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“There Is Pleasantness at Your Right Hand Forever”The Watchtower—2012 | March 15
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PIONEERING
A year later, in 1959, we were pioneering and living in a small house trailer on top of a prairie hill in Saskatchewan. You could see for miles, and some of these miles were our territory.
One day, an interesting letter from the branch office arrived. I hurried out to where John was working on the tractor. The letter invited us to be special pioneers in Red Lake, Ontario. Not knowing where that was, we quickly got out maps to find it.
What a contrast it proved to be to the open prairies! Now we experienced huge forests and little towns built near gold mines. As we were looking for accommodations the first day, a little girl heard our conversation with her neighbor. She ran home to her mother, who kindly offered us lodging overnight. The bed was in a dirt cellar. The next day, we located a place, a two-room log house with no plumbing and no furniture, just a wood-burning tin heater. We got a few things at a secondhand shop and soon felt quite content.
There was no congregation within 130 miles (209 km). Many workers in the gold mines had come from Europe, and they asked if we could get them a Bible in their language. In a short time, we had 30 excellent Bible studies. Within six months, a small congregation was formed.
The husband of one woman with whom we studied phoned his priest to come and set his wife straight. During the encounter, the priest said that we should be teaching the Trinity, among other things. The woman got their Catholic Bible and asked the priest to back up the things he was saying. He flung the Bible across the table, saying that he did not need to prove anything. As he left, he said in Ukrainian that they should throw us out of the house and never let us in again. He did not realize that John understood Ukrainian!
Shortly thereafter, we left Red Lake because John was to be trained for the circuit work. About a year later, however, when John was giving the baptism talk at a district convention, that husband was among the baptismal candidates! The episode with the priest had caused him to begin looking into the Bible for himself.
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“There Is Pleasantness at Your Right Hand Forever”The Watchtower—2012 | March 15
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[Picture on page 4]
When I was a special pioneer in Red Lake, Ontario
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