In my Baby Book, six weeks after my dad had passed away, my mom wrote:
On June 8, you said, “Soon will be Dad’s birthday.” Mom told you it was yesterday. Then you said, “Yes, but we didn’t have him.”
Then in July, a month later Mom recorded:
When we passed the graveyard on Sunday you said, “When that pile of dirt goes down, Dad will have stood up.”
On Friday, October 4, 1968, almost six months after my dad’s funeral Emma wrote about me in her diary:
At Nellie’s funeral she stood real close to the grave. I believe she wanted to see what graves were like.”
The funeral has been lost somewhere within my memory. I believe it’s buried somewhere with the memory of the pain attached to it.
My childhood was a happy one. When adults asked me about my dad I remember telling them about the good memories I had and then adding, “I’m glad he died when I was so young that way I was too young to remember any sense of loss. They all believed me. I did too until one day when I was twenty-five.
How can one grieve and release a buried memory? While hypnosis has crossed my mind, it leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There is a reason God created our minds with the amazing ability to block out memories that cause overload. Is that a part of his promise to not allow more than we can handle to come into our lives? (1 Corinthians 10:13)
I believe that eventually, when my emotions are healed enough to handle it, the memory will return. Acknowledging that there was a loss has been the first step in receiving that healing. In His time God will show me the next step along that path.
After the funeral there is only one more snapshot. A dream. In this dream my dad has just stepped through the outside door into the kitchen and I am staring up at him. He’s wearing his denim-blue work shirt, suspenders and denim overalls. Our eyes lock. My heart cries, “Why don’t you come home anymore?” But not a word is spoken. There are no tears. I only feel an indescribable longing.
I have frequently questioned the authenticity of this dream-memory. Even though the dream had occurred prior to the time my mom had remodeled our house, in my memory the dream was set in our newly remodeled kitchen. Was my dream-memory superimposed into our new kitchen because I have difficulty remembering how our pre-remodeled house used to look or was it a false memory?
Several years ago I discovered the answer in my Aunt Emma’s diary. On December 19, 1969, one year and eight months after my dad’s death, sandwiched in between a comment about how cute my younger brother Roland could talk and how she had shipped off a box of sugar and creamer sets she had painted, Emma had penned the following words:
Mother (Grossmommy) said Aleta told her she dreamed her father came in the door. “Do you know why I dreamed that? Because I wish to see him.”
More than forty years later I could still feel that longing deep inside. My heart crying out for my daddy. This time the tears came.
That longing subconsciously followed me throughout my life. Because of it, unhealed, I made choices that I believe I would not have made otherwise. I spent my teen years searching to fill that empty void in my heart. It was not until I allowed God to fill it that I found peace.
We all have a God-shaped void within us. It is only by daily inviting his presence in to fill it that we maintain that peace.
A modern American Castle on my drive home from school.
It is nearing the end ofthe school year and the children have been feeling restless, but everytime I bring out a fairytale, they become quiet and I can see and feel them entering into the magic of the story.
A knight in pink and shining armour.
So we read fairytales and dress up as knights. We decorate crowns with jewels and become princesses and princes. The door of our classroom becomes the entrance into an ancient castle.
Baskets and baskets of fairytale books line the wall and the children and the teacher never tire of looking at the pictures and reading and hearing the stories.
A Princess Knight
We make castles out of ceareal boxes. We color and cut out fairytale character.
We retell stories and make up our own.
We write fairytales and publish them as books.
We display our work in the castle where Rapunzel's hair dangles out the side of the tower.
We write fairytale Math stories.
We compare interesting versions of our favorite tales and graph their
similarities and differences on a Venn Diagram.
And we thank God that he inspired the Grimm Brothers to record many of these tales.
