A Toothache in the Heart

Last week was not a good week for me. In fact, I was quite miserable. Two rather costly incidents happened, one on the heels of the other.

I was so proud of my front-load washer (bought in 2008 when we moved to Winnipeg from Kitchener). Every week I put in my laundry and it came out fresh and clean and smelling good. For some reason the washer seemed a bit agitated of late, sometimes sounding almost like a jet coming in for a landing. Then, last week, it betrayed me. When I took out the load of laundry, some items were streaked with ugly brown marks. The fitted sheet of our king-size bed as well as my favorite towel, given to me by my cousin in Germany as a farewell present, were ruined. No matter what I did to remove those streaks, they remained. 

We called a repairman who concluded our washer needed a thorough cleaning. He took off the back panel and couldn't find anything, so we ran a bleach-and-water cycle. I did another couple of loads; they turned out okay but then the ugly brown streaks reappeared and I had to deal with more ruined laundry. According to the salesman at the store where we bought this washer, that type was not known to last more than eight years or so. (I was still thinking of it as my new washer! My top-load washer in Kitchener had worked well after 24 years.)  

Sunday afternoon I was on the way to my sister's house. Just a small inattentive moment as I was looking down at the car radio, and I was suddenly driving up the bank onto my neighbor's lawn, right toward a tree. I frantically grabbed the wheel and managed to avoid hitting head-on. I scraped off a good-sized piece of bark, ruined the front bumper of the car and cracked the headlight. My neighbor came running out to see if I was okay. I was, but the car wasn't.

               

So we took the car in for repairs and went to buy a new washer. All this took a lot of time and energy and I spent time berating myself. "Why does everything have to happen at once?" I grumbled.

I have begun to adjust my thinking in light of what we have heard in the news all week. We have been inundated with reports of a massive forest fire around the thriving oil-boom city of Fort McMurray, Alberta. People are leaving everything behind and fleeing for their lives. The whole place looks like a war zone.  

How insignificant and puny my own problems appear compared to what the people in Fort McMurray are enduring. Some of the video clips from that besieged city remind me of global news lately: people in war-torn countries fleeing for their lives but with no place to turn to for safety. 
The Fort McMurray inhabitants are traumatized at the loss of their homes. However, they do not have to leave their country and their loved ones behind. 

I am reminded of my own family situation during World War II: With my grandmother, two small children  and another born along the way, my parents fled a country at war (Ukraine) only to wander through war-torn Germany for four years. After five years of hard labor in the Paraguayan Chaco, our family arrived in Canada in 1952.

Our church is sponsoring a refugee family who is arriving this week. They have a one-year-old and are expecting a second child. They have lost their country of origin, their extended family and their home. And I'm crying about a washer and a fender bender??

                                                 

Lately I have read and reviewed a memoir by Katie Funk Wiebe called My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986. Although Jacob manages extremely well in his new country, in his latter years the traumas he experienced as a young boy during the war in Ukraine come back to haunt him. It is a good book to read at this time when Canada is accepting many new immigrants who have gone through unimaginable suffering.

The weight of grief  (Celeste Roberge)

"A toothache in the heart" is how Wiebe describes the experience of fleeing from one country to another and enduring separation and uprootedness. As a young child in Paraguay (I was four when we arrived and 9 when we left for Canada), I remember how Sunday morning church services were permeated by sadness and grief as the refugees, now finally feeling safe, began to realize the enormity of their loss. They chose the saddest songs in the hymnal and many wept as they sang. It was my father's responsibility as their pastor to comfort them and to remind them of the one who had been their guide through all the hard times and would not abandon them now. With their hearts on their sleeves and tears running down their cheeks, they sang:

Thou my Shield when evening shadows lengthen,

Thou my Joy when morning breaks anew;

Thou the Fount of grace my heart to strengthen,

Thou my Counselor both kind and true.

With my Lord I'll seek communion ever:

He is Bread of Life and Fount of Joy.

From His love no power me can sever,

Him I'll trust when threat'ning foes annoy.

          None But Jesus Would I Have to Guide Me (stanzas 3+4)

 (original: Nur mit Jesu will ich Pilger wandern)

Johann Peter Schück, 1811-1892

               Trans. John Regehr