Weeping at the End

At EPW’s first-ever training in Darjeeling, an elderly pastor in his eighties stood to speak, and the room fell quiet.

He began with a memory from childhood. As a boy he carried tea in a plantation office, serving an English manager. The manager was a Christian, and he took time to tell the tea boy about Jesus. The boy believed. The manager kept going, preaching through the plantation villages, planting a small church. And when the day came to sail home to the UK, he turned to the young man, sixteen years old, and said, “You are now the pastor.”

That was the whole of his preparation. One sentence.

Decades followed. He served that church faithfully. He never attended Bible college. He never received formal theological training. And God used him anyway.

Then he paused, and his voice changed. “I have been weeping,” he said. “Weeping with joy because I have heard the Bible explained so clearly and helpfully.”

Then it broke.

“And I have also been weeping with sadness. I wish I had received this training at the beginning of my ministry, not at the end. It would have helped me so much.”

He looked out at the younger men in the room. “You must listen. You must learn.”

Sit with that. A faithful man, used by God for sixty years, weeping over four days he received too late. Not bitter. Grateful. But grieving. And the honest question isn’t whether God can use untrained men; He plainly does. The question is what we do about the ones who find out at the end what they needed at the beginning. There are rooms full of them, in every country where EPW works. Most will never get four days.