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An Ordinary, Great Man

By: Kathy Nesper 

I didn’t pay much attention to the elderly man, that long-ago year when I was part of the Hume Lake summer staff. He was gray-haired, quiet, and occasionally could be seen working around the grounds or speaking with one of the campers or staff members—a man easily overlooked. Yet Hume Lake Christian Camps might well not exist if it hadn’t been for his deep faith, developed through a lifetime of radical obedience to God, often at great personal sacrifice. A less likely hero of the faith is hard to envision. But isn’t that just like God?

Hunger for God

From a human perspective, the basic path of Hermon Pettit’s life was an ordinary one. His Christian parents emigrated from Canada to the U.S. in 1895, when he was an infant, and he grew up on a farm in the central valley of California. After college, he served a brief stint in the military during World War I, then attended seminary. As a Presbyterian minister, he married, had two sons, and served in a number of pastorates, with summer ministry in the Christian camps at Sequoia Lake and Mt. Hermon.

It was his spiritual path that was so remarkable, demanding everything from him but leaving a tremendous legacy.

Even as a child, Hermon had a deep love for the Bible, along with a hunger for the lost to come to know Christ and for spiritual power in his own and others’ lives, and at eight, he sensed a call to be a missionary. During his sophomore year of college, he began a lifelong pursuit of seeking God’s guidance after he failed to ask for it in a decision to run for student office, had no peace, and then was slandered when he felt compelled to withdraw at the last minute.

The next year a nervous disorder struck, complicated by vision problems. Nursing his shattered nerves the following summer, he connected with two locations that would have great significance years later. Serving first as a counselor at a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) camp at Sequoia Lake east of Fresno, he then went farther into the mountains to do logging work at a site named after one of the businessmen who had built it—Hume Lake.

When the United States entered World War I, Hermon wrestled with his conscience over the possibility of killing and couldn’t bring himself to enlist. God solved the dilemma for him soon after graduation. He was drafted, assigned to be a non-combat stretcher bearer, and sent to France, though the armistice was signed before he saw active service.

Steps of Faith

With college and military service behind him, seminary beckoned, and he learned to trust in God’s provision when he made a financial pledge he had no way to pay and then watched as the funds were provided. As graduation approached, it seemed time to fulfill his early call to missions in Korea, but he was rejected because of his previous struggle with his nerves.

In confusion, Hermon turned to God for answers. The reply came: his specific call to missions was as an intercessor, and he began to pray in faith for a million souls in Korea to come to know Jesus and for other countries around the world. He sealed an even deeper spiritual commitment by writing out a statement renouncing any “success” that might distract him from his purpose “to know the love, power, and fellowship of Jesus Christ.”

During his ordination service as a minister, he experienced an overwhelming sense of the Spirit’s power, and he enthusiastically set out to seek “revival” through new believers and increased spiritual power among those who already believed. When a vivacious church worker seemed capable of contributing to ministry, they married. Their fruitful work with young people led to an invitation to do summer ministry on staff at Mt. Hermon’s Christian camps, and two sons joined the family.

Hermon’s enthusiasm as a young pastor was short-lived. Over several pastorates in different cities, he tried various approaches that produced some numerical growth, but not the spiritual change he hungered for. In desperation, he examined his own life and felt convicted to give up his community activities, distressing his wife, who enjoyed the engagement.

The prayer burden grew, and Hermon and another man committed to pray nonstop one evening in the early 1930s until they knew God had answered. They had just knelt to begin when a stranger arrived, saying he had traveled more than a hundred miles looking for a prayer meeting and asking to join them. As the three prayed together, the stranger, who had identified himself as a born-again Jew, announced they had been asking long enough and declared it was time to begin praising God for the answer. They changed the nature of their prayers accordingly, but Hermon never saw the man again and concluded he had been an angel sent to announce the victory they’d been praying for.

The tide began to turn toward the longed-for spiritual renewal, and Hermon spent hours alone in intercessory prayer. At the same time, his wife’s dissatisfaction over this “antisocial and unchristian” behavior increased, and she left him in 1933, taking their sons. In deep regret, he repented before God for disregarding a sense before they had married that it was not God’s leading.

Everything else fell apart, too—their ministry at Mt. Hermon and his pastorate were terminated, and the strain affected his eyes, leading to lifelong loss of sight in one. In keeping with the commitment he had written eleven years earlier to sacrifice everything in pursuit of knowing Christ, a broken man moved back to his parent’s home, increasingly convinced that his best service for the Lord would come precisely from those broken areas of his life.

Go Up Higher!

The profound losses began a period of deepening faith and dependence on God for material needs, and little miracles multiplied as a result. Out of money and in need of ten dollars, he received an unexpected one-dollar repayment by mail, and someone handed him the other nine at a prayer meeting. When he had no gas, he asked a friend for a dollar, only to learn the man had already given it to his wife for that purpose. Over time, Hermon learned to be specific in his requests, sometimes for as little as a single penny that God then provided through a found nickel or a one-cent postage stamp discovered in the bottom of a drawer he felt led to clean out.

He decided to depend totally on God and committed from then on to give 100% of whatever he had. A cabin he owned at Mt. Hermon was opened to guests, even if meant he must sleep in his car, and he often went hungry until God provided. The last connection with his ex-wife and children was lost when her second husband was jealous of even the small amount of child support Hermon was able to pay. Surrendering his sons into God’s care, he gave up their visits and allowed all ties with them to be severed, lasting for almost ten years.

