Christmas 2022
My dear friends
I have been overwhelmed by your love shown through your inundation of cards, letters, emails, videos, visits, and phone calls in celebration of my 100th birthday in November.
Thank you so much for the generosity of love that you have poured out for me. It has been a wonderful season of celebration and I have had a few parties to mark the occasion. Really though, my deep desire for this centennial celebration is not really to celebrate me but to use the event to launch, with our mutual cooperation, a new reformation of evangelical Christendom.
I give God the credit for sparing me to live this length of time, but I ask that He spare me another year or two to have the joy of seeing a radical revival in our hearts. We need to reshape our thinking with the therapeutic orientation of the Early Fathers.
Our Christian maturity is all about the healing of our negative emotions that have grown since childhood. We need to establish a global “Friends of the Early Fathers” to generate a “Reformation of Evangelical Christendom”. Starting in the new year I will be writing about the teaching of the Early Fathers on the Old Testament.
May this new heart movement be to the glory of God our Saviour
Again, I warmly thank you,
Jim
From the family:
We too wish to thank you all for journeying with us this last year, and for celebrating Dad so expansively.
He has received over 85 videos, 400 emails, and a plethora of cards and is desiring to respond to each one. He continues to see you as individual hearts – dear friends of his – and wants to connect with each of you. We had a wonderful family gathering and Dad was in top form. He delighted in not only being celebrated but also being able to announce to the family the engagement of a grandson. At one celebratory occasion, Hans Boersma spoke about the secret of Dad’s 100 years (this will be featured in an upcoming Crux edition). God’s gift and Dad’s attitude of gratitude are crucial, but you also have contributed to bringing him life.
The year of letters and your interaction with him has been an enormous encouragement for Dad. We see him pushing harder and stretching his mind more and more. He is devouring books and challenging all of us with his building up of yet another library, and his enthusiasm as he bursts with new ideas. So, thank you. Dad has already started writing for his new series which will launch at the beginning of the new year.
With grateful hearts,
Chris, Lydele, Claire, and Penny
Photos courtesy of Yaletown Photography
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