My Gifts:
441. The shady, green, wooded road.
442. The castle in the forest.
443. Having seen the house where the Grimm Brothers grew up in Steinau, Germany.
444. Memories of exploring the castle in Steinau.
445. Having followed a small portion of the Deutsche Märchen Straße.
446. My collection of fairytale books.
447. Being able to share my fairytales with children.
448. Listening to the children tell an act out their own stories with their castles and fairytale characters.
449. Pam, the friendly clerk when I check out at Kroger’s.
450. Mezzetta stuffed olives on sale.
451. Scent of Purple Irises.
452. A lawn mower that starts on the first pull.
453. Watching the body rejuvenate itself as a wound heals and skin grows back.
454. Discovering a nice new Doggy Wash place closer to home.
455. Washing the dog with my husband.
456. A partial day of resting and reading.
457. The strawberry smoothie my husband made to rescue the strawberries I had forgotten about in the fridge.
458. One of my favorite drinking waters on sale.
459. Students staying on green!
460. Students’ parents being supportive.
461. The grace (power beyond my own ability) of God at work within me.
462. Wisdom that can only come from God.
463. The Home (SOS).
464. Apostle Mario Villela.
465. Pastor Regina Villela.
466. Josh walking in his father’s/Father’s footsteps.
467. Fresh cilantro in guacamole.
468. A Sunday afternoon nap.
469. Operating the computer for church services.
470. The book: Relentless by John Bevere and the growth that is happening inside of me as I read it.
471. Hearing testimonies of faith.
472. Immediate email response in the middle of the night about which airport to book.
473. Inexpensive airplane tickets at the closest airports.
My dad had started a business called Schrock Small Engine, Sales and Service. He sold and repaired lawnmowers, tillers, chainsaws… After he was diagnosed with cancer my mom worked alongside him and by herself on the days when he was not able to help. One day, knowing the extent of the illness, he asked her, “When I’m gone, will you continue the business?”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” was her quick reply.
Mom told me that he looked her in the eye and quietly remarked, “You can if you want to.”
That comment changed the course of history. When my dad passed out of this life and into Heaven, I was four and a half years old. It was 1968 and my mom became a widowed mother of three preschool aged children, the sole owner of a business and a mechanic in her own right.
The shop was located less than six steps outside the side door of our house. Mom sang us awake and fed us breakfast and was out in the shop by eight o’clock every morning five days a week. She locked the doors for an hour at noon while she cooked and we ate dinner. At five the doors closed for the night and we had supper, Mom often returned to the shop in the evening to finish the repairs. (While we were young an Old Order Mennonite girl lived with us and helped take care of us children and do housework.)
This is the atypical Old Order Mennonite Mother I grew up with. Making her way in a man’s business.A feminine touch in a greasy world.
The little girl bent close over her book, her nose almost touching the words as she read. I smiled as I continued to test her Reading Level. That was exactly how I used to do it. Read with my nose literally buried in a book.
But something had happened to my eyes between then and now. I felt a twinge of longing for those youthful days before bifocals. Before bifocals made my perfect reading vision come out of one tiny spot in the lower middle half of my glasses.
*******
“We can look into bifocals for you,” my optometrist had suggested one visit a number of years ago.
“I don’t need bifocals”, was my quick response.
Dr. Schneider, assuming that pride kept me from admitting my need for this addition to my eye glasses, gently explained that once people reached their forties their eyeballs began to change shape creating the need for bifocals to help us read better and that the modern graduated bifocal was not visible to others unlike the highly noticeable magnifiers centered in the middle lower half of our grandparents spectacles.
“I would be happy to get bifocals if I needed them,” I explained for the third time as the doctor continued to try to reassure me that bifocals were not a shameful experience, “but I can read just fine.”
Dr. Schneider was young, probably in his early thirties and he was going by the book. I was several years into my forties; therefore, I must need this dreaded addition to my eye glasses.
I left feeling frustrated. Pride was not the issue here, I could read just fine. But it started my brain thinking. Why did I not need bifocals yet, when others my age often did?
Then one evening as I lay in bed reading the Bible, the answer came. I used to read in bed with my chin resting on my hands, my nose practically touching the pages. But now I held my head up several inches away from the book. When had this change occurred? I couldn’t remember. It must have happened so gradually that I was unaware of it until my optometrist’s insistence for bifocals created the awareness. As I pondered on these changes, I remembered something from my childhood.
As a child adults often told me to hold my book farther away, because holding it so close wasn’t good for my eyes. So I’d hold the book a foot or more away down on my lap and continue reading, but next thing I knew the book had gradually found its way back up to my nose. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see clearly with the book farther away, it just felt comfortable having it close. So I read, literally buried in a book. Well, my nose… and mind at least.