Yet it was during these years of sacrifice that the broken places that had driven Hermon to deep faith began to produce more of what he had so long prayed for. During continued ministry at the Lake Sequoia camps, he met John Strain, a gifted school and Bible teacher, and the two began praying regularly together, interceding for general revival and for a larger Christian camp ministry. Others joined what became six-hour weekly prayer sessions, including three “young farmers,” Dave Hofer, Walter Warkentin, and Dave Thiessen, and these five became the board of a Christian bookstore, expanding to more stores and other evangelistic and mission projects.

John and Hermon shared with the others their prayer burden for a Bible-centered conference center of their own, and the group formed Sequoia Fellowship Conferences. That led to the famous meeting where each of the five drew a slip of paper with his assignment, and Hermon remained primarily in intercession. Years later, he wrote, “It is quite evident, looking back, that this whole sudden development of Christian projects was the moving of God through his Spirit into a culmination of the protracted period of years spent in heartfelt praying for revival….Periods of dormancy with the underground development of root systems must first take place before the spring times of flowering and expansion.”

The group began its first official camps at Lake Sequoia during the summer of 1944, and in August, John and Hermon slipped away to pray for a full-time campground of their own. In response, God spoke to Hermon through the words of Luke 14:10 in his King James Bible: “Friend, go up higher!” He had learned to seek God’s specific guidance in the pages of Scripture, and now he was led to a detailed description in 2 Chronicles 20:16: by a cliff, at the end of a brook, before the wilderness.

The story is well known of the group going higher into the mountains the following summer, where they asked if the Hume Lake Hotel was available for sale. It was, though, at an impossible price. Hermon found it matched the Chronicles description and declared by faith God wanted them to have it. On the strength of God’s promise in Philippians 4:19 to provide all our needs, the purchase was made, and the organization’s name was changed to Hume Lake Conferences.

Now You Are Low Enough

The work grew rapidly, but Hermon’s struggle with nerves returned in 1952. Temporary amnesia from a life-threatening injury led to more than seven months in a psychiatric hospital, and he found himself homeless when he was released. He stayed with friends and returned to Hume most summers, doing landscaping work like building trails and steps around the buildings.

During this bleak time, God spoke again, saying, “Now you are low enough so that I can really use you!” In response, Hermon sensed it was time “for an even bigger prayer push,” and for the rest of his life, he prayed around the world for hours each day, naming each country individually before God. One joyous discovery was that the million commitments to Christ in Korea he had prayed for years earlier had already been answered six-to-eight-fold, and he determined never to be guilty of too-small faith again!

There was a new sense that it was time to take advantage of a lot Hume had granted him years earlier. At the time, he had felt God led him to one high on the hill, on a slope at an almost 45-degree angle. People pronounced this crazy, saying it would have no view. He responded with the wisdom that had become characteristic of his faith-based life, saying, “I try to follow the Lord’s personal inspiration when I preach a sermon, so why not when I build a house?”

And so began a seven-year building process, squeezed into the few hours not devoted to prayer. As the building began and the foundation jutted out above the angled slope, a new benefit of listening to God’s leading emerged—he had one of the most beautiful views of all, with a clear look down onto the lake with the mountains rising beyond it.

In keeping with Hermon’s lifestyle of faith, building materials, and extra labor rolled in either free or inexpensively, sometimes before he even knew they would be needed—a level (later found to be defective so that one side of the building ended up a quirky four inches lower than the other), a wheelbarrow offered at exactly the moment he was wrestling with a large rock, creek sand for concrete, even a manzanita branch perfectly shaped as a rail for the inside stairs and found at the exact location God had told him to look. He named the cabin Ravenrest after 1 Kings 17:2-5, “in appreciation for the many ‘ravens’ God had sent to help build it.” As at Mt. Hermon, he opened it freely to visitors, and it lived up to its name for decades as a place of rest and spiritual refreshment for many.

Jubilee!

In late 1963, Hermon felt God led him to begin writing, but he didn’t understand what it meant. The help he needed came two years later when John Strain’s daughter, Helen, wrote to tell him what a blessing he had been in her life. She was a gifted and published writer, and her family stayed in the cabin every summer as the two of them worked together on a book-writing project. God told them would take a long time to complete, and it did—his autobiography, Jubilee!, was published by Helen’s ministry organization sixteen years later and was joined over time by several other books.

Hermon sensed God’s voice again during that same year of 1979 when Jubilee! was published, this time saying he would live seven more years. In February 1986, he had surgery for a blocked vein in his leg and felt it was time to move into a retirement home. To the last, God met his precise need at just the right moment. The surgery made Helen hours late in inquiring at the home he had specified, only to find a room had become available just one-half hour before she arrived. He was there only a short time; a few days after preaching in the chapel on Easter Sunday, a conversation about the Lord with a friend was interrupted by God calling him to his true eternal Home ten days before his 92nd birthday, right on time with the prophecy of seven years.

In 2003, Wildwood camp was established at Hume Lake in loving memory of Hermon Pettit. In his foreword to a new edition of Jubilee! published for the occasion, then-director-at-large Bob Phillips summarized Hermon’s life this way: “Heroes of vision and faith often are not recognized by the world, or by their family or friends until they have passed on….Hermon was a man who prayed, believing that God used whatever weak or feeble efforts anyone would make as long as it was done out of faith.… We are richer because of his obedience.”

Kathy Nesper and her husband of 51 years, D.W., live in the Central Valley of California and began dating when she was on summer staff at Hume Lake in 1970. In an unrelated but God-ordained “coincidence” eight years later, she met John Strain’s daughter and Hermon’s co-writer, Helen Wessel Nickel, who became her spiritual mentor, and the two started a Christian ministry together—in the living room of Hermon’s cabin at Hume Lake, of course. Kathy and her husband and three sons became frequent visitors there, and she got to know Hermon more personally. Her family, now expanded to include daughters-in-law and grandchildren, still enjoys a week at Hume every other summer.