Kevin Bettany : A Testimony on Retirement
A new chapter arrived on 9th January 2016. I have said goodbye to my career in the Probation Service. God willing I will have time for a creative retirement with the rest of my allotted span.
In fifty years of employment, I and my family have been blessed with amazing provision and protection. I can say with King David – “The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing, (Psalm 34 v 10); I can also now say -“I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.” (Psalm 37 v 25).
My employment history has made a crazy mosaic. In 1973 I had said goodbye to the Royal Army Medical Corps; in 1984 to Rolls Royce Aero-Engine Division; in 1989 to residential social work. In between those years I had also done a plethora of temporary manual jobs as well as three years teacher training in Bristol and two years of probation training at University of Keele.
I look back over the last 25 years, at the Probation Service, with a great deal of thanks to God. In 1990 I was already nearly forty years old when I started work at Wenger House Bail and Probation Hostel. Before that I had worked, for a year, as a part-time hospital phlebotomist. Our seventh child arrived in the May of that year!
The first twenty-five years of my life cannot be described as deprived. My father had been a career soldier and his postings took our family to Nigeria, to Germany and to several interesting postings at home, including Plymouth and York. With six children my mother was an amazing woman; my father was not a good male role model.
My father’s career meant my brother and I were sent to a boarding school. The Royal Alexandra and Albert School, at Gatton Park, is a co-ed school in a beautiful location called Gatton Park between Reigate and Redhill in Surrey. Life in a boarding school had not been dull but I left in 1968 with only seven half-decent O’ Level GCE’s.
Len Renouf was an evangelical Christian housemaster, whose influence would prove to have the most enduring significance on my life after leaving school. This would not become obvious for another seven years but I still ask God to bless Len for his care for my soul. He died on 24thDecember 2015.
In 1969, on the 9th January, I joined the Royal Army Medical Corps on my eighteenth birthday. In 1970, after failing my first physiotherapy exam, I trained as a military hospital lab technician. That training ended when I was medically discharged in 1973 due to damaged hearing; probably due to a head injury playing rugby. Life in the Army had not been dull.
Another very important person came into my life during those Army years. Angela and I had met when she joined the Queen Alexandra Nursing Corps in 1970. We were married in 1972. A very sweet and gracious Kentish Maid, I certainly did not deserve her love and her loyalty. We moved to Bristol in 1973 and our first child arrived in 1974. I was not a good male role model.
Around Easter of 1976, during my second year at a teacher training college, my lifestyle problems were leading me into a toxic frame of mind. My college work was suffering and, due to my drug addiction, we were in serious debt. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things’ and I even contemplated if it might suit me if Angela ended our marriage.
But there was another relationship which I had formed at teacher training college. Dorothy was a student who, for some strange reason, my conscience would not allow me to ignore; her peace of mind both disturbed and attracted me. It was that same peace which I had observed in my Christian housemaster at boarding school and it was a peace outside my experience.
Like so many others, without any peace of mind, I was striving to distract my guilty conscience. What my housemaster and my fellow student seemed to have was a peace with a solid and lasting quality. It was a peace which surpassed my understanding. In my desperation, I found myself wanting to meet Dorothy’s family.
For the first time in my life I met a Christian family. Dorothy’s father, Robert Duff, was originally from Belfast; her mother was from Leipzig in Germany. They were missionaries who, with help of Sir John Lang, had established the Delhi Bible Institute in North India. Perhaps it was obvious to her parents that I was a troubled man and I agreed to meet on a weekly basis for a Bible study.
Oddly, I cannot remember much about those Bible studies. I had a history of struggling against Christian convictions at boarding school. I had even stopped my own ears, as it were, at a Billy Graham meeting in 1966. I was like Felix, in Acts 24 v 25, “As Paul talked about righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and said, “That’s enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you.”
Nevertheless, during those Bible Studies in Bristol, I was under a conviction that I was being given another opportunity to surrender to the truth of the gospel. In John’s gospel chapter 13 verse 20 it says “Very truly I tell you, whoever accepts anyone I send accepts me; and whoever accepts me accepts the one who sent me.”
I had been sent my Christian housemaster; I had even been sent a Christian whom I had avoided in the Army. I had been sent my Christian fellow student and now it was her family, especially her father, who was sent to explain the gospel again to me.
One would think that to exchange my destructive lifestyle for peace with God was a ‘no brainer’! I was blinded and deceived by selfish thinking and my mind argued against a peace with God because it could literally do no other. But I had seen that peace in others, even if it was still outside my experience.
Faith turned out to be not about giving up my lifestyle, but about giving up my life; not about doing something for myself at all, because what needed to be done by God had already been done by Jesus Christ. But accepting my own helplessness was still a big ask for my pride to accept. In reality, I was a bigger hypocrite than my father because I had blamed him for my problems!
Of-course I could not begin to imagine the cost that was paid to bring about peace with God; it will always surpass my understanding. After all, how could I understand what it would be like to suffer hell? How could I understand what it must have been like for Christ, who was so totally innocent, to suffer hell on my behalf?
It turned out that it was not my understanding of the cost which would bring me peace with God but by trusting that Jesus had paid that cost on my behalf. The effect of believing that truth was like rain upon a parched land; it effects and blessing was immediate; it was a personal encounter with the Lord himself. “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” Romans 5 v 1
And that happened on the 9th June 1976. My Bible study ended on that day with a prayer of faith. I literally repeated the words that Robert Duff asked me to repeat. I confessed my sin and my need of Christ to forgive me; to come and dwell in my life as my Lord and Saviour.
There was no Damascus road event like that of the Apostle Paul but as I walked home that day I had a conviction that my life would never be the same again. The Lord has been faithful to all his promises and by faith I consider myself as one of those about whom it is written – “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” John 14 verse 27.
As a teenager I had considered my retirement as such a remote event and I could not imagine that it would ever arrive. Now that it has arrived I realise just how great has been the blessing of God’s grace to me. Angela and I are gathered for the weekend with our seven children, their six beautiful spouses and our ten beautiful grandchildren. We are at a beautiful venue on the Herefordshire Welsh border to celebrate my sixty-fifth birthday and my retirement. It is wonderful to be all together and I give God all the glory.
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