Free Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer Page A

were twenty or more guests staying with us all week. In summer, there were even more, with the overflow sleeping on the balconies that ran around the second and third floors, protected by the wide eaves.
    If I got up in the night to go to the kitchen downstairs to grab a snack, I’d be stepping over young men and women
spread out in sleeping bags all over the middle-floor hall, filling our chalet with the intimate musty flesh-smell of warm breath and bodies that mingled with the faint scent of pine.
    Pine paneling covered the thick solid squared timbers from which the chalet had been constructed according to the old custom, wherein the wood walls were solid, much like a log cabin, only the beams were squared into magnificent six-inch-thick perfectly interlocking timbers. In the winter, I could hear our chalet “breathe” when it changed temperature outside and those timbers creaked. In the summer, I could smell the pine.
    Many years later, when I moved to America and tried to hang up my paintings, I was stunned to learn that I could not just nail anywhere. The idea that I had to find where the stud was under the sheetrock was like being told I was living in a cardboard box, a fake building, a swindle. “What would the Swiss think of this?” I’d mutter, as a nail disappeared into a wall with a hollow thud.
    By the time I was fifteen, there were eighty to a hundred guests with us year-round, though no longer just in our chalet. Over the years, other chalets were added through a series of “miracles,” each one part of the growing list of proofs of God’s hand on us, each with its own inexplicable list of attending coincidences as to how the money came in so amazingly that “even a New York atheist couldn’t explain this away,” as Mom would say.
    All the L’Abri chalets had married couples running them. About half the time, those houseparents were my sisters and brothers-in-law. When my sisters married, they roped their husbands into serving the Lord, or rather “God put His hand on them.” By the time I was on the cusp of my teen years, my three sisters were all back and living in chalets near ours,
receiving L’Abri guests in their homes and raising their children as we had been raised: child missionaries press-ganged into the Lord’s work.
    Priscilla met her future husband John Sandri at the University of Lausanne, and more or less started L’Abri by witnessing to him. John was one of our first guests. My sister invited him home for a weekend to ask Dad all those questions about God that she couldn’t answer. Maybe John was also interested in spending the weekend with us, then another and another, due to the fact that Priscilla looked like a fortunate blend of Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy.
    John was a tall, handsome, olive-skinned Swiss-American and had been a basketball star in high school in Scarsdale, New York. After he moved back to Switzerland—his Swiss-American industrialist father brought the family home when John was eighteen—John played for the Swiss national basketball team. John always treated me like a favorite little brother, and I would eagerly wait all week for his weekend visits. By the time he married Priscilla, John had graduated from the University of Lausanne. Then he was offered a job in the Swiss-American company his father ran. He followed the Lord’s call instead, gave up his worldly ambitions, and went to seminary.
    My sister Susan—home from Oxford, where she was studying occupational therapy at Dorset House—met her future husband Ranald Macaulay when he visited L’Abri after hearing Dad speak. This was while Ranald was a law student at Cambridge. Ranald was a tall, athletic, piano- and rugby-playing South African-Scot, with bright red hair and a scar on his face where a wild dog had bitten and almost killed him as a child. Ranald’s father was a QC in South Africa, and then later a judge in Rhodesia.

    My mother was thrilled by “Cambridge converts” like Ranald.