As my mind continued to ponder these discoveries, I chanced upon what I believe to be the cause. My eyeballs must have been shaped in such a way to cause my close-up vision to be most perfect at a distance the length of my nose. After I entered my forties they began to change shape slowly just as Dr. Schneider’s medical books had predicted. The average readers who spent their childhood holding their books a comfortable one foot distance away were by now not able to hold their reading material far enough away to see. My eyes, on the other hand, had moved from a comfortable vision at nose length to finally doing what adults had been trying to make me do my entire child hood. Hold my book on my lap to read.
Eventually, in my late-mid forties after I spent a year moving my glasses to the tip of my nose every time I sat down to read for a length of time, I told my doctor that I think I might need bifocals. Now these graduated bifocals create only a narrow line of clear vision down the very center of each glass. As soon as I move my eyes a fraction to the right or left I notice a slight blur. I miss the days when I could bury my nose in a book and every letter was crisp and clear.
So I smile in remembrance as I continue to test this little girl with her nose buried in the story and I thank God that although I can no longer bury my nose, I can still bury my mind in a good story.
My List:
391. Watching a little girl bend close over her book, her nose almost touching the page as she reads and remembering the days (prior to bifocals) when I did that, too.
392. Teaching first graders how to do research and write reports.
393. First graders excitedly pointing out the features of non-fiction text in the books they are reading.
394. First graders publishing non-fiction text and incorporating the features they learned about such as a table of contents, an index, a glossary, a diagram with labels, a close-up of an interesting detail, etc.
395. Two boys asking me to teach them how to add a glossary to their book.
396. Finding the title to my mother-in-law’s RV.
397. Getting temporary a temporary plate for the RV.
398. Finding the right battery for the RV.
399. My sister-in-law removing the RV from our driveway and taking it to Texas.
400. The space in our driveway back.
401. Safe travels for Debbie and the RV.
402. My brother-in-law getting a new place to live.
403. Panda black licorice.
404. Connecting the spiritual and the intellectual.
405. Living a blessed life.
406. Walking by faith according to the Word and not by sight.
407. Being born in America to a family blessed of God.
408. A mother filled with wisdom.
409. My husband finding a place open on Sunday that could make his truck road worthy again.
410. Seeing Debbie again.
411. Seeing Tony again.
412. Seeing pictures of Everett and his girlfriend.
413. The awesome sale my husband made.
414. Living in the Life of The Word.
415. Safe delivery of the RV to TX.
416. My brother-in-law repairing the pipes.
417. Debbie’s safe return to MN.
418. Our pastors.
419. Our elders.
420. Hearing the truth of God’s Word preached.
421. The awesome sale my husband made.
422. The cyst being removed from my finger.
423. The finger healing totally and beautifully.
424. Giving a friend a ride.
425. Living a blessed life.
426. An abundance of healthy and delicious food.
427. Finding a cute skirt in a store.
428. Watching The Sound of Music as a play in our local theater.
429. Discovering the Worship Leader of our church has a part in the play.
430. Students following directions and building beautiful cereal box castles.
431. Students excitedly coloring and cutting out fairytale characters.
432. Students enthusiastically using their fairytale characters to tell and act out stories.
433. Children who had been noisy and challenging all day becoming quiet as a fairytale book is read and the story unfolds.
434. Listening to students discuss the similarities and differences between two versions of a fairytale.
435. A student excitedly sharing something they read or saw in a book.
436. The smile on the uplifted face of a child.
437. A delicious Mexican dinner prepared for teachers in honor of Cinco De Mayo.
438. A delicious gourmet sub from our principal in honor of Teacher Appreciation Day.
One of my final photo-memories is of Eugene and me sitting at the kitchen table, still eating after all the adults had jumped up and left. I sat staring at all the white mounds of mashed potatoes thinking about how they were going to get cold if everyone didn’t come back and eat them.
That day the mashed potatoes not only grew cold, they remained uneaten. I discovered the reason why almost thirty years later.
My mom and I were discussing Dad’s death. She commented that both of my Grossmommies and several aunts were at our house that day. Emma-Grossmommy was in the bedroom at Dad’s side and as he was taking his final breaths, she cried out and everyone jumped up from the dinner table and rushed in to his side.
I looked at my mom. “That’s why the mashed potatoes grew cold.” While my brother and I sat at the kitchen table finishing our dinner and watching those mounds of creamy white mashed potatoes growing cold, my dad’s body had begun growing cold in my parent’s bedroom.
Later, during that day of the cold mashed potatoes, I stood at the foot of the couch listening to the grown-up’s talk about asking Uncle Raymond to bring my cousin Rosella along down to our house to keep me company.
