Jonathan excused himself from the conversation with Donald McGillivray. As he walked over to where Mr. O’Brien and the well-dressed young woman were seated, he was conscious of his shabby suit and worn shoes. Mr. O’Brien smiled at him.
“Mr. Goforth, I would like you to meet Miss Rosalind Bell-Smith. She played the organ for me at church last Sunday.” Then turning to Rosalind he said, “And I should like you to meet Jonathan Goforth, one of our key workers at the Toronto Mission Union.”
“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Jonathan, extending his hand to Rosalind Bell-Smith and looking into her determined eyes.
Rosalind shook Jonathan’s hand and gave him a broad smile that seemed to animate every square inch of her face.
“Miss Bell-Smith has agreed to join us at the mission next Saturday night and play the organ for us,” beamed Mr. O’Brien.
“How good of you,” replied Jonathan, noticing as he spoke that the boat was pulling up to the dock.
The following Saturday night Rosalind Bell-Smith sat at the organ. Jonathan was impressed with how well she played. He was also conscious that his eyes kept drifting her way as he preached the sermon.
Later that night, the mission held a meeting, and Rosalind was invited to become a part of a committee being set up to open a new mission on the east side of town. She hesitated for some time before agreeing to join the committee. Jonathan found this odd, and it was a long time before he learned why she had hesitated.
It turned out that Rosalind was a very talented young artist who came from a well-known family. Her father had been Professor John Bell-Smith, the most famous artist in Canada. He had immigrated to Canada from England when Rosalind was three years old and quickly won the position of president of the Canadian Academy of Art. He had groomed Rosalind to follow in his footsteps. He had died the year before, however, when Rosalind was twenty years old, but not before he had insisted his wife make him a solemn promise. The promise was that no matter what happened, after Rosalind graduated from the Toronto Art School, she was to be sent “home” to England for further training at the Kensington School of Art.
When she was asked to join the committee at the Toronto Mission Union, Rosalind had already begun packing for the trip to England to fulfill the promise her mother had made. She knew it would cause a great deal of strife in the family if she announced she wanted to delay the trip. Still, as she hesitated over the decision, something inside her told her she should agree to become part of the committee. She did, and Jonathan felt strangely lightheaded about her decision.
Over the course of the next year, Jonathan and Rosalind worked together at the mission most weekends. By the time October 1886 rolled around, Jonathan was sure he was in love with Rosalind. However, he knew that in asking her to marry him he would be asking her to sign on for a life of hardship and challenge beyond anything that she had encountered during her sheltered and privileged upbringing. Undeterred, Jonathan rehearsed his proposal many times, and one beautiful fall evening he finally decided it was time to ask Rosalind to marry him. “Rosalind,” he said quietly, “will you join your life with mine for China?”
Rosalind’s eyes shone brightly as she replied, “Oh, Jonathan, of course I will.”
Jonathan’s heart skipped a beat at her answer. He had worked with Rosalind long enough to know she was as hardworking and dedicated as he was. Still, there was one more thing he needed to ask her. “Would you mind if I did not buy you an engagement ring? It’s just that I’ve ordered a hundred more of Hudson Taylor’s booklets, and the postage is going to be high. I’m going to need every penny if I’m to have them all in the mail by Christmas.”
Jonathan held his breath while he waited to hear his new fiancée’s reply. Would she rather have a ring, or did she want to play a part in challenging fellow Canadians with the spiritual needs of China? He knew it wasn’t an easy thing he was asking of her. After all, she had grown up in a much wealthier home than his and had never wanted for anything. Rosalind gulped, and then looking Jonathan straight in the eye she said, “I agreed to join my life with yours for China. What better way to begin?”
Jonathan reached out and held Rosalind’s hand, grateful to know he had found a partner who understood what being a missionary was all about.
Not everything went smoothly, however, for twenty-two-year-old Rosalind when she told her mother. Mrs. Bell-Smith was devastated by the news. She had made a solemn oath to her late husband to send Rosalind to England, and she had no intention of breaking the promise. She was adamant that Rosalind set sail for England immediately. And if Rosalind refused to obey her, she would be ordered to leave the house and never return. Rosalind’s heart belonged to Jonathan and China, and so with great sorrow, she packed up her things and moved into her brother’s home.
The next few months were very difficult for Rosalind. At first her mother would not even speak to her, but slowly she began to soften and eventually apologized, inviting Rosalind to move back home.
While this was going on, Jonathan continued his hectic life. Finally, in his last year at college, he began to turn his attention to how he was going to get to China. He had known when he entered Knox College that the Presbyterian Church had no mission stations in China. Although he’d hoped that some would open up while he was studying, none had, and so Jonathan decided to apply to Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. Jonathan had just sent off his application to the mission’s headquarters in London, England, when a group of fellow students asked him to meet them in the library.
As he strolled across the quadrangle towards the library, Jonathan wondered what the meeting could be about. He didn’t have the slightest idea. As he entered the library, a cheer went up, and Jonathan was surrounded by his entire graduating class.
“Jonathan,” announced the class president, “we know that you want to go to China, and we think you should go with the Presbyterian Church.”
Jonathan opened his mouth to interrupt, but the president held up his hand and continued. “Of course, we all know the church has no work in China, at present that is, but we have all met together and decided we want to sponsor you as our missionary. We know that no class from Knox College has ever sponsored one of its own before, and we want to be the first! You go to China, and we will supply the money.”
Jonathan was speechless. Tears flooded his eyes as he searched for words to thank his classmates. The same men who had taunted and mocked him three and a half years before now wanted to send him out as their representative. Jonathan now had a way to serve in China, and he could not have been happier about it.
As Jonathan’s time at Knox College drew to a close, he was asked to speak in many churches about his plans. He was so enthusiastic about missionary work, however, that not every church he visited was glad they had invited him!
One Sunday the pastor in charge of home missions for the Presbyterian Church in Canada invited Jonathan to speak at his church, Zion Church in Brantford. The church members were proud of the amount of money they had raised for home missions within Canada. However, Jonathan had studied the foreign missionary giving for each church in the area and knew that Zion Church gave only seventy-eight cents per person per year to foreign missions. Jonathan was appalled. He arrived at the church ready to challenge the congregation about their giving and undaunted by the pastor’s prominent position in the church hierarchy.
Jonathan’s opportunity to deliver his challenge was not long in coming. The opening hymn was announced, and the choir director read the first verse aloud before the singing began:
From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand…
Waft, waft, ye winds His story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till like a sea of glory
It spreads from pole to pole.
When the choir director had finished reading, the organist poised her hands, ready to peal out the first bars of the hymn. As she did so, Jonathan sprang to his feet, his hands raised to stop the singing. He bounded to the pulpit and boomed, “No! No! A congregation like this one does not have the right to sing that hymn.” He waved the blue book containing the church’s financial records high in the air. “You are a large and prosperous group, yet you give only seventy-eight cents apiece to foreign missions! This is not a hymn you have earned the right to sing. Let’s sing Psalm 51 instead.”
He gave the organist a stern look, and she nervously flipped through the pages of her music book until she found the music for Psalm 51. The congregation obediently sang along with Jonathan, who then preached from the story of the loaves and the fishes.
The story tells of how more than five thousand people followed Jesus to hear Him teach. As night approached, the disciples wanted to send the crowd away because they had nothing to feed them. Just then a young boy came forward with five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus blessed the food, broke it into pieces, and told the disciples to distribute it to the crowd. Everyone had enough to eat, and afterwards there were twelve basketfuls of leftovers.
When Jonathan had finished retelling the story, he said, “Now, let’s imagine for a moment that the disciples fed the first two rows of people. When they were done, instead of moving on to feed the back rows, they went to the front and fed the first two rows a second and then a third time. After a while, people in the first two rows were so full they turned away when food was offered to them. All the while, the people in the back rows were fainting from hunger.”
Jonathan paused for a moment to let the congregation think about what he had said. “My friends,” he continued, “aren’t we doing the same thing when we put most of our time and money into giving the Bread of Life to those who have heard it so often while millions of people in China are starving for the gospel message?”
When Jonathan had finished his sermon, the church sat silently thinking about the simple yet powerful point he had made.
Finally, on October 25, 1887, after being engaged for a year, Jonathan Goforth and Rosalind Bell-Smith were married. The ceremony was held a week after Jonathan was ordained as a pastor. Following the wedding, the Goforths were to spend six months traveling and speaking at churches in Canada before setting sail for China. Although their wedding went as planned, their departure for China did not. In late 1887, China was in the grip of a desperate famine, and the Presbyterian Church in Canada had raised a large sum of money to help with the disaster. It needed someone to take the money to China as quickly as possible and make sure it was placed in the right hands. Jonathan was asked whether he could be ready to leave for China with the money by mid-January.
Jonathan was eager to get to China as soon as possible, and so he wasn’t too worried about the earlier departure date. Rosalind, though, was disappointed. The women at Uxbridge Presbyterian Church had donated a beautiful twenty-four-stop organ for her and Jonathan to take to China. In their rush to get to Vancouver, British Columbia, from which they were to leave for China, they had no time to wait for the organ to be crated and shipped. Jonathan told Rosalind that it would have to follow them to China on a later boat.
The newlyweds hurriedly packed their belongings. Rosalind’s mother had died a few months previously, and so Rosalind took with her several special items from the family home, including a self-portrait her father had painted and some of her mother’s favorite china plates and cups.
The commissioning service in which Jonathan and Rosalind dedicated their lives for service in China was held on January 19, 1888, at Knox Church in Toronto. The huge church was filled to overflowing for the service, and the crowd spilled out into the street. All sorts of people were there—pastors, college professors, workers from the eastside mission, and hundreds of poor people Jonathan had visited during his four years in the city. Many people got up to speak at the commissioning, and in the end, the service had to be cut short so that the Goforths could get to Old Market Station in time to catch the Trans Canada train at midnight.
