Growing Pains

Our ten-year-old granddaughter, Kathryn, is realizing her dream this summer. She is enrolled in an intense, one-week gymnastics course, something she has wanted to do for a long time. Her parents are both at work and she is staying with Oma and Opa for the week. Our job is to get up earlier, help her make her lunch, get breakfast ready, drive her to the gym for the day and pick her up again. After gymnastics, she has an hour of "electronics" to relax, then we eat supper, play a game or two of "Aggravation," talk about the day, and go to bed. Opa washes her gym suit and hangs it up to dry for the night, while Kathryn and I spend a bit of time reading before bedtime.

Yesterday was her first day and Kathryn came home very stiff and sore. "No pain, no gain" is one of Oma's favorite sayings, but I bit my tongue and had lots of sympathy. Kathryn's mom came over in the evening and there was more TLC. 

At bedtime we decided to get a chapter book from the book shelves downstairs and I told Kathryn about one of my very favorite children's authors, Jean Little. Little grew up in Taiwan, the child of medical doctors. She became blind very early in life and has great sympathy for children with disabilities. This shines through in every one of her books. I have wonderful memories of going to some of her readings with our youngest daughter. Jean always had a seeing-eye dog with her, which was an added attraction for the children.

Kathryn decided on the book called Home From Far. It is about a girl, Jenny, whose twin brother is killed in a car accident, and how that affects the rest of the family. They decide to reach out to another troubled family by taking in two of their children, one of whom has the same name as the brother Jenny lost. Kathryn loves the book and decided that we should read two chapters after gymnastics (instead of spending time with electronic games) and two before bedtime, in order to get trhough the book in five days. We'll see if that happens!

 

Home From Far was published in 1965, and Little has some "archaic" expressions and terms we wouldn't use today, such as, "Hilda was fat. Her face was fat and her legs and arms were fat and her clothes made her look even fatter." Kathryn has been taught not to use that word to describe people because of the effect it has on them. However, this does not detract but rather enhances the book for Kathryn, as it gives us an opportunity to talk about some of these things.

This morning Kathryn got up and moaned and groaned about how much her body ached. We were making her lunch and having breakfast. Opa was taking her to the gym and I stayed at home to catch up on some things I needed to do. She looked at me with her big hazel eyes and said, "Oma, I wish I was like you. You just get to stay home and do whatever you like."  Secretly, I had been wishing I was like her, so fresh and young, her whole life before her! I said, "Kathryn, you have the whole summer to do what you like." "But Oma," she said, "you have your whole life to do what you like!" I smiled, gave her a hug, and told her some day she would probably be as lucky as me!

Mother Teresa says it well: "It is not how much we are doing but how much love, how much honesty, how much faith is put into doing it. It makes no difference what we are doing. What you are doing, I cannot do. Only sometimes we forget and spend more time looking at somebody else and wishing that we were doing something else. We waste our time thinking of tomorrow, and today we let the day pass, and yesterday is gone."

Mensch ärgere dich nicht !

As long as I can recall, there has been a favorite board game in our family, called by its German name, Mensch ärgere dich nicht. Literally translated, the name of this game is "Human, don't get annoyed."  [OR, "Don't get angry, buddy!"]

The goal of the game is to be the first to get all four of your marbles home by throwing a dice and moving around the board. The numbers one or six allow you to begin, and throwing a six also gives you an extra turn.

I had never heard about the origin of this game. When I checked with Wikipedia, I learned that it was developed in Germany by Josef Friedrich Schmidt in 1907. It was launched in 1914 (two years after my Dad was born) and sold about seventy million copies because of its popularity among German troops serving in World War I. American English names for this game are Parcheesi, Aggravation, and Sorry. In England it is called Ludo. There is also an Indian version, called Parques. 

The source of the greatest annoyance in this game is that when someone lands on the space you are occupying, they can throw you out and send you back to start all over again. However, there are also other things about this game that can be aggravating. Sometimes a player's patience is tested because they can't seem to throw the right number and are lagging behind. Another source of annoyance is when a player decides to save someone from having to go back home by moving one of their other marbles. My grandmother was known to spare you if you begged long enough or if you were one of her "favorite" grandchildren! Some of my siblings couldn't stand the pressure and just stopped playing. This could also be annoying. Others made a great show of throwing someone out. Some players wanted to give advice or check if someone had cheated. Sometimes they insisted you cheated when you knew you didn't. One of  my nieces can clearly remember her grandfather, my Dad (who was normally a patient and peace-loving man), hissing at my Mom in his Low German accent, "Mind your own bissnes!"

The board pictured above was made by my great-uncle John Epp, a bachelor all his life. He and his older sister (who was my widowed grandmother) lived in a little house on a farm owned by another brother. One of my favorite childhood memories is playing this game after supper at my grandmother's house. We would sit at the kitchen table by the light of a kerosene lamp. I can still hear the thumps of big white moths, attracted to the light, hitting the window pane. And  I can still hear my sister wailing and my grandmother comforting her and "helping" her start again. I felt bad for my sister, but my urge to win was greater than my compassion.

My sister and I are toasting each other over an aggravation game on New Year's Eve. We play more maturely now (most of the time!). The board we are using is a modern version of our great-uncle's which is still in my possession.

Our grandchildren love to play this game with us. Some of them keep score from one visit to the next. They have "magic" tricks like blowing on the dice, picking a certain dice, having the right colour of marbles, whispering to the dice under the table, etc. Sometimes they whine and say, "I'll never win this game!" I always tell them to think positively because it will help them to win. They look at me with big eyes and say, "Really, Oma?" "Yes," I tell them, "you will always win by thinking positively and lose when you think negatively." They think I'm talking about the game but it's a life lesson I'm teaching them. And isn't that also the point of playing games like this together?

What games have you enjoyed during your growing-up years? Do you still play them? Have you kept the originals?

Shoot for the moon! Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

                                                                                                               -- Brian Thomas Littrell

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

Risen Indeed !

Just before Easter, a little boy wanders from the backyard on their farm. After several days of searching, in which the whole community is involved, his body is found in a nearby creek. His parents are heartbroken, their grief etched on their bewildered faces. Their community grieves with them.

Just before Easter, my daughter's friend, who has three small children, is given only weeks to live. She spends the Easter weekend at home, surrounded by her children and her husband, all saying their farewells, basking in love that should have been distributed over many years and is now concentrated in one weekend. Their church community brings them food and also cleans their house so that the family can be together as much as possible.

Just before Easter, two people my age, whom I have known all my life, pass away. These are not sudden deaths, but rather deaths caused by lingering illness. We all knew that death would be imminent, but when it happened it was still a shock. They will never again hug their grandchildren nor see those yet unborn.

Just before Easter, Jesus visits his dear friends in Bethany: Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The sisters greet him with tears streaming down their faces. Their beloved brother has died. Jesus himself is so moved at their sorrow that he too begins to weep, even though he knows it is not the end of the story. He tries to tell them, but they don't understand.

The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt) by Vincent van Gogh, 1890

(Van Gogh died at age 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)

Death seems especially threatening when we, as young children, become aware that all of us will die, and again when we get older and realize our days are numbered. In between these times, we live as though death doesn't exist, until someone close to us dies and we are shocked into awareness.

I just finished reading a book written by Sue Klebold, a woman who was especially traumatized when her teenage son committed both murder and suicide. The book is called A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy. Sue's son, Dylan, was one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 who killed 13 people before ending his own life. Klebold's journey is difficult to read, but it made me aware of how we rally to victims and how we condemn perpetrators and their families.

 

How do we deal with death? In each of the instances I mentioned, the community stands beside those personally affected and grieves with them. Even Sue Klebold, the mother of the perpetrator, had people who stood by her in her darkest hours. Mary and Martha had their community too, but they longed for Jesus; he gave their brother back to them.

I am comforted by a passage in the Gospel of Luke (20.34-38) where Jesus speaks of the afterlife to some Sadducees who tried to trick him. About those who have passed from this life Jesus says, "They will be like angels and cannot die. They are the children of God, because they have risen from death.  . . .  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living, not of the dead, for to him all are alive."

Christ has risen, and so we shall rise …

The day will come when there will be a remade universe  . . .  when we can do all things, when we shall be those gods that we are described as being in Scripture. To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.                                                 -- C. S. Lewis (in Watch for the Light)

"Heimweh"

The German word for homesickness is Heimweh, which translated literally means hurting for home. In English we are homesick. Our longing for home makes us sick.

My first experience with homesickness happened when I was nine years old and my family left our home in Paraguay to find a new home in Canada. The world as I knew it until then consisted of a small village of 30 adobe straw-thatched houses, 15 on each side of a dirt road. In the middle of the village was the school which served as a church on Sundays. That small village called Einlage (named after a village the refugees remembered from Russia) was the only home I knew. Hacked from the jungle by a people dispersed and longing for home, it was a mute testimony of courage, strength, and resilience. I remember every family that lived in that village. (Gerhard Ratzlaff's book Vater Abram includes a chart with the name of each household; almost half of them were headed by widows.)

Country bumpkin that I was, my world cracked wide open on that trip to Canada. I got a crash course on river boats, airplanes, automobiles, trains, cities, hotels, elevators, white bread, spicy soup, and chiclet gum! All this was very exciting but also confusing. I missed the soft and familiar Plautdietsch we spoke at home. I missed our little village school and my friends. I missed the hymns we sang on Sundays. For a while I was sad, but within a year or two I had almost forgotten because there were so many new things to learn.

Our family moved to a small town in Alberta (Didsbury), close to my grandmother and her siblings who had emigrated from Russia in the 1920s and farmed in the area. We lived there until I finished high school, eleven years after we arrived in Canada. Following graduation, my father persuaded me to go to Winnipeg and move in with relatives (whom I didn't know!). He suggested I look for a job there; the family would follow within a year.

Although I loved my job (in a small Christian bookstore), homesickness hit me full force that year. I did not love being with my relatives and moved out after six months, renting a room in a house across the street from a colleague at work. This woman was very kind to me and I usually spent Saturdays with her family, but I did feel lonely on the weekends, especially on Sundays. I think it was the longest year of my life, even though I had the opportunity to go home twice that year, once by bus and once with friends. During my absence, my little brothers had grown taller than me and my friends had also left home. I was delighted when my sister joined me in Winnipeg a year later after graduating from high school. In summer my family moved to Winnipeg and we all crowded into a small bungalow in North Kildonan. It felt like home and I was happy again.

 

Catalano Bruno's "Noémie"

I never again experienced homesickness to the degree I did that year in Winnipeg, away from my family and friends. In 1969 my husband and I left for Africa and that became our home for almost twenty years. We had little access to the outside world, and in many ways that experience can be compared to my life in Paraguay. Ours was a simple lifestyle and we depended on the people living around us for emotional support, practical advice, and help when needed. I missed my family, but not with that terrible ache in my gut. I always looked for someone to replace my mother, but no one could ever quite fill that void. We returned to Canada every three years for a few months during that time and I got my fill of parental indulgence.

In 1984 we moved back to Canada and, although we originally thought we would be living in Winnipeg, Hardy was invited to join the United Bible Societies Americas Translations team which happened to have its offices in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario. There I finally fulfilled my dream of higher education at the University of Waterloo. Still far from where my parents lived, we did see each other once a year.

In 2008, several years after Hardy's retirement, we