[Faith-talk] Unsung Heroes, "The Hidden Calling." (Churchill's Nanny)

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 12:23:37 -0500

Happy Sunday To All of You!

I forget sometimes just how much one person CAN have a positive influence 
on the world, and how much each of us can influence others, often without 
even realizing it.  Here is a great reminder that I wanted to share.  It 
reminds me that walking the walk makes the difference, not talking the talk.

I hope each of you  is having a blessed Holiday season.  God bless you, & 
your efforts in Him!

Merry Christmas,
Everett

Worldscope - Unsung Heroes

The Hidden Calling
By Stephen Mansfield

http://www.churchlink.com.au/churchlink/worldscope/heroes/index.html

Her name was Elizabeth Anne Everest. Few today remember her. In fact, few 
would have known of her even during her lifetime, which ended in near 
obscurity in 1895. She was, after all, only a nanny--one of thousands in 
Victorian England--who quietly spent their days caring for the children of 
other people. Strolling in a park with her baby's carriage, or braving the 
London streets with a little boy clinging rightly to her side, there would 
have been nothing to distinguish her to passersby, but she may well have 
had an impact on the life of every person born in the western world since.

But Elizabeth Anne Everest was not just another nanny. She was a Christian, 
of the most passionate and fearless kind. For her, being a nanny was not 
just a job; it was a ministry. She lived her faith boldly before the 
families that hired her and worked hard to build godliness and biblical 
truth into the young lives in her care. It was as she thus served the Lord 
in the hiddenness of her calling, that she came to have such an impact on 
the course of modern history. For on a blustery English day in February of 
1875, Elizabeth Everest came to be the nanny, and soon the primary 
influence, in the life of one rosy-cheeked baby boy by the name of Winston 
Leonard Spencer Churchill, future Prime Minister of England, and leader of 
the western world during some of its most trying times.

There was little hint in his early years, however, of the greatness that 
young Winston would one day command. Mrs. Everest soon understood the 
immensity of her task. In time, the boy's mother would warn visitors, with 
typical British understatement, that he was "a difficult child to manage." 
She was right. He kicked, he screamed, he hid, and he bullied. The word 
"monster" was often used of him. The trouble was that he was bright, too. 
Knowing of Mrs. Everest's Christian faith, young Winston once tried to 
escape a mathematics lesson by threatening to "bow down and worship graven 
images." It worked, too for a while. But Elizabeth Everest was an 
exceptional woman. She knew how to enforce the boundaries she set, and from 
the beginning Winston held a grudging respect for this woman who seemed to 
know the secret - that his irritating behavior only served to hide a 
desperate longing of his heart.

This was the truth she tenderly guarded, for she knew that her Lord had not 
entrusted young Winston to her solely for the discipline she would enforce, 
but more for the vacuum she would fill in the life of this lonely little 
boy. Few knew how painful his loneliness really was. It would be nice 
indeed to report that the Churchills shared a warmly intimate home life, 
and that Winston was smothered with parental affection, but nothing could 
be further from the truth.

Quite to the neglect of their son, Randolph and Jennie Churchill gave 
themselves completely to their social ambitions. True, Victorian parents 
maintained an astonishing distance from their children, receiving them only 
at prearranged times, and under the watchful eye of servants. Even so, the 
Churchills were remote even by these standards. Of his mother, Winston 
later wrote,"I loved her, but at a distance." His father thought Winston 
was retarded, rarely talked to him, and regularly vented his mounting rage 
on the child. More than one historian has concluded that Lord Randolph 
simply loathed his son.

Thus it was that Elizabeth Everest - who Winston came to call "Woom" - 
became not only his nanny, but his dearest companion. He came to share with 
her an understanding and tender loyalty of the secrets of his widening 
world. She was, after all, the stereotypical British nanny; plump, simple, 
cheery, ever optimistic, always compassionate. The boy grew to love her 
completely. Of their special relationship, Violet Asquith later wrote, in 
Winston's "solitary childhood and unhappy school days, Mrs. Everest was his 
comforter, his strength and stay, his one source of unfailing human 
understanding. She was the fireside at which he dried his tears and warmed 
his heart. She was the night light by his bed. She was security."

She was also his shepherd. It was with her, in the safety of their shared 
devotion, that Winston first experienced genuine Christianity. On bended 
knee beside this gentle woman of God he first learned that surging of the 
heart called prayer. From her lips he first heard the Scriptures read with 
loving devotion and was so moved he eagerly memorized his favorite 
passages. On long walks together they sang the great hymns of the Church, 
spoke breathlessly of the heroes of the faith, and imagined aloud what 
Jesus might look like, or how heaven would be. As they sat together on a 
park bench or on a blanket of cool, green grass, Winston was often 
transfixed while Woom explained the world to him in simple, but distinctly 
Christian, terms. And it is not hard to imagine that when their day was 
done many an evening found this devoted intercessor praying the prayers of 
destiny over her sleeping charge, asking her Heavenly Father to fulfill the 
calling she sensed so powerfully on his life.

It would seem her prayers were answered, for though in early adulthood 
Churchill immersed himself in the antiChristian rationalism that swept his 
age, he eventually recovered his faith during an escape from a South 
African prison. So deeply had he received the imprint of Mrs. Everest's 
dynamic faith that in this time of crisis, the prayers he had learned at 
her knee returned almost involuntarily to his lips, as did the Scripture 
passages he had memorized to the familiar lilt of her voice. From that time 
forward, his faith defined him, as it did his sense of mission. He came to 
see himself in much the same terms as those he once used to dedicate his 
grandson. Holding the child aloft he tearfully proclaimed him "Christ's new 
faithful soldier and servant."

So when the tests of life had prepared him and his day of destiny arrived, 
Winston Churchill was ready to lead the world with a clear trumpet call of 
the solid faith he first learned from his godly nanny. In an age of 
mounting skepticism, Churchill proclaimed the cause of "Christian 
civilization." It was threatened from without, he believed, by "barbarous 
paganism"--like Nazism-which spurned "Christian ethics" and derived its 
"strength and perverted pleasure from persecution." Therefore, every 
Christian had a "duty to preserve the structure of humane, enlightened, 
Christian society." This was critical, for "once the downward steps are 
taken, once one's moral intellectual feet slipped upon the slope of 
plausible indulgence, there would be found no halting-place short of a 
general Paganism and Hedonism."

While other leaders of his age vacillated and sought the compromises of 
cowards, Churchill defined the challenges of his civilization in the stark 
Christian terms that moved men to greatness. Yet behind the arsenal of his 
words, behind the artillery of his vision, was the simple teaching of a 
devoted nanny who served her God by investing in the destiny of a troubled boy.

So it was that when the man some called the "Greatest Man of the Age," lay 
dying in 1965 at the age of ninety, there was but one picture that stood at 
his bedside. It was the picture of his beloved nanny, gone to be with her 
Lord some seventy years before. She had understood him, she had prayed him 
to his best, and she had fueled the faith that fed the destiny of nations 
... in the hiddenness of her calling.