While her children enjoyed living with and being taught by an Olympic gold medalist, Mrs. Smith discovered new challenges. With so many people under one roof, getting enough bread for their meals became nearly impossible.
“By the time I get to the bakery,” she told the adults in the house, “the bread is gone.”
Eric cleared his throat discreetly. “I’ll go,” he said. “I can get up early enough to be there by five o’clock each morning.”
And so he did.
Mrs. Smith also discovered that Eric knew his way around a broom. During the year that Eric lived with the Smiths, one of North China’s famous dust storms blew over Tientsin. Even with the doors and windows tightly shut, dust crept into the house and settled on the furniture, shelves, and tables.
Mrs. Smith sighed over the enormity of the task in front of her. “I’ll take care of it first thing tomorrow,” she told her husband the evening after the storm had passed. “Before everyone comes down for breakfast.”
But the next morning when Mrs. Smith crept down the stairs at six o’clock, she found Eric quietly finishing up with the cleaning. He’d risen at four thirty and, without waking a soul inside the house, cleaned the house thoroughly.
Many years later, Rev. Smith said of Eric,
For a year we had the privilege of his sharing our home. I never saw Eric angry. I never heard him say a cross or unkind word. He just “went about doing good,” and he did so unobtrusively, so self-effacingly, and so naturally that one just took it for granted that Eric was just like that, because day by day he kept an early morning tryst with his Lord. The pattern of his daily living was so little marred by faults because he offered up, quite simply, each smallest thing to Christ. He was Christ’s man.[81]
The buds of spring finally bloomed, bringing with them the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Remarkably, on Good Friday, an assembled choir performed at Union Church to a standing-room-only crowd. Two days later, the people returned for the Easter service.
Eric continued the work he’d found to do, his writing, and the long walks with Cullen. The two men talked openly about their wives and children, sometimes repeating the same stories they had told the day before because news from England and Canada came so rarely. By this point, Cullen had not seen his family for two years and at times wondered if he ever would again.
As Eric explored the theme of surrender to God, which impacted his humble approach to the rest of the world, he returned to his writing desk:
When surrender is being made, whether alone or with another person, the mind should not be focused only on our act, but also on God’s forgiveness. The Cross, and what has been done for us by God, is far greater than anything we are doing. We are saved by grace and by grace alone. Surrender means the end of the great rebellion of our wills. We capitulate; God can act.[82]
In August, as the time came to let the LMS know whether he intended to stay or go, Eric received an invitation to come to Canada after the war, where the offer to take up a rural pastorate awaited him. He wrote to Florence, asking for her thoughts, and saying that even though he knew the work would be difficult—and of course they must consider the children—he thought it sounded like the best thing for them to do. He also let her know how the writing of his “manual” was coming along.
About this same time, Florence received a letter from LMS Foreign Secretary Cocker-Brown asking if she thought Eric, once he was able, would go to Canada or the UK for repatriation. For a moment, Florence wondered if Eric might—indeed at that moment—be on his way back to Canada. But she guarded her heart against that hope.
In October, Eric again wrote to his wife, telling her of the books he’d been reading to better grasp and understand the mentality of war, books such as The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Journey’s End. But, he told her, he had also read a book on the life of George H. C. Macgregor, which he had chosen to keep his reading material balanced. This was a book, he told her, about “one of those men whose work is finished at 36, but who, by that time, are ready to join the Choir Invisible.”[83]
In a letter dated November 5, 1942, Eric wrote to Florence again, telling her more about the book he’d worked so diligently on, the one filled with daily Bible readings: “If it never comes to anything it will have been useful for my own thinking. And to me will always be a companion booklet to the Daily Prayers which I got out. It would be so easy to let this time go by with nothing done; nothing really constructive, and so have the days frittered away.”[84]
In Canada, the MacKenzie and Liddell families moved into a house at 21 Gloucester Street in Toronto. At night Florence and her girls sang songs, then ended their day with a prayer for all those they loved and who now served in the war.
Then, each night before lights-out, the girls whispered into the night air as their father began a new day in China. “And help Daddy to come home soon.”
As was true for everyone in China, little was certain for the LMS missionaries who lived there. No one was sure how long they would remain in reasonable living conditions. Word on the street had been that the foreigners would soon be moved to an internment camp. They were told by the Japanese not to be concerned, that they would have all the
