By Chris Lewis, April 2007

Jean revisits the past without living in it. "God is not finished with me yet," she says. PHOTO: MELISSA BOECKEL » Extended Photo Gallery

Amid all the chaos and candle lighting and incongruity of that muggy February night, a gaping 33 years ago in Panama City, there was this sobbing at the front door.

No pensé que lo harían! "I didn't think they'd do it!"

The young Panamanian - let's call him "Jose" - was inconsolable. So shaken that friends could not coax him into the crowded sixth-floor apartment on Espinosa Street, the home of missionaries Gil and Jean Reimer. And so there he kneeled, in a heap on the hallway tile, his grief bathed by a single glaring light bulb.

"I didn't think they'd do it!"

Jean Reimer never heard the hysterics. Inside the vigil-like living room, inside her mind, the shell shock was deafening. The mutilated, decomposed body of her husband - the father of her two children - had turned up earlier that day, eight miles and an eternity away. A police cruiser, on routine patrol in the U.S.-operated Canal Zone, had frightened off a pack of vultures from the tall grass along a lonely back road.

The Bible teacher had been missing for six days. Still missing, however, were the reasons. They who? Why? How?

"Probable multiple stab wounds," read line 18 of the death certificate. The ink-bled type looked as hazy as the stated facts: "(Circumstances to be determined by police.)"

But for three decades, the truth of Gil's death was bound by this parenthesis - the antithesis of the ebullient, beyond-the-box life he had lived. Officially, the case remains unsolved. Perhaps it always will be, in the earthly realm.

Knowing this, Jean had buried her disquieting questions with Gil's body - in Panama in 1974, following a memorial service that drew 600 Panamanians and Canal Zone residents. She had just turned 40. It wasn't the rite of passage she'd expected: Police interrogations. Wild rumors. And a new identity confronting her on standard forms, where she had to bypass the suddenly surreal "single" and "married" boxes and, cringing, check the empty one for "widow."

She mourned. She wrestled. She made peace. She released her life again to God. And she kept marching - in the resolute footsteps of 20-year-old Jean Little, the single, Saskatchewan farm girl who'd raised eyebrows in 1955 as the youngest missionary ever commissioned by Avant.

She returned to her native Canada. She inspired her children into a life of ministry. She remarried, in 1978, as Jean Barsness - to a ministry man named Alton. She beat breast cancer. She earned master's and doctoral degrees in missiology. She became a highly respected voice and educator in the missions world - as a professor at Briercrest Bible College, and as a board member at Avant, SEND International, IFMA and Back to the Bible Canada. She co-founded CrossTraining, a unique program that equips students for cross-cultural ministry.

And then, only then, came the truth.

Strange, how iridescent revelation can be in the twilight of life ... although, at age 73, Jean's life is still a whirlwind of classes and meetings and globe-trotting.

The divine appointment caught up with Jean last year, on a visit to Panama City. A group of Gil and Jean's former students, now in their 50s, were reunited at a friend's home. Among them was Jose, who'd left their hallway that long-ago night and gone into hiding, taking secrets with him. The young man Gil had discipled was now a school administrator.

Halfway through lunch, Jose veered the conversation into the crevice of '74.

"Juanita," he murmured. "I just want you to know: Fue una equivocacion. It was a mistake."

Strange, how things past tense can become oh-so-very present. Groping for words, she said, "Yes, I thought Gil's death might have been a matter of mistaken identity."

She'd been so close, and yet so far, from the real story. The truth would thaw a Cold War mystery - revealing that Gil was killed not by accident, but as a martyr targeted by a communist spy who'd infiltrated a Bible study. Really, the order had been to take out three missionaries, whose evangelistic impact was subverting a leftist student movement on campuses. The three men: Gil, fellow Avant missionary Alfred Mount, and a Campus Crusade for Christ director.

The "mistake" was that the confused killers had first kidnapped Gil instead of Al - who lives today in Southern California. However, in the revolutionary tide of 1970s Panama, where people were known to disappear, Jose had been too scared to alert missionaries to the underground rumor mill.

"What a relief," Jean gushed. "This brings so much closure - just knowing that he died for the sake of the gospel." (Oh, if only Gil's parents were alive to hear this.)

