Postby TriP » August 28th, 2016, 10:41 pm
People of Trinidad and Tobago
“It was a bulls eye. It hit my pupil,” Christine Jackson-Hart says of the day a friend’s brother shot her in the eye with an arrow constructed from a Hibiscus bush. She was eleven years old.
“I was called One-eye Jack, Robin Hood and different things,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t let people take pictures of me. I was ashamed of having an eye that didn’t move. People couldn’t tell where I was looking.”
No one, perhaps not even Christine herself, could tell that “where she was looking” would one day be within, seeking deep, abiding peace.
Childhood in Point-a-Pierre was “incredible”. The seven-child Jackson household—“Grand Central Station”, as their mother called it—was a playful hive of activity for friends of all ages. Young Christine was a tomboy, climbing mango trees, playing pranks, pitching marbles.
When her altered visual perception caused her to stop playing sports, she expressed herself creatively, living for school concerts and pantomimes. Years later, her natural love of the stage would find her representing Trinidad and Tobago at Miss Universe 1975 in San Salvador (where she was voted ‘Miss Amity’).
“I struggled with depression but didn’t know what it was,” she says of her early years. “I wouldn’t talk to people about things. Instead, I used to write poems.”
Raised Roman Catholic and with a natural love for helping people, young Christine decided that she wanted to be a missionary in Africa.
“I didn’t know about Africa and why I wanted to be a missionary there of all places, but anybody that people ostracized or had an issue with, I would defend them,” she says.
Seeds of what she has since harvested as a woman were in her already. Years later, she and her husband would do missionary work—not in Africa, but in Canada, Canouan, Montserrat, Tobago.
Christine met her husband-to-be, Brent Hart, at the travel agency where she worked. The newly married couple lived on a 100 year-old, 100-acre estate in central Trinidad, with, no electricity or running water. “Trinidad’s darling”, accustomed to people calling her name wherever she went, was plunged into the starkly contrasting silence of country life. There, she touched peace that she had not yet known.
“Out there, God was everywhere—in Nature, in the sky, in the birds. He became a part of me, rather than me having to find him in church. He became even more real—in me, with me, about me, my Everything.”
Years later, Christine and her husband migrated to Vancouver, Canada. “We had a wonderful life, living on an acre of land with a little brook. But it was very cold and I missed home.”
The growing family eventually moved to Tobago, accepting the opportunity to look after breathtakingly beautiful Bird of Paradise Inn, on 700 acres of bird sanctuary with direct ocean access.
Brent grew vegetables, men on the reef would catch lobster, Christine would invent recipes and cook and the house, with its large kitchen, was opened up to welcome everyone.
“It was the most amazing experience,” Christine says wistfully. “Truly paradise.”
But this paradise was not enough.
“I hit a low. I couldn’t understand what was going on and started searching again for that peace. I had been looking into Eastern philosophies for a while, but I always prayed to the Lord—for every decision I had to make. The God that I grew up with never went away.”
One day Christine walked across a tiny bridge to the beachfront. There, talking aloud to the Lord, she cried out: “Lord, I need you to show me something! Why am I unhappy when everything is perfect?”
The Lord answered swiftly, sending two men who came to stay a day later at the Inn. One, “Uncle Sam”, who had a children’s television ministry, told Christine something simple that hooked her—the connection with God is a ‘personal relationship’.
The prayer in which he subsequently led Christine, asking Christ to take over her life, immediately transformed her.
“It was instantaneous. That hole, that missing thing left. I knew that I had found what I wanted and that was Jesus—whatever that meant. I was fulfilled.”
She compares the new awareness of God’s presence with having tons of money in the bank, knowing it is there and that access is immediate. “Do I use a cheque this time? Or an ATM machine?” she chuckles.
The peace she found then has never gone.
“People think it means you don’t have confrontation or experience terror, pain or heartache. Peace is always there despite those things and it contributes to how to deal with those things so we don’t get depressed.”
The words of John the Baptist are her constant prayer: “He must increase, but I must decrease”—for her will to decrease and for Jesus to be walking in her on this earth.
This mother of six, grandmother of six, with her funky-shaved hairstyle, multiple ear piercings and casually creative fashion sense wears many hats and has a wealth of stories and miraculous testimonies to share.
Marriage is her ministry now—touching and teaching couples at the weddings she officiates. She is co-founder of Tobago Weddings (Tobago’s first wedding coordinating company, 1998, which she no longer operates).
Her sense of the “personal relationship” introduced by ‘Uncle Sam’, has evolved into the experience of an intimate relationship.
“Intimate relationship—that’s what everything is about. Intimacy is a two way street. If we see God as this big thing that religion gives, how can we be intimate with that? How can He be intimate with us if we are afraid of Him? The whole thing of Sonship and I AM is real. Who we truly are and what Jesus did is a finished work. We’re not to look and beg for what is already here.”
Even her grandchildren know prayer as an expression of thanks—gratitude for what one already has, rather than begging for what one perceives as lacking.
A blackboard sign written for her grandchildren reflects the source of her deep, abiding peace: “Daddy God loves me and has my back no matter what.”
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