. Of course that’s assuming she is actually even doing what she told me.

If I went off after her she’d probably turn up here to an empty house (that had happened another time, another place). I had only patchy contact with the outside world so I was left to wait, wonder, and try not to let my fears run amok.

On Boxing Day evening the generator blew up.

That horrible high-revving Yanmar made such a din you heard it a hundred metres away. It ran whenever we needed to weld or compress air in the workshop, plus every evening so my and the workers’ houses could have light.

I was sitting down for dinner on my sunsets-to-die-for verandah when the lights dimmed, flickered, and quit. Then dead quiet.

A watchman arrived with a pretty decent rendition of the last ugly clunking throes he’d heard from the generator bay. We went up and found the Yanmar seized solid. Totally cooked. Not outta diesel. A thrown conrod? Given her vintage not worth fixing.

Brilliant.

Trying to source and install a new generator in northern Tanzania was not exactly straightforward between Christmas and New Year. My boss was holidaying in New Zealand and the only replacement I could find was expensive enough to require his sign-off. The Aussie sparky selling it was way less sober than usual. Nothing was gonna happen until he dried out sometime after the New Year was in.

The irony was not lost on me.

I already felt powerless far too often in my nearly nine years long marriage.

Now I was powerless in my own house too. Sitting in the dark with no light to see by.

What I did know, with a sinking inevitability, was that if my wife turned up before the generator was sorted, she was gonna be filthy.

She was.

Late afternoon on New Year’s Eve I drove the four miles to the one hill on the farm where I could usually catch a whisper of a cell signal if I stood on top of the Land Cruiser holding high my Nokia. A text ting-tinged in: my wife had arrived in Arusha a couple days ago and had texted two hours ago to say she was heading my way.

By the time I skidded back down the hill, I could see a dust trail approaching quickly. It morphed into a red coupe turning up my long driveway nearly a kilometre ahead of me.

She was in the house when I arrived. Not pleased.

I barely got hello out before she launched in.

Why wasn’t I home with dinner cooked and waiting? She’d messaged me two hours ago! Why are the lights not working?

Told her the generator had naffed itself six days ago. I’d spent two days in Arusha organizing a new one but, you know Africa, nothing gonna move fast.

That didn’t help.

She refused staying home on New Year’s Eve without power. I refused her desire to party in Arusha all night. I didn’t say as much but I wasn’t driving two hours to spend the night in some dingy hooker-infested dance club. Mainly, I hadn’t seen her for ages and wanted a quiet evening together.

“I’m done with you. How much money have you got here? I want all of it.”

To wrap that ever so nicely she then announced she was leaving me for good this time.

Something in me flipped.

Not courage exactly.

More like exhausted surrender tripped a fuse. Fatigue phase overload.

Enough with the drama and flaming blaming. Finally comprehending that no matter what I fixed, supplied, arranged, earned, or endured, it would never be enough.

I walked to the office, took all the cash that wasn’t the companies out of the safe.

Enough to live on for many months.

Counted thirty Benjamins into her impatient hands.

Stunned mullet me was operating like an automaton so the symbolism of the amount didn’t compute until she’d gone.

Shoving the cash in her handbag, she grumbled that it was disgustingly little and restated that she was leaving for keeps.

Strode out the open door into the night.

I didn’t follow her.

Watched her taillights fade with distance, and stood there powerless on New Year’s Eve.

No wife.

White knuckle loneliness.

No power.

Blacked out darkness.

I am who my Creator says I am. My parents had good reasons for my given names - named after good men of times past. They didn't choose because of what they meant when run together.

Through the suffering my foolish choices eventually brought to me, and the journey into greater maturity that resulted, God revealed I am 'man loved by God' even 'man loved by God, son of a king' if you include my family name.

In 2005 I had finally been going to change my middle name (which I had long despised) for another admired since childhood. Thankfully, I decided to check out the meanings of both before heading to the deed office. It surprised me to find my middle name fit exactly with who God had been teaching me I was over the previous couple years. I instantly fell in love with my given names.

Amazing how God moves to bless us through others, in this case my parents who unknowingly prophesied my true core identity at my birth.

Accepting this as true and moving through life in this identity changes everything for me. O that I would remember to walk in this truth rather than my habit of being too easily persuaded by the world to adopt the false names they pronounce over me.

Some of us need to live in our already given name. Others of us, like Simon, renamed Peter by his Lord, might have a new name waiting for us to step into?

No guts, no glory. Let’s go!

I found Thomas Dickson while holidaying at the Outer Banks with my wife’s extended family.

Ten siblings + spouses. Nearly forty kids.

Chaos in the best sense.

That week I was spotting synergies, connecting dots, casting a bit of vision. Ways this unusually healthy, high-trust family culture might one day be developed into something even more fruitful, even financially so, if they wanted. Not pushing. Catalysing.

Which made what happened next feel uncomfortably ironic.

Because somewhere in the middle of that week, I casually searched Dickson and found the first one.

Thomas Dickson.

And he felt less like family trivia and more like a slap from God.