As the puzzle pieces tumbled from Jose's mouth, someone offered up a "Hallelujah! We finally have an answer."

But as Jean returned home to Calgary, it was a question that comforted her: What if it wasn't a mistake? What if Queen Esther hadn't risked her life for the Jews? What if Hannah hadn't returned little Samuel to the temple? What if ... God is truly sovereign?

God said, "That's it."

Aileen Jean Little first encountered death at age four, in a nursery rhyme.

Each night, she would kneel by her bed and recite, If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee Lord my soul to take. Haunted by the thought, she'd burrow beneath the covers. She knew her parents were believers assured of heaven, but not until age 15 did Jean accept Christ herself.

When her admission to nursing school was delayed, she decided to "kill a year" at Bible school. In 1954, Don P. Shidler, the president of Avant (then known as Gospel Missionary Union), visited the Briercrest campus to talk about church planting in Panama. Jean's heart stirred. She signed up to go. "I'd often said that I didn't want to be an ‘old-maid' missionary," she recalls. "I didn't want to dress like they did. But I had a calling - not to missions, but to lordship. To obedience."

After six years in Panama, she furloughed home to Canada. She met a strapping school teacher from Manitoba named Gil Reimer who was about to join her mission. Avant was a Reimer family affair: In 1953, Gil's cousin Linda had arrived as the first Avant missionary in Panama, followed by cousin Delbert, who then encouraged Gil's older brother, Cliff, to come set up a school for missionary kids.

Three of Gil's four siblings joined the mission. On his Avant application form, filed in April 1961, Gil described his calling: I visited Panama ... and saw the need for a Bible school. God said, "That's it."

Gil and Jean married in June 1962, and returned to Panama together. After years of student evangelism in Santiago, they relocated in 1969 to Avant's Sunrise Farm (El Amanecer) campus, about 20 miles outside of Panama City. Jean led Bible studies and managed the guest house; Gil directed Avant's leadership training and taught classes at Seminario Bethel, which he later converted into a popular theological extension program.

But in August 1973, they took a different tact toward building the national Church. They moved to a Panama City high-rise - to minister not in the swelling slums, but to the urban elite. A Latin church leader had scolded, "You missionaries act as if the professional class doesn't have a soul." For Gil, it was a carrot-stick comment; he immersed himself in research and prayer, then proposed a new upper-class ministry to the Avant home office in Kansas City.

"He was a man of adventure," Jean says, the kind who drove from Canada to Panama, just to try it. "If nobody was doing it, he'd make it happen."

Still, she resisted. God, I'm just a farm hick - what do I know about high society women and protocol? But within six months, the couple had six Bible studies going. "People were drawn to Gil like a magnet," Jean says. "His presence filled the room, and yet he made everyone feel comfortable."

Gil was more than a gifted teacher - he was also a perpetual student, earning a master's in medieval history while on furlough. He memorized encyclopedias, using random facts to connect with newcomers as people, not conversion projects. Gil's buoyant laughter never fit "the strict Christian box," Jean says. For him, blowing up people's "Christian" stereotypes was good godly fun. He was a pianist, a soloist, and a linguist fluent in four languages. He learned Spanish in record time - with a Panamanian accent so flawless that it startled taxi drivers and shopkeepers.

But the everyman was first a family man. February 9, the Saturday before his death, Gil turned down a visitor's request for a local tour. "Excuse me," he apologized, "but I have a date with my kids." That day, he took Glen and Betti Lou bowling.

Monday the 11^th was a rush-hour morning. The kids left for a weekday boarding school. At noon, Gil returned from a boys' camp session at Sunrise Farm, where he'd challenged the youth about heaven and the cost of a martyr's life: Is it worth it? "I would not be ashamed if God took me home today," Gil preached that morning. "He has a plan for my life."

The couple shared a quick lunch - then Jean herself was off to Sunrise Farm, to stay for a week-long girls' camp.

"Honey," Gil said, kissing Jean good-bye as she hoisted her duffle bag. "Won't it be great when everything gets back to normal?"

A story to tell

Normal never arrived, of course.

Today, Jean is compiling a 100-page journal for her five grandkids. Something to show who their grandfather was - "How else will they know?" she says. The working title is testament to how Jean survived the journey: Not ‘Somehow,' But Triumphantly.

