It was the fall of 1954 and time for my father’s annual crusade in the Oberschule (high school) stadium in Schwenningen, located in the Black Forest region of Germany. Singing was becoming increasingly important to me and when dad asked me to be the crusade soloist I jumped at the opportunity.
Before the 2nd World War, Schwenningen was known as the clock- making capital of the world, and it was in the residence of one of these clock factories that we stayed during the crusade—in the home of Schwester (sister) Benzing, a major supporter of Dad’s ministry. I slept in a small, though well-furnished, attic room.
One night, in the middle of the night, I was awakened with an overwhelming sense of lostness. I realized that, though I had been exposed to the gospel all my life, that I could not remember ever not going regularly to church, that I could give a good account of what it meant to be a believer, I had never come to the point in life of acknowledging that I was spiritually dead and needed a Savior.
There had been off and on times over the years when I sensed some conviction, but not enough to bring me to the point I was facing that night in the attic room. As I wrestled with this, I found myself looking back to my childhood when, for several years, our family lived with my grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Underhill (I called him Gang Gang), in Campbellton, New Brunswick. That night I realized that, more than anything, I wanted to be like him, and I had been around Gang Gang long enough to know what made him the man he was. He was a Christian who didn’t just talk, but walked his faith. When I climbed down those attic steps the next morning my life was headed in a different direction. I had made an about-turn. I had been made a New Creation. I was born again.

Aroma
In the story about Mary’s worship found in John 12:1-8, the latter part of verse three reads, “…and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” As Mary poured the perfume over her Master’s feet and wiped them with her hair, everyone in the house was touched by her offering. Not only that, Mary carried the aroma of her act of worship with her for days to come—it was on her hands, it was in her hair, the aroma of a worshiper!
As I recall that night when I had a flash-back to my grandfather, thousands of miles away, and wanted to be, more than anything else, like him, I’ve likened his impact on me to the “aroma of his life” crossing the Atlantic ocean to his grandson in an attic room, over a clock factory, in Germany’s Black Forest.
Years later, remembering that experience, I wrote the words to two songs—one a tribute to Gang Gang’s memory called “Child of My Child,” the Grandparent’s song, set to music by Patricia, and the other, “God’s Way,” my testimony, that I sing to the familiar music of “My Way.”