INTRODUCING: David Beattie
INTRODUCING is a blog series introducing you to some of the members of Redeemer. You will meet some of them through their fact file, their life story, or their faith journey.
FOUND
The story of how God carried me from the streets of Saigon to here
You will know me as David Beattie, though that is not the name I started with. My wife is Khanh. Together we have an eleven-year-old daughter, Olivia, and a son, Bao, who is now fourteen and whom we recently adopted.
My Vietnamese name is Nguyen Tan Dat — or at least, that is the name I was given when I was found on the streets of Saigon during the Vietnam War. I was an infant, discovered by a policeman and taken to the local orphanage, one of hundreds of children being cared for by a team of British volunteers and aid workers.
Around that time, an English couple felt a calling to adopt. They already had two children of their own, but their hearts had room for one more, and I was their first choice. There was, however, a complication: I was still recovering from a serious bout of pneumonia and pleurisy and was being cared for by US Army medical personnel, so they sensibly chose to adopt a healthy girl instead. I like to think I simply made such a strong first impression that a second viewing was required. Several months later, once I had fully recovered, they came back for me, and I became their fourth child.I arrived at Gatwick in 1974 and began to understand what it meant to be a child in a family with loving parents. I grew up in Hayes, Middlesex, in west London, the youngest of four children. My mother was from Whitstable in Kent — a former missionary in the UK with the Faith Mission, where she had met my father in the 1960s while she held a mission in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. We went to church every week, and so I grew up steeped in the person of Jesus and in all the Bible stories. Each summer we travelled to the Faith Mission children’s Bible camps in Witnesham, Suffolk. At the age of eleven, I gave my life to Jesus and was truly saved. I knew it had happened because I felt different at once — less selfish, less angry — which was no small thing, even for a quiet child.
My parents found it difficult to settle in any one church, which I believe had something to do with my mother’s talent for disagreeing with each church’s theology in turn. We moved from the Salvation Army to a Baptist congregation to a Calvinistic Evangelical church, working our way through the denominational alphabet one disagreement at a time. When my parents eventually fell out with that last one, my siblings and I were teenagers — we had friends, we had roots, and the four of us decided we were staying put while our parents moved on once again. It was a painful season for our family, and not one I would wish on anyone.
Growing up, I had always nursed a childhood dream of becoming a pilot. So at seventeen, when I discovered that British Airways was recruiting for the first time in a decade, I felt certain the Lord was about to make that dream come true. My father worked for British Airways as a stores manager at Heathrow, and it was always a thrill to be taken into the hangars, to sit in the captain’s seat of Concorde and the 747s, and to size myself up against the controls. You couldn’t do that now. But I was about to learn that the Lord’s plans do not always line up neatly with ours. British Airways told me, very kindly, that I was two inches too short. Undeterred, I tried the RAF at a careers fair, where they cheerfully assured me my height was no problem at all — it was my eyesight that ruled me out, since fast-jet trainees could not wear glasses or contact lenses in those days. And so, two inches and one pair of spectacles later, the childhood dream came quietly to an end.
Bao, Khanh, Olivia & David
I found work instead in accountancy, where I made the curious discovery that a great many accountants are, in fact, failed pilots. Who could possibly have guessed. For fourteen years I worked as a part-qualified accountant at Fiat’s UK head office in Slough. It was there that my love for Ferrari and Formula One was born — Fiat owned Ferrari at the time — and there that I had the good fortune to sit in the latest models parked in the workshop on the ground floor of our building. It was not flying, but it was not a bad consolation prize either.
In 2002, my mother passed away from cancer, and that was a pivotal moment in my life. My career, too, seemed to have run its course; I no longer felt it was my calling. So I leaned on the Lord to guide me, and He led me to York, where I studied for a Bachelor’s degree in Management and IT as a thirty-three-year-old mature student. For three years I had told everyone my story while firmly declaring that I had absolutely no interest in returning to Vietnam. The Lord, with His usual sense of timing, then placed it firmly on my heart to go.
I was no stranger to travelling. I had made five road trips to Romania with my church, carrying aid to an orphanage and children’s camp near Arad, so a trip back to Vietnam felt entirely within reach. I asked my adopted Vietnamese sister if she would come with me. At the time she was married to a wealthy businessman, and the moment I suggested the idea she promptly booked first-class flights and five-star hotels — evidently her idea of roughing it. I, meanwhile, was wrestling with a rather different dilemma: should I keep studying, return to work, or start a business? I chose to keep studying, going on to do a Master’s at Cranfield University in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. My sister, sensibly, went to Vietnam without me.
On her return, she told me she had found our old orphanage. It had become a school for blind children and, remarkably, had not changed one bit — we still had the old photographs and cine film of our days there to prove it. She had also discovered another orphanage and was planning to go back out for a year to help them.
When I finished my Master’s, I was offered a consultancy role back with Fiat. So I seized the chance to visit Vietnam with my sister before returning to work. There I not only rediscovered where I came from, but also met wonderful people — including Khanh, who would later become my wife. It turns out the trip I had no interest in making opened up a future where I would once again have a family back in Saigon. We try to visit our family there at least every two years.
After Vietnam, I worked for Fiat for four months and was then invited to join Honeywell, which brought about my move to Essex. I did not want to live near Basildon, where the office was; Chelmsford was too expensive; and so Colchester became the appealing option — a piece of logic that left me commuting to Basildon daily, which rather defeated the purpose. After eighteen years and four different roles within Honeywell, my time there came to an end in April 2026 through redundancy. I am now waiting on the Lord to show me what the next chapter of my life will be.
What I have learnt across my life is that God has an amazing plan for each of us. He guides us, and He genuinely cares about our lives. It is only when I look back over the many twists and turns that I can see how good He has been, and how faithfully He provides. You rarely know it at the time; it is only on reflection that you can see how God has been at the centre of every decision and event that shapes your life, and the meandering path that it takes.
There have been more than a few moments that could have been the end of me: the pneumonia and pleurisy as an infant; the simple peril of being an orphan in a war-torn country; the time I fell out of the back of a London Routemaster at the age of twelve as it took a sharp corner, cracking my head on the kerb at thirty miles an hour; a mystery illness at twenty-one that wasted me down to six stone before clearing up just as mysteriously after two surgeries; and several near-misses on the road that I walked away from. Looking back, the pattern is hard to miss. God will not allow me to miss out on the plan He has for my life.
Since coming to Redeemer, I have walked through not only a difficult and stressful adoption process for our son and a career-ending redundancy, but also the strain of a failing business that I had acquired in 2024. Yet it is precisely here that the Lord has taught me His deepest lesson: when life is comfortable, it is desperately easy to feel no need of God at all. But when the storms come, when everything seems to be going wrong, that is when I have found I need Him most, and it is then that He uses these struggles to bring us back to Him. It is true that in hardship, turmoil, and loss, you must remember what God has already done in your life. 2025 has been the year I have grown closest to the Lord. Surrounded at Redeemer by brothers and sisters who love Jesus, I knew, beyond doubt, that I was exactly where I was meant to be at this time of my life.