She laughs, wistfully. Because there were days, God knows, when it felt more like somehow.

"It created in me a greater craving for God. How shallow I was before Gil's death," she muses. "I was very comfortable being a wife and mother, and I still believe in that. But it's so easy just to rely on the giftedness of your husband. I had to find my own."

Her Irish blood insisted on it. During her first trip to the Emerald Isle two years ago, Jean discovered her place in a lineage of Word-grounded, ground-breaking Christian women who freely spoke their minds - such as the grandmother who'd dined with royalty and given a Buckingham Palace address about temperance and alcohol.

She was a latent leader - others saw it in her first. Shortly after Gil's death, she was challenged by Briercrest president and personal mentor Henry Hildebrand. "Jean, instead of going back to Panama, don't you think you could make more impact for missions in the classroom?" he asked.

Jean likes to say, "Gil packed more into his 36 years than most people pack into 72." Her own life's pack job is, well, pretty full. It was Jean who became the constant student, the gifted teacher other students flocked to, the mentor they confided in, and the humble sojourner who erected her share of altars in the desert - to remind young passersby of God's faithfulness.

"She wasn't a teacher who read from a missions book - she went way beyond the theory," says Avant missionary Corina Clements, one of Jean's students at Briercrest in the early ‘90s. "She asked the hard questions. She taught us to think and have convictions. She's faced so many things so gracefully."

Avant missionary Spring Becker first latched onto Jean during her commissioning in 1998, when Jean served as the mission's Assistant to the President for International Training. "I've been really touched by her. She's meant a lot to my spiritual journey," Becker says. "She talked so straight and honest to me. She opened my eyes and made me feel valuable, both as a woman and in community."

For the many miles she's journeyed, this much Jean knows: "God is not finished with me yet." Last year in Panama, Jean celebrated the firmly rooted work of the church association Avant formalized in 1965 - Unión Misionaria Evangélica de Panamá. Today, Avant has a minimal presence there, thanks to a now-autonomous association of 29 churches that commissions its own missionaries.

It was a fitting backdrop for Jean's discovering the bigger story of Gil's death - and his life. In the 1970s, she learned, a Chilean "student" had spent two years carefully befriending the Reimers. He joined their Bible studies. He posed as a new believer. He used the right Christian lingo. But he was actually an illegal immigrant doctor spearheading a leftist movement on college campuses, including the University of Panama near the Reimer's apartment.

"He really played his part well," Jean says. "I've prayed for this man so many times, that he would be haunted by what he's done. But I've forgiven him."

Gil had been so impressed with the Chilean's zest for the Word, and his intelligent, eager questions - in hindsight, a bit too eager for Latin culture. He'd introduced himself as a Catholic - "But I'd really like to learn the Bible," he told Gil.

Two weeks before Gil's disappearance, the Chilean had attended Jean's 40^th birthday party. She was unnerved that night by the eerie way he'd scanned the crowd in their apartment. But Gil dismissed her suspicions. Weeks after his body surfaced, two Panamanian policemen let it slip that the couple had been followed for six months. Like Jose, they'd kept mum with fear.

Now, three decades later, Jean faced the same dilemma: to tell, or not to tell?

"No," cautioned colleagues and loved ones, still sensitized to Panama's shifty political climate. In the early ‘70s, after a military coup had ushered into power Omar Torrijos, the Casco Viejo (Old City) cafes were abuzz about the strongman's socialist reforms, about his crackdowns on Panama's upper class and his political opponents.

"Is Torrijos red or pink?" went the whispers. Is he a closet communist or just a sympathizer?

The question still lingers - with another Torrijos, Omar's son Martín, who was elected to the palacio in 2004. As Panama strengthens relations with Cuba and China, Western missionaries are warily reading between the lines. But they're blurred by a domino parade of new leftist Latin leaders - especially the strident nationalists flouting anti-U.S. rhetoric in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. (Facing the threat of property seizures last year, Avant accelerated plans to release its Bolivia ministries to the national Church.)

Politics alone couldn't keep Jean out of Panama, her beloved adopted country. Barely a year after Gil's death, she led her first Briercrest student group there on a 1975 missions trip. "I was still trying to find myself as a widow," she recalls. "I really was scared. I told my students, ‘I don't ever want to be alone on the streets.'"

The look-over-your-shoulder sensation still billows at times. And yet ... there was Jean in December, bracing against those gusts of fear and boarding a plane for Kansas City - then flying through an ice storm, just to meet a writer who'd journey with her through all the years she'd so neatly tucked into memento boxes.

"I don't want this to be ‘just another story,'" she says. "It's God story in our lives."

During a layover in Denver, Jean winced at the scarred and yellowed news clippings she'd saved, but never before dared to read: "Bible Teacher Missing" ... "Body Found in Panama City" ... "11 Stab Wounds on Pastor's Body." Fresh tears welled with the memories. But they also exposed a story of healing, one far bolder than the headlines. You can dust off the decades, but you cannot wipe away the fingerprints of God's redemptive work.

They were everywhere, on a story just dying to be told.

Paranoia & promise

In early 1974, a Reimer family newsletter highlighted a Romans 12 passage they'd been studying: Be glad for all that God is planning for you. They were looking forward to finishing church camps, taking a three-month furlough in Canada, then returning to Panama to organize six "professional class" Bible studies into their first urban church plant.

The following verse was glossed over: Be patient in trouble, be always prayerful.

That Monday night, February 11, Gil finished teaching a class at the Sunrise camp and headed back to their city apartment. Alone at camp, Jean didn't sleep well. Something just didn't feel right - as she told her brother-in-law, Cliff.

"Oh, Jean, Gil's a grown boy. Don't worry," Cliff said. But when the maid arrived Tuesday morning, Gil didn't answer the doorbell. She noticed the family car was missing. Gil was a no-show at a Tuesday Bible study, and people began checking with local hospitals. At the girls' camp that evening, word reached Jean just as she was approaching the podium. Her intuition flared up again, and her Bible slipped from her numb fingers - thump.

She sped home, headlong into a week of fog: Streams of well-wishers. Impromptu prayer circles. Dead-end visits with baffled authorities - British, U.S., Panamanian.   

Standing on her terrace one morning, overlooking the city's cement jungle, she thought, I'd give anything to see that little yellow Volvo drive up. To keep faith, and her wits, she comforted others by reciting God's promises from the Word.

But the biggest promise arrived at 6 a.m. Sunday morning, as she was lying in bed. Psalm 68, God whispered: I am a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows.

"I knew right then that Gil was in heaven," Jean says.

Her spirit settled. "But I didn't tell anyone else," she recalls. "I let God work out all the details." He already had, in that the kids were away at Elim Academy, spared from a roller-coaster week. In that Gil's mom was there on a rare vacation; his dad would cut short a South American business trip and arrive later that morning.

At 3 p.m. Sunday, Canal Zone police called Jean to the station, stirring people's hope. But she strode into the chief inspector's office with a higher peace.

"Mrs. Reimer, your husband is dead," the chief announced.

"No, my husband is with the Lord, whom he loved and served," Jean replied, faintly. "Can I please have a drink of water?"

Alarmed by Jean's calm, the chief later observed: "There's something wrong with that woman - she doesn't have an emotional bone in her body." Answered a Christian officer: "No, sir. You just saw the power of God in a woman's life, responding to the prayers of hundreds."

In the weeks that followed, Jean's serenity riled a local detective. During one exhaustive interrogation, he exploded, "Señora, you're telling me a bunch of lies! We're finished!" On the sun-dappled street outside, she fell into hysterics - a glimpse into how much God had sustained her.

Her children, as well. The night his father's body was found, 10-year-old Glen pulled Jean into his bedroom - so he could cry unashamedly, she assumed. Instead, her son opened his Bible to Philippians 1: For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain. "Mom, this is Daddy! It's OK."

The day of Gil's funeral, 8-year-old Betti awoke and proclaimed, "This is going to be a good day! Jesus suffered so much for - we can suffer a little for him, can't we?"

Bodies of evidence

Somehow, Gil's car turned up outside a pizza shop, adorned with parking tickets. The rearview mirror had been broken off. A cigarette lighter was under the seat. His body had been found with $11 in his pocket, a dented wedding ring, a mashed school ring - signs of a struggle, but not a robbery.

That's where the investigation stalled. "He disappeared as if the earth swallowed him up," observed The Messenger, put out by the Evangelical Mennonite Conference. The Kansas City Times quoted Avant leaders as "dumbfounded" by what they termed "a complete mystery." Like the authorities Panama, they didn't suspect foul play; Gil wasn't head of the field, and the mission wasn't wealthy, they reasoned.

"The only way we're going to find out is in eternity," said Alfred Mount recently, Gil's targeted colleague. Jean's phone call last December, about his life's peril in Panama, caught Mount by surprise. "I was never involved in politics. I didn't think I'd called attention to myself," he said.

At the time, the scant evidence only magnified fears of Avant's 16 missionaries in Panama. Some worried their phones were tapped. They heard of a Baptist missionary's life being threatened.

"I went to bed at night very fearful, like ‘Oh no, they're watching us,'" recalls Jean's friend Shari Regier, a former Avant missionary who managed the Sunrise Farm complex with her husband, Daryl. "You felt like your life was an open book."

Retired Avant missionary Don Palmer, then the mission's Latin America director, flew from Kansas City to Panama when Gil was reported missing. "I remember asking the group how they felt about staying, if they wanted to leave - 100 percent said, ‘No,'" Palmer says.

"They were called as missionaries. They knew it wasn't the safest place in the world. But it was heart-wrenching," he says. "I was impressed with Jean's strength and sense of peace. She didn't go to pieces. And [his brother] Cliff was making all the funeral arrangements under such stress. When he needed to cry, he'd slip away into a room by himself. People around him and Jean needed to see them as strong."

Avant had faced such crisis before. In 1956, in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, Avant's Roger Youderian was one of five missionaries martyred by Waodani tribesmen, a redemptive story memorialized last year in the film End of the Spear. Gil had been one in the new wave of missionaries inspired by that tragedy.

Last January, the movie was hitting theaters just as Jean returned from Panama - two storylines crossing paths in the winter of time, forgiveness, renewal.

For Jean, the real story wasn't in the criminal facts, but how God lined the way with the brethren. "I'll never cease to be in awe about what it means to be in the body of Christ. We were never alone," she says.

A month after Gil's death, the mission moved them briefly to Quito, Ecuador. Waiting for her were Marj Saint and Barbara Youderian, widows from the Waodani tragedy. "Being around somebody who'd been through it, they understood me," Jean recalls. As Marj counseled, "Jean, people will tell you that time heals all wounds. No, time doesn't heal. Only Jesus heals."

Among the 700 letters that poured in were cards from missionary kids near the now-evangelized Waodani village. Glen found a playmate and confidant in Avant missionary kid Bob Stuck, who'd recently lost his own father to illness. (Stuck is still in Quito, now as Avant's regional director.)

"Gil's death was something you never put out of your mind," says Cliff, who has retired to Winnipeg. "It was always there." He'd often wondered, Why couldn't it have been me, God? I was older ...

"But God allowed it to happen this way," Cliff says. "And I look at how well his children are doing. That's a real consolation."

Gil's mark on his son is indelible, from Glen's encyclopedic mind, to his undaunted humor, to a missions devotion that quivers Jean's heart. While in Buddhist Asia in the 1990s, Glen was threatened. His college philosophy professor once asked, "Aren't you bitter about your dad's death?"

No, Glen replied - "Because my mom wasn't."

It was a wilderness lesson. A deep peace forged in that thin and barren place, somewhere between God, I've nothing left, and God, you're my everything. Gone was her husband, her ministry, her home.

On the eve of the Quito move, after tucking in the kids, Jean bowed in the living room and shouted through the din of her brokenness: "God, I don't understand your ways. They're higher than mine. But thank you for taking Gil, for taking the father of my children, for taking me out of Panama."

In the echo of her desolate prayer, she heard Job's cry: The Lord gives and takes away - blessed be the name of the Lord. She heard the Psalmist's plea to not forget God's "benefits" - even those of subtraction. She renewed her trust in God's economy.

Her mind floated back to age 17, to her baptism at summer camp. Breaking through the waters of Last Mountain Lake, she'd joined her campmates in singing, I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back, no turning back.

"I didn't have any idea of the cost," Jean says today. "But just look at how God has blessed me, like crazy. I now have students all over the world who are in missions. Who would have thought it?"