Until then, I knew almost nothing about my paternal family line. More than twenty years had passed since the net had suggested we came out of middle England up into Scotland maybe 700 years ago - probably due to religious persecution. Then over to Northern Ireland before my grandfather finally emigrated to New Zealand in the 1920s. That was about it.

Turns out the first ever Dickson was a Scot. And not some vague guy either.

A rather dangerous man.

As best I can tell, Thomas was the first actual Dickson — the surname itself apparently formed from being Richard “Dick” de Keith’s son.[1]

What really got me, though, was this:

Thomas Dickson was 57 when he was the key player retaking a castle from the English.

My exact age when I found him.

And he was dead by 60, killed fighting at a church door.[2]

That got this man’s attention.

Especially when this man had spent thirteen years feeling called to testify publicly to the faithful acts of God in his life, yet still managed not to write in public.

I’ve had plenty of adventure in my life. Fulfilled childhood dreams in foreign lands etc.

While adventure has been one of the results of my past obedience, it doesn’t automatically prove it.

And helping other people discover a greater vision while quietly dodging your own calling is not humility.

It’s hypocrisy with better manners.

Thomas Dickson exposed me to myself.

A decent morning’s work

In 1295 the English held Sanquhar Castle and were making life miserable for the surrounding country. Sir William Douglas wanted it back. Thomas Dickson helped him do it.[2]

The plan was simple and mad.

Dickson borrowed the clothing, horse, and wood cart of a local man who regularly supplied the castle with firewood. As dawn was breaking he rolled up to the gate, emerging out of the fog looking deceptively like the delivery bloke. The porter opened up. Dickson drove the cart into the gateway, then cut the horse loose so the cart jammed fast between the gates, stopped them from shutting. He killed the porter with his knife, grabbed an axe he’d hidden under the wood, signalled to the 30-strong ambush waiting nearby, then wailed into some more lethal work. Douglas and his men surged in behind him and they took the castle before the English soldiers were out of bed.[2][3]

One way to start a day.

Later, when the English came back in force and laid siege, Dickson slipped through enemy lines to warn William Wallace, who quickly came and broke the siege as he was campaigning only ten miles away. The English ran but lost ~500 men. For this, Thomas was given lands and later made hereditary Castellan of Douglas Castle.[2][3]

So no, the first Dickson was no timid background character in someone else’s story.

He was the sort of bloke trusted when things got gnarly.

And then he died properly

A few years later, with the struggle against the English still raging, Thomas was again in the thick of it when James Douglas moved to retake his lands. One of the old accounts places him at St Bride’s church on Palm Sunday, when the English garrison ventured out from the castle to attend service. A per-arranged cry of “Douglas! Douglas!” went up and Dickson launched himself at the enemy from his hiding place inside the church.[2][3]

Tradition says he was slashed across the belly but kept fighting, one hand holding in his guts while the other still swung his sword, until enough life oozed out from between his fingers that he finally dropped dead.[2][4]

Maybe the story was embellished a tad over the centuries.

Even so, the point stands.

Thomas Dickson died aged 60 fighting an occupying enemy.

I was 57 when I found that out. Still avoiding the assignment God had been nudging me about for years.

Not a comfortable comparison.

My gate

I’m not being asked to retake Sanquhar Castle.

I've been instructed to write.

To testify publicly to the faithfulness of God in my life despite foolish choices, fear of failure, and the many times I’ve disguised fear as accommodation.

A much smaller assignment than risking one’s health deceiving a gatekeeper at first light of dawn.

But it’s still a gate.

And for a man who has always preferred staying useful in the background rather than being visible out front, it still requires guts.

That is why this newsletter exists.

Not because I’m some heroic figure.

Quite the opposite. I have tales proving why God is my hero.

I’m sick of the gap between the courage I admire and the caution I habitually practise.

At the OBX, while I was happily suggesting other people think bigger, God shoved a dead 13th-century Dickson in my face. Exposing me still dodging my own assignment.

If the first Dickson could storm a castle at 57 and die fighting at 60, then I can at least stop skulking around not writing.

This newsletter is not a castle.

But it is my gate.

And by God’s grace, I’m going through it.

Notes

[1] “Dickson (surname),” Wikipedia. Accessed 20 November 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickson_(surname)

[2] “Thomas Dickson,” Douglas History. Accessed 20 November 2024.
https://www.douglashistory.co.uk/famgen/getperson.php?personID=I100200&tree=tree1

[3] “Borders Family History: Dickson,” Electric Scotland. Accessed 20 November 2024.
https://www.electricscotland.com/history/borders/riding3.htm

[4] “Clan Dickson,” Dickson Dixon International. Accessed 20 November 2024.
https://www.dicksondixoninternational.com/clan-dickson

[5] “Dickson Family History,” RootsWeb Freepages. Accessed 20 November 2024.
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~gator1/genealogy/dicksonhistory.html

[6] “Thomas Dickson of Symington, 1st Lord of Symington,” FamilySearch. Accessed 20 November 2024.
https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/G7KR-FM4/thomas-dickson-of-symington-1st-lord-of-symington-1247-1306