A stark story about inner struggle between morality and grace:
Philip Yancey’s father died of polio a month after his first birthday, and so he grew up fatherless. Out of kindness, one man in their church took Philip and his brother under his wing. Big Harold, they called him. He sat patiently in playgrounds as they spun on the merry-go-round. When they grew older, he taught them to play chess and helped them build a soap-box racer. They had no idea that a lot of people in the church thought him strange.
Eventually Big Harold left their church. It was too liberal, he decided. Some of the women there wore lipstick and makeup. He was obsessed about morality and politics. The United States, he believed, would soon fall under the judgment of God because of its permissiveness. He quoted Communist leaders who talked about the West rotting from the inside out, like an overripe fruit. Harold believed in conspiracies and gave Yancey literature from the John Birch society.
Big Harold hated black people. He often talked about how dumb and lazy they were, and told stories about good-for-nothing blacks who worked around him. He saw integration of the races as a Communist plot. The final straw came when Atlanta ordered busing of schoolkids. Harold decided to move – to another country. Yancey thought he was kidding, but Big Harold got literature on places like Rhodesia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. He wanted a white-dominated country, but also a moral one. In his eyes, that ruled out Australia, because they had topless beaches and drank a lot of beer.
One day, Big Harold announced he was moving to South Africa. Back then, no one could imagine the whites losing power there. No matter how much the world condemned them, they stood their ground. Big Harold liked that. It was also a very religious country, and outlawed abortion, interracial marriage and Playboy magazine. Yancey and his brother gave a tearful farewell as Big Harold, his wife and two small children got on the airplane. They had no jobs, no friends, not even a place to live in South Africa, but they knew as white people they would be welcomed with open arms.
Big Harold was faithful in writing letters. He became a preacher in a small church and used the back of his sermon notes for the paper. He used so many Bible verses that often they couldn’t tell which side was which. Big Harold railed against Communism and false religions, against the immorality of today’s young people, against churches and people who did not agree with him in every detail. He wrote that South Africa had no feminism or gay rights. The government should be an agent of God, he wrote, and stand up for what is right against the forces of darkness.
Even when he wrote about his family he had a cranky, judgmental tone. His children never seemed to please him. In the 1990’s, when it became conceivable that whites and blacks would share power in South Africa, his letters darkened more.
With some misgivings, Philip Yancey decided to visit Big Harold in 1993. In 25 years he had only gotten judgment and disapproval from Harold, especially for the books Yancey had written. One was titled, “Disappointment With God.” Harold wrote back a three page letter condemning it. He never read the book – the title was horrible enough.
Thus began the most bizarre day in Philip Yancey’s life. As he got off the plane he was met by Harold’s wife and son. The son let it drop that he met his fiancé at a methadone clinic for recovering drug addicts. Some facts had never made it into Big Harold’s letters.
When they got to the house, one obvious question was on their minds. Where was Harold? “Oh, we were going to tell you but didn’t have a chance. You see, Dad’s in jail. He was hoping to be out by now, but his release got delayed.” Inside the house he eventually got the whole story. Harold had preached fire and brimstone on Sunday and railed against the decline of morals to everyone who would listen. But at the same time, out of the small house Yancey was now sitting in, he had been running a pornography ring. He brought in illegal foreign publications, clipped out photos, and sent them to famous women in South Africa with suggestive notes. One of them called the police, who traced the typewriter back to Harold.
A SWAT team had surrounded the house. They searched and found his private stash of pornography. They hauled him off to jail, handcuffed. Television news trucks parked outside and a helicopter hovered over the scene. The story hit the evening news: “Preacher arrested on morals charge.”
Yancey got to see Big Harold later that day. He seemed ghostlike, with a look of overwhelming sadness. He had nowhere to hide. He admitted he was afraid because he heard what happened to sex offenders in prison. They talked for a few hours, mostly about friends back in the States, then hugged each other and walked away. Philip Yancey knew they probably would never see each other again.
The Yanceys returned to America in shock. The next few letters from Harold had a humbler tone. When he got out, though, he began to harden again. Harold bullied his way back into his church and started sending out more pronouncements on the woeful morals of the world. There is not the slightest sign of humility in his letters.
Saddest of all, Yancey has never detected any sign of grace. Big Harold was well-schooled in morality. For him, the world was divided neatly into the pure and the impure. And he kept drawing the circle tighter and tighter until finally he could trust no one but himself. Then he could not trust himself.