“Use the present opportunity to the full” (Ephesians 5:16a, NEB). I took this verse as my personal mission statement long before the phrase ”mission statement” was even coined. I was a young, married woman officer in an era when, in the United Kingdom, it was not Salvation Army policy to provide appointments for women whose husbands were appointed to headquarters. God pointed me to this verse in the newly published New English Bible as an assurance that he would always provide appointments for me if only I would be open to using “the present opportunity to the full.”

Looking back over 40 years, I believe that I have been able to prove God's faithfulness to his word. Recently, three very different contexts have brought home to me the need to continue in this spirit.

At the beginning of the month it was my privilege to share with my husband, Robert, the leadership of a divisional officers' retreat in Western Australia. In that context, I decided to speak about my mission statement, its origin, and some of its workings, in the hope of providing encouragement to a new generation of officers who might be facing similar challenges.

However, studying the geography of Australia in preparation for our visit, it occurred to me that I might have the opportunity to fulfil what I thought was an impossible dream that took root over 20 years ago. Firmly fixed in my memory is the first episode of a six-week BBC dramatization of a book by Australian author, Nevil Shute. It told of a group of British ex-patriate women and children in then Malaya, who were forced to walk for many miles and many months by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. A young woman emerged as the unofficial leader of the group, and she was befriended by an audacious Australian soldier, who managed to scrounge extra rations for the women. One day he went too far, stealing the captain's prize chickens. He was caught and the women and children were forced to watch as he was scourged and nailed to a door, crucifixion-style. I sat stunned, barely able to believe what I had seen, and that the story could be over before it had begun. I waited very impatiently for the next episode, to see how the story would play out.

The book was A Town Like Alice, and the scenes in ensuing episodes were set also in England, and the Australian towns of Cairns and Alice Springs. It was a well-crafted story and I developed a deep longing to visit all the locations portrayed. During the years that have followed I have had several opportunities to visit England, and have even visited Malaysia and Cairns, picturing again the scenes set there. Now, at last, had come the opportunity to have a stop-over in Alice Springs en route from Perth to Sydney, and then home. I grasped it with both hands and was not disappointed. Buildings of the era of the story had been re-constructed outside the current town boundary, not because of the book, but because of their links with the factual telegraph office that was set up there, and which established a link between a town set in the middle of a vast desert with other parts of Australia and the rest of the world. This provided a reality check for me, and as I, again, re-lived the events of the story I was reminded of God's much bigger meta-narrative, and the need to “use the present opportunity to the full” as I found myself singing: “Yet deeper do I ponder, his cross and sorrow see, and ever gaze and wonder why Jesus died for me. And shall I fear to own him? Can I my Lord deny? No, let me love him, serve him, and meet him by and by.”

And out of this comes the third context which brings me full circle. Within the last few weeks one dear friend has had a very close brush with death, and two others have gone to be with the Lord─all my peers. What a stark reminder of my own mortality and of the fact that I only have a limited number of “present opportunities” to fulfil my dreams and be available for what God has in mind for me on any given day. All of this has caused me to re-visit a little chorus I eventually wrote, linked with my mission statement:

“Please clothe me, Lord, with garments you've designed for me; with love and truth, integrity and purity, that I may use the present opportunity, to live a life that honours you.”

Would you like to make that your prayer, too?

Colonel Gwenyth Redhead is a retired Salvation Army officer. She and her husband, Robert, have held a wide variety of appointments in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. However, her passion has always been to encourage others in creative responses to God through writing of scripts, stories, articles and lyrics (mostly to Robert's music). She has two daughters, Joanne and Corinne, and rejoices that they, too, use the creativity God has given them in ministry.