Yesterday, driving into Toronto to teach a course on Andrew Fuller and William Carey at Toronto Baptist Seminary, I fell to thinking about the sovereignty of God in my life: here I am a Christian historian, one of the "Lord's remembrancers," whose paternal grandparents were Kurdish Muslims and whose maternal grandparents were Irish Roman Catholics. If that is grace undeserved, I do not know what is! Then, along the same vein, today is the eightieth birthday of my father, Simon Haykin. I wish to go on record to say that I am forever indebted to his courage and integrity. He came from Iraq and decided at great cost to stay in England and then later brought my sister and I to Canada, for which I am forever grateful. He raised me in the West, gave me Western values and a Western education, for all of which I am deeply grateful. How different life would have been had he gone back to Iraq as he was planning when I was two or so!
Lord thank you that you gave me such a father.