Conversation with
Jan Best
Part 1
What you are reading is a special trilogy about Jan and Anneke Best. How can you summarize their life story in one sentence? Sailor, sailor, missionary. There is a world of adventure behind that. Together they share inspiring stories about their work in the ports on seagoing ships. Special moments of faith and grace that they experienced as a couple.
Sea, love, and faith
The story of Jan Best
If Jan Best had to summarize his life in a few words, he would choose a powerful trinity: sailor, yachtsman, missionary. Three careers, three vocations that he followed one by one. But behind that apparent simplicity lies the compelling story of a man who was completely seized by God, whose life was turned upside down, and who ultimately found his true destiny on the quay of IJmuiden—with a Bible in his hand instead of a warrant.
The irresistible call of the sea
“I was a five-year-old boy when I already wanted to become a sailor,” says Jan. “I don’t really know any better. And in my heart, to be honest, I still am.” Born in Koog aan de Zaan in 1944, he grew up in the Zaan region, but his heart beat for the sea. Where did that immense love come from? No idea. “It was probably inherited from a distant ancestor or something. I was the only one in the whole family who sailed. My parents didn’t really appreciate it, you know. They thought, oh well, it’ll blow over. But it never blew over.”
And no, that fascination never disappeared. “That majesty, that vastness… I can hardly put it into words,” he sighs. “When I walk along the beach now and hear the waves crashing on the shore, it moves me.” Even today, when he boards ships in IJmuiden to spread the gospel, his heart still leaps. “I step on deck and smell the ship’s oil, the paint, the salty sea air. Those galley smells, the whole mix. My heart still races. I would love to sail away with it, but I’m not going to do that.”
What he has done, however, is sail. “Sailing has always been my great passion,” he once told me. “My very last boat was a beautiful English sailing yawl. I had a lot of fun with it for 22 years!” That yawl had a special name: ICHTHUS. A name with a deep meaning, because the letters stand for ‘Jesous Christos Theo Uios Soter’. Freely translated: ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior’. He called her his floating means of evangelism, a wonderful way to combine his faith and his love for the water.
A man of the world
Jan rose to the rank of captain. His rank gave him absolute power over both the crew and the ship; he was ultimately responsible for everything. It made him a man who went through life with his nose in the wind and owed nothing to anyone. “I had been around the world ten times and was truly a man of the world. I was religious, but only to a very small extent. A man with imagination. To be honest, sometimes downright disgusting,” he now admits.
Before he met Anneke, he had led a pretty rough life. He prefers not to talk about it—it’s private. But he freely admits: “There was a dark phase in my life.” An old life full of choices that left lasting scars.
The total turnaround
Everything changed when he was 24. After sailing in “the East” for 26 months, he returned on study leave for his second rank. He was single, and someone told him about a Bible study weekend for young people. “It was just a disguised marriage market,” he says with a laugh. “I thought, well, I’ll go and take a look.”
He arrived late, around six o’clock on Saturday evening. During the break, all the young people came down the stairs in the large country house in Lage Vuursche. And there he saw her. All the way at the side. “I was standing thirty meters away from her. Then I thought to myself: that’s my wife.”
For Anneke, it was less obvious. “There was this young guy,” she recalls. “I had heard stories about his wild lifestyle. I thought: well, it would have to be something really special for me to go along with that.”
But it did turn out to be something special. “God really grabbed me by the scruff of my neck,” Jan says emphatically. “He pulled me out of the world I was living in and put my feet on the Rock, on Christ. Anneke was the means by which my life was completely transformed.”
Anneke brought him back down to earth. “She said: I’d rather you act a little more normal instead of acting all cocky. In that respect, it has been a turning point in my life.”
Sailing for the family
They got married in December, a day that was immediately overshadowed by sadness. Anneke’s mother had surgery two weeks before the wedding and did not recover. “As bride and groom, we visited her in the hospital. It was a terrible wedding day. Everyone was crying.”
In January, Jan set sail for Lagos to work as third mate on a ship belonging to the Royal Java-China Mail Lines. After a while, he changed course and resigned from the shipping company. He then worked as first mate on various hopper dredgers. The real step came when he was twenty-six: that’s when he became captain. This had a big advantage, because it meant he could finally be home more often. Life as a sailor meant long periods of absence. “There was no email or cell phone. I was completely cut off from the world,” he explains. “She would receive a blue letter after three weeks, and by then I was already somewhere else.” He kept this up for two years. For the sake of Anneke, the children, and the family, Jan decided to stop sailing. He went to work at Schiphol Airport. The daily commute from Heiloo—an hour there, an hour back—was exhausting. That’s why they moved to Alphen aan den Rijn in 1974, to cut the travel time in half: only twenty-five kilometers. They bought a house and never left. Now, fifty years later, they still live in Alphen, one house away from their first home.
A surprising career at Schiphol
Jan worked at Schiphol for 27 years and was given every opportunity to develop himself. “A really great employer, I’ve had a wonderful career,” he says. He became responsible for snow clearance and de-icing and was secretary of an international working group of major Western European airports for twenty years.
Five years before his retirement, he was promised that he would become the head of a group of 150 people. “I was already more or less Head of Operations. I was going to be given overall management responsibility.” But at the last minute, he was passed over for the position. Not because he had done anything wrong, but because the management preferred someone else for the job.
“That was quite a disappointment for me. I found it very difficult to accept,” he admits. “I thought: Lord, how can that be? What did I do wrong?” He walked through the Bospark in Alphen aan den Rijn, crying, alone with his sadness and questions.
But that disappointment became the gateway to something much better. He set up a consultancy within Schiphol, specializing in snow removal and de-icing. Thanks to his international contacts, he was able to sell his knowledge to other airports. “That went extremely well. It really made a lot of money for the airport.”
At 55, he retired and was given permission to do the consultancy work as a sole trader on his own account. He continued to do that work for another seven years. “I never expected it to turn out that way. It really did me no harm at all. I shouldn’t have been in that chair at all; I should have been doing something completely different.”
The third calling presents itself
When Jan retired, he said to the Lord, “Lord, I want to. I have the time now. What can I do for You? How can I serve You?” Before that, he always went to work very early in the morning, came home late at night, and was still busy with his job on the weekends.
Since then, for 26 years now, he has started every day with a quiet time. “Seven days a week, every morning. I get out of bed at 7:00 a.m. Then I talk to the Lord and read. I worship, give thanks, and ask questions of the Lord. And then I ask Him to please say something to me, to give me a message.”
Every day he receives an answer. “I simply consider that to be an answer from the Lord to me. It really amazes me. Sometimes I hear myself say, ‘Yes, how is that possible?'”
With Bibles to the harbor
Jan and Anneke have started an impressive work: visiting ships. They truly see this as a calling from God for their lives. They have now visited almost 1,300 vessels. In the early years, this required considerable effort; they sometimes visited four, five, or even six ships a day.
This “ship work” began in 2006. In the early years, the focus was exclusively on cruise ships docking in Amsterdam. Since 2009, cargo ships have been added, including in IJmuiden. To this day, this remains their sole field of work. They devote all their time and energy to it.
Anneke waited in the car with small gifts for the sailors’ wives and children, while Jan took the Bibles and bottle ships on board as gifts for the captain. “I have a ship in a bottle as a gift for the captain,” Jan explains. “It is made by a brother from Hardinxveld-Giessendam. Really nice and very detailed. So I start with that. But I add: this is just for fun. My main goal is: I have the Word of God, Bibles in your own language, and I want to give them to you.”
His background as a captain is a huge help in this regard. “A lot of people see a captain like that, who usually acts like a king. You don’t really dare to approach them. But I treat them as equals. Especially when I tell them about my background, they immediately accept it. Then you see the whole relationship, the atmosphere immediately changes.”
A first mate on a freezer ship (frozen cargo) initially said they didn’t have time. “Then I said: I know what it’s like to be a first mate, you have a lot on your mind just before departure. Then he looked up: have you been a first mate? Yes. He said: now we can talk. Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee first.”
Encounters that linger
But it’s not the five or six ships a day that Jan remembers most. It’s the special encounters, the moments when God’s hand was so tangible.
Only twice were they sent away. A Russian captain simply said “no” while spooning food into his mouth. A Chinese captain was really angry, coming all the way down to the deck to tell Jan to leave. “No Bibles on my ship.” Jan suspects it had to do with his beliefs: communist and atheist.
“The first time, you do feel rejected, hurt,” he admits. “But I’m past that phase. I actually just feel sorry for them. Without knowing it, they are depriving themselves of what they are doing. And with that, the crew as well.”
But more often than not, it’s the encounters that give hope. Take the Chinese captain with whom he shared dinner, for example. The ship was scheduled to depart at 11:00 a.m., but Jan asked the man what he missed most. “Fellow contact, contact with fellow Christians,” replied the captain. At that moment, there was a knock at the door. The departure had been postponed until 2:00 p.m.
“I said, ‘Now that we have time, I would appreciate it if the three of us could celebrate dinner together. He said, ‘I would very much like that.'” With paper cups of wine and cream crackers, they celebrated dinner together. “We had never seen each other before. We understood each other. And then the three of us sat at the table and celebrated dinner.”
The text he always shares
There is one Bible text that Jan always has the captains read: Philippians 4:6-7. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, present your requests to God.”
He explains: “Those captains sometimes have to make difficult decisions. And they can’t consult their colleagues, because they are all subordinate. He is expected to make that decision himself. In those cases, if you believe in God and Jesus, there is always another possibility. That text from Philippians 4. There you can lay everything before the throne of God, and then you receive the assurance, a promise, that you will receive the peace of God in your heart. Then you can relax, and you can make much better decisions than when you are extremely tense. They understand that and they all believe it to be true.”
Another Chinese captain read a passage from the same section and said, “The Lord is coming soon.” Jan looked up in surprise, because the text clearly said, “The Lord is near .” However, the captain stood his ground and repeated, “The Lord is coming soon.” Then it dawned on Jan. What happened? In the original Greek text, the word can be translated as both “near” (in distance) and “imminent” (in time). So the return of Jesus is really imminent. That’s actually what it says! Amazing, isn’t it? You learn something new every day!
@Wim van Putten