For about ten years Chappo and I played two sets of tennis at 7am every Friday morning, weather and work permitting.
Along with the tennis we played word games. We would try and outdo each other with make-up superlatives - from the beauty of the morning to the brilliance of the shots we played around the court.
I would say, “That was a splendificent serve, Chappo!”
Chappo would say, “Schmagnofagous passing shot, Dave!” Sometimes it would be, “Magschnofogus.” The great thing is you can choose your own spelling. Chappo loved it that way.
From Friday to Friday it was on for old and older.
Then one day Chappo turned up on a glorious spring morning and greeted me with, “Dave, what a splendiferous morning.”
I was speechless. It sounded like the most perfect of all made up words. It rolls off the tongue like velvet. He had aced me with the best superlative you could come up with. It was game, set and match.
It was only a month after his death, in December last year, when I was texting a mate in South Africa to wish him and his family, a splendiferous Christmas, and I got the surprise of my life.
I was typing in the word, letter by letter, ‘splend’, and the auto-correcting offered me ‘splendid’. I cancelled that and continued, ‘splendif’, and the miniature man in the phone offered me ‘splendiferous’.
It wasn’t a made up word after all. It was a real one. Chappo, the sly old dog, had slipped one past me and I didn’t even see it.
As I reflect on Chappo’s life, a year after his death, my mind floods with so many splendiferous memories.
There are first memories
I was still in high school when I first met Chappo. I was a new Christian and struggling with all sorts of issues, doubts and temptations. John had been invited to my local church to run a series of Bible studies over a four week period.
Both in the public teaching and the couple of personal conversations we had afterwards, he applied God’s word to my life in a way that was clear, uncompromising and compassionate. I have never forgotten that month late in ’69 when I was in the middle of the HSC, my final school exams.
There are funny memories
As well as tennis, Chappo and I played a lot of golf together over the years.
In 1977, while a student at Moore College I was playing with John and Steve Abbott at Moore Park Golf Course.
On a Par 5 I played a 3 Iron off the fairway. I struck it well and it soared into the sky towards the green. When the ball reached the height of its trajectory, a small bird fluttered across the sky and the ball smacked into it. Both bird and ball plummeted to the grass.
We wandered up to the carnage and Chappo dryly said, “I’ll bet nothing like that’s ever gone through its head before!”
22 years later in 1999, Chappo, Steve Abbott and I were again playing at Pymble Golf Club on one of the last clergy golf days ever held.
We were on the 15th Tee. Chappo belted his ball with his driver, making as sweet a contact as I have ever seen. Not 10 metres in front of us, a Crimson Rosella glided across the ball’s path.
Thwack!
Feathers flew everywhere as the bird dropped helplessly to the ground in front of us. Chappo was livid, his mood hardly helped by three golf buddies behind him buckled over laughing like kookaburras and one whispering, “I’ll bet nothing like that’s ever gone through its head before.”
There are family memories
In about 1995 when our kids were teenagers, we had Chappo and Dick Lucas over for dinner. At this stage of our family life, if the kids ever got bored with the table talk, usually because guests ignored them or spoke down to them, they disappeared from the table as quickly as the dessert.
But not this night. Dick and John had so engaged them in conversation, listening to them, asking questions about their life and some of the challenges of being Christian in their worlds and discussing all sorts of theological issues with them that they were fixed to their dining chairs. It was about 10:30pm before anyone noticed that it was way past everyone’s bedtime.
There are final memories
About a fortnight before John’s death I took a mutual friend who was visiting from South Africa to see him in hospital. Rory had been Nelson Mandela’s chief bodyguard from 1994 to 1999.
After about 40 minutes of banter, Bible reading and prayer, Rory and I made our move to leave. Chappo asked us, as we got up, if we would mind taking off his slippers and the compression stockings that were holding at bay the terrible fluid build-up in his ankles and legs.
Rory dived for the right foot and I went to work on the left. Getting the slippers off was the easy part. The compression stockings were a different matter. It was almost impossible getting our fingers between stocking and skin to peel them off. Chappo expressed his embarrassment and apologised for asking us.
Rory looked up and said, “Don’t worry Chappo. I used to do this for Mandela.”
My first thought was of what a privilege it would have been to serve Mandela in such a way. But then another thought quickly followed, “Don’t be a dope. Doing this for Chappo is a much greater privilege. These are the beautiful feet, as scabby, scaly, puffy and ugly as they now look, that held up this man who proclaimed the word of life to generations of people all over the world.”
Then I thought, “What a privilege it would have been to have had the chance to do this for Jesus.”
But then I thought, “Ouch!”
The disciples had that chance and passed it up.
But it was Jesus who did it for us, above all, in his death for our sin.
And it was this splendiferous word that lay at the heart of Chappo’s life and made him, by God’s sovereign grace, a faithful servant of the Word – of Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2).
