Pauline Huntington | USA     July 9th, 8:20am.  The telephone rang. It was a colleague and I thought she was calling to talk about the plans for the day. Whatever the plans might have been, no one could have anticipated what happened on that day. “Bill has passed away.”  Her words were short but not sweet, and my response, even shorter. “No.” I simply could not believe it and even though a month has already passed since that sad day, it still doesn’t seem real.   This is the reaction of many people when someone close to them dies, but with Bill it was different. I was used to Bill not being around. He was always on the move and we often did not know where he was. There was always one thing that we did know, however, and that was that wherever he was, he was busy working for the sake of the gospel. Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Toronto, LA, China, the Philippines, Poland: he could have been in anyone of these places and a lot more. Or perhaps he was on a plane talking about the Bible to the person next to him, or just down the road at the diner, buying lunch for a brother or sister who needed encouragement, comfort, or scolding. This was his life and this was the way he lived. It wasn’t that he had the gift of the gab?acutally sometimes it was difficult for me to translate his speech, but he had something he just had to say to anyone who would listen. If there were no translator available, he would just struggle through with the few words that he knew in whatever language was necessary. For days after I heard the news, my mind dwelt in the past as memory after memory flowed along in front of my mind’s eye and tried to make the reality of the situation sink in. I worked with Bill for almost ten years, so there were a lot of memories to sort through.I remembered a time in Mexico when I had been translating for Bill as he counseled a Mexican man and his wife. Bill explained the gospel again and again, but the only response was an expressionless nod of agreement. Most people would have given up?I certainly would have?but not Bill. He repeated the message again and again until the Mexican suddenly stood up, said, “OK,” and left the room in a hurry. I wondered if he had lost his temper or his patience, so quickly had

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