Bombs, Ruins and Honey

(Artwork: © Paulines
Publications Africa)

Robin Anker-Petersen reviews a book by Andrew Wheeler of a life full of varied experiences and “lived as an active witness to ‘the life of God’”.

I was deeply moved by this book.  Not only does it give wonderful insights into living and working cross-culturally, but it also gives insights into the development and growth of the heart and soul of the writer and his family.  I had the sense of being on a journey with a friend among friends.

Andy writes with sensitivity, feeling and wisdom about life as a long-term mission partner.

He not only falls in love with his host country, as perhaps most mission partners do, but he goes further and lives a life of love and suffering with the people whom he has chosen and been called to serve.

“You have come to share the praise and the blame” was a sentence that Andy remembered from a meeting with the Episcopal Church’s Archbishop in Sudan in 1977.

As the story unfolds, the implications of that perception become clearer.  He had become part of the complex social, historical and political web with his Sudanese friends and colleagues.

The praise is welcome; the blame is less so.  Andy and Sue also showed their solidarity with the suffering Sudanese community through their ‘open home’ during their years of displacement in Cairo, with sometimes more than 30 people for Sunday lunch and nowhere in their flat for them to be alone during the week.  The visitors were refugees from Sudan.

Indeed, the Wheelers had, in another sense of the word, now come to share the blame.  Living close to the refugees, Andy and Sue became part of their world and absorbed some of the pain that was laid on their brothers and sisters.

This took its toll and Andy narrates candidly how he came close to a breakdown in the wake of it, yet he discovers that this was also the breakthrough to a deeper level of faith and freedom.

Andrew and Sue Wheeler (Photo source: The Wheelers)

Read it for yourself.  This is a good story, and it has all the ingredients to make it so: adventure, danger, heroism, kids, love, reflection, romance, sacrifice, suffering, good times and bad, breakdown and breakthrough.

I hope that this is only a first instalment — the story is still unfolding.

To order this book, please click here or telephone 020 7803 3376.

To read another review of Andy's book, please click here.

Andy and Sue Wheeler were CMS mission partners in Sudan for many years and are now based at St Saviour’s Church, Guildford.