My Aunt Emma’s diary records that while the adults were waiting for my dad’s body to be embalmed and then returned to the house, I enquired. “Wes duh Dat es er dot ist? Does Dad know that he is dead?” When they replied in the negative, I asked, “Shouldn’t we tell him when he comes home?”
Several days later Dad’s coffin was placed just inside the parlor door. I see a memory snapshot of Grossmommy and some other adults holding Roland, who was eleven months old, up to the casket and urging him to touch Dad’s face. There is no movement and I hear no words. I see them there and I just know that that is what is happening.
In another snapshot the walls are lined with chairs and I sit in one of them with hundreds of people filing by. The only person I recall personally is one little boy, a distant cousin several years older than me. I remember standing outside the barn door once when he and his dad had came to my parent’s shop.
There is no emotion attached to any of these photo memories of my dad’s death. They are all still life prints. But as I write about them the tears come. The memory of being his baby girl is drowned in a sea of abandoned emptiness.
While I am writing my cell phone rings and the pictures fade. “I love you!” I answer as I dry my tears.
My husband, out of town on business is calling to wish me good night, “I love you,” he responds.
“I finally found the inspiration to write,” I told him.
“Oh, good!” He always sounds so excited when I have good news about my writing and storytelling. I feel warm and loved again.
When I had met my husband, Daniel, I wasn’t looking for a husbandly kind of love. I believed I needed to first heal from the feelings of abandonment I was struggling with due to losing my dad at such a young age. But I fell in love and God gave me a peace that Daniel was the right one for me. Even then, I was not expecting to gain any healing through my relationship with Daniel. I was expecting God to heal me. But God chose to extend his love and healing power through the love of my husband.
Culture shock, along with the pain of finally beginning to deal with a sense of loss as a young adult had led me to build walls around my emotions. It sometimes felt as if my heart were made of iron. My natural tendency toward introversion had led me to crawl inside of myself and God knew I needed that human connection. So he sent me Daniel, a gift of love from God.
Morning by mornig he awakens me and opens my understanding to his will.
(I have this on a small poster on my refrigerator,
but I don’t know which translation it is.)
The Sovereign LorD has given me a well-instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed.
Every year Notre Dame University offers the Teachers as Scholars program and for the last several years I’ve picked up their brochure in the teacher’s lounge at my school thinking that it looked interesting. But I never did take advantage of it, until this year. The seminar on Teaching Ethics to Kids sounded interesting- an ever challenging phenomenon in a public inner-city school. I signed up for it. The form required that I list a second and third choice of seminars in case the first one was already filled. Reluctantly I made two more choices. There really was only the one class I was interesting in.
When my acceptance letter came in the school mail, my shoulders drooped. They had signed me up for my second choice: Dying to Live: Theological Perspectives on Migration and Globalization. The date of the seminar had also been changed and it conflicted with a writing seminar I was registered to attend with the school.
“I think I’ll drop it,” I commented to another teacher. “I really wanted to attend the writing seminar anyway.” But after more discussion and some time to contemplate, I decided that I would attend the Teachers as Scholars program. It would be a good experience. I could learn something new. I always enjoyed learning new things.
Not that the concept of migration was new. Half of the students at my school have migrated from Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries. I had had the most awesome ELL (English Language Learners) class last year. All my students were from Mexican or Port-a-Rican descent. We had so much fun learning together. It would be interesting learning about experiences similar to those their families might have encountered.
But a seminar on migration coming from a theological perspective? I pictured enduring a day cowering under an opinionated professor with liberal thinking insisting that we all agree that the US should open wide her borders and allow everyone to pass back and forth with no restrictions. While I agree that the US migration laws need a desperate overhaul, this idea that we should just entirely do away with borders would cause our economy to collapse and leave us with nothing left to offer anyone, not even ourselves.
Then my mind returned to the word Theological Perspectives in the seminar title. Yeah, right! I thought. Like a Doctor of Theology from Berkley who had been a visiting research fellow at Oxford would still believe in the basic theology of the Bible. But again, I reminded myself that a new perspective, whether or not I agreed with it, would expand my worldview. I began to read the booklet that had arrived with my packet of information from Notre Dame. I forced myself to wade through all the statistics. Some of them opened my eyes to some new thoughts. That was good.
I arrived early and settled into my seat at the table, nibbling on the breakfast snacks provided, skimming over the last few chapters in the book, smiling hi as a few more participants settled into seats around me. Dr. Dan Groody seemed like an amiable man. He appeared relaxed in his khaki slacks and polo shirt. He was introduced as Father Dan Groody and soon had us all feeling at ease along with him.
We spent the morning listening to and discussing facts of migration. After a lunch across campus we returned to a video he had produced about migrant workers from Mexico risking their lives, many dying in their attempts to cross hazardous mountain and desert terrain, all in a desperate attempt to make enough money to stop the cries of hunger from their children back home. Risking death so their children might have a chance at life. Dying to Live: Theological Perspectives on Migration and Globalization. A fitting title.
Then Dr. Groody began to speak again. “We are all migrants,” he said. “According to Christian theology we are all migrants, aliens, foreigners in a strange country, seeking a better home. And God himself, in the form of Jesus, migrated to this earth and died so that we could live.”
I sat there listening to the gospel of Jesus Christ being preached through the voice of migration. This message that causes my heart to hunger, my eyes to glisten and my spirit to soar reverberated from the walls of that college classroom. I sat mesmerized, unable to take my eyes from his. My heart wanted to laugh, to stand and shout, but my body remained immobile. When he finished there was a hallowed silence. And when he asked for comments, I was speechless.
Thank you, God! My heart cried. I may have wanted the Ethics for Children seminar, but you, the one who migrated from Heaven to Earth, sent me here to hear your story in a new light.
My 1000 Gifts:
339. Attending the Teachers as Scholars program at Notre Dame University.
340. Discovering that my second choice was God’s awesome first choice.
341. Seeing the human side of illegal migrants from Mexico to the US.
342. Hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed through the voice of migration.
343. Feeling my husband’s heart connect with mine as I tell him about the thrill of hearing the gospel in the message of migration.
344. Discovering the girl sitting next to me was from Germany.
345. Discovering that having enough protein in my diet helps renew the energy I had been lacking.
346. Delicious lima beans.
347. Crabapple branches loaded with red and pink extending like tentacles into the sky.
348. Afternoon naps.
349. Easter service.
350. Resurrection cookies.
351. The children leading us in a march for Jesus around the block.
352. Whole families coming for prayer.
353. People coming to Christ in repentance.
354. A young woman standing strong for Christ in a hard situation.
355. The buoyancy of the heart as the Spirit of God indwells and surrounds.
356. Dinner with friends.
357. Meeting new friends.
358. Discovering a new favorite Mexican Restaurant.
359. An extra day of vacation.
360. A good job that I enjoy to return to.
361. A weekend in Chicago.
362. Discovering a supermarket in a glass covered high rise building.
363. Once more experiencing the culture shock that the big city brings inside this little country girl.
364. The introspection that comes with being out of my element.
365. Staring up, up, up, up, up towards the tops of skyscrapers towering over us.
366.The same blue sky and sunshine that cheers me here in Elkhart appearing between the tall buildings in Chicago.
367. Seeing Marilyn Monroe in Chicago.
368. The river-taxi ride.
369. Walking Navy Pier with friends.
370. Meeting a young man who is passionate for God.
371. Realizing that if my husband and I would have had children, this young man would be the right age to be our son and thinking of how cool it would be to have a son passionate for Jesus like he is.
372. Hearing the words of encouragement a friend gave to my husband.
373. Seeing God come through for us one more time.
374. Learning that I can trust God.
375. Reading an awesome translation of Acts 17:28. In him we live and move and have our being. A German translation says that in him sind wir, in him we are. He is the I Am and in him we are.
376. The stone chimney and porch on one of the houses I walk by on my joy walk.
377. Students doing well on tests.
378. Students reading on level “I” and beyond.
379. A faithful God.
380. Finding a natural cure instead of needing to take medication.
381. Remembering to put my earrings in. (I feel naked without them.)
382. Our new Vitamix blender!
383. Fruit smoothies filled with veggies.
384. Ice cream filled with veggies.
385. Having all four food groups in one delicious drink.
386. Being able to add the flaxseeds without pre-grinding them.
387. Watching a four year old boy go out of his way to jump over a pothole in the parking lot and then stop to wave at me in my car- waiting for him and his mother to pass.
388. Being able to call my mechanical mother when my husband is out of town and the lawnmower won’t start.
