The Hidden Calling

By Stephen Mansfield

Her name was Elizabeth Anne Everest. Few today remember her. In fact, few would have known of her even during her lifetime, which ended in near obscurity in 1895. She was, after all, only a nanny--one of thousands in Victorian England--who quietly spent their days caring for the children of other people. Strolling in a park with her baby's carriage, or braving the London streets with a little boy clinging rightly to her side, there would have been nothing to distinguish her to passersby, but she may well have had an impact on the life of every person born in the western world since.

But Elizabeth Anne Everest was not just another nanny. She was a Christian, of the most passionate and fearless kind. For her, being a nanny was not just a job; it was a ministry. She lived her faith boldly before the families that hired her and worked hard to build godliness and biblical truth into the young lives in her care. It was as she thus served the Lord in the hiddenness of her calling, that she came to have such an impact on the course of modern history. For on a blustery English day in February of 1875, Elizabeth Everest came to be the nanny, and soon the primary influence, in the life of one rosy-cheeked baby boy by the name of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, future Prime Minister of England, and leader of the western world during some of its most trying times.

There was little hint in his early years, however, of the greatness that young Winston would one day command. Mrs. Everest soon understood the immensity of her task. In time, the boy's mother would warn visitors, with typical British understatement, that he was "a difficult child to manage." She was right. He kicked, he screamed, he hid, and he bullied. The word "monster" was often used of him. The trouble was that he was bright, too. Knowing of Mrs. Everest's Christian faith, young Winston once tried to escape a mathematics lesson by threatening to "bow down and worship graven images." It worked, too for a while. But Elizabeth Everest was an exceptional woman. She knew how to enforce the boundaries she set, and from the beginning Winston held a grudging respect for this woman who seemed to know the secret - that his irritating behavior only served to hide a desperate longing of his heart.

This was the truth she tenderly guarded, for she knew that her Lord had not entrusted young Winston to her solely for the discipline she would enforce, but more for the vacuum she would fill in the life of this lonely little boy. Few knew how painful his loneliness really was. It would be nice indeed to report that the Churchills shared a warmly intimate home life, and that Winston was smothered with parental affection, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Quite to the neglect of their son, Randolph and Jennie Churchill gave themselves completely to their social ambitions. True, Victorian parents maintained an astonishing distance from their children, receiving them only at prearranged times, and under the watchful eye of servants. Even so, the Churchills were remote even by these standards. Of his mother, Winston later wrote,"I loved her, but at a distance." His father thought Winston was retarded, rarely talked to him, and regularly vented his mounting rage on the child. More than one historian has concluded that Lord Randolph simply loathed his son.

Thus it was that Elizabeth Everest - who Winston came to call "Woom" - became not only his nanny, but his dearest companion. He came to share with her an understanding and tender loyalty of the secrets of his widening world. She was, after all, the stereotypical British nanny; plump, simple, cheery, ever optimistic, always compassionate. The boy grew to love her completely. Of their special relationship, Violet Asquith later wrote, in Winston's "solitary childhood and unhappy school days, Mrs. Everest was his comforter, his strength and stay, his one source of unfailing human understanding. She was the fireside at which he dried his tears and warmed his heart. She was the night light by his bed. She was security."

She was also his shepherd. It was with her, in the safety of their shared devotion, that Winston first experienced genuine Christianity. On bended knee beside this gentle woman of God he first learned that surging of the heart called prayer. From her lips he first heard the Scriptures read with loving devotion and was so moved he eagerly memorized his favorite passages. On long walks together they sang the great hymns of the Church, spoke breathlessly of the heroes of the faith, and imagined aloud what Jesus might look like, or how heaven would be. As they sat together on a park bench or on a blanket of cool, green grass, Winston was often transfixed while Woom explained the world to him in simple, but distinctly Christian, terms. And it is not hard to imagine that when their day was done many an evening found this devoted intercessor praying the prayers of destiny over her sleeping charge, asking her Heavenly Father to fulfill the calling she sensed so powerfully on his life.

It would seem her prayers were answered, for though in early adulthood Churchill immersed himself in the antiChristian rationalism that swept his age, he eventually recovered his faith during an escape from a South African prison. So deeply had he received the imprint of Mrs. Everest's dynamic faith that in this time of crisis, the prayers he had learned at her knee returned almost involuntarily to his lips, as did the Scripture passages he had memorized to the familiar lilt of her voice. From that time forward, his faith defined him, as it did his sense of mission. He came to see himself in much the same terms as those he once used to dedicate his grandson. Holding the child aloft he tearfully proclaimed him "Christ's new faithful soldier and servant."

So when the tests of life had prepared him and his day of destiny arrived, Winston Churchill was ready to lead the world with a clear trumpet call of the solid faith he first learned from his godly nanny. In an age of mounting skepticism, Churchill proclaimed the cause of "Christian civilization." It was threatened from without, he believed, by "barbarous paganism"--like Nazism-which spurned "Christian ethics" and derived its "strength and perverted pleasure from persecution." Therefore, every Christian had a "duty to preserve the structure of humane, enlightened, Christian society." This was critical, for "once the downward steps are taken, once one's moral intellectual feet slipped upon the slope of plausible indulgence, there would be found no halting-place short of a general Paganism and Hedonism."

While other leaders of his age vacillated and sought the compromises of cowards, Churchill defined the challenges of his civilization in the stark Christian terms that moved men to greatness. Yet behind the arsenal of his words, behind the artillery of his vision, was the simple teaching of a devoted nanny who served her God by investing in the destiny of a troubled boy.

So it was that when the man some called the "Greatest Man of the Age," lay dying in 1965 at the age of ninety, there was but one picture that stood at his bedside. It was the picture of his beloved nanny, gone to be with her Lord some seventy years before. She had understood him, she had prayed him to his best, and she had fueled the faith that fed the destiny of nations ... in the hiddenness of her calling.

Copyright: 1996 by Morningstar Publications and Ministries. All rights reserved.

This article is published courtesy of "The Morningstar Publications and Ministries". If you would like to peruse more of their articles, visit Morningstar's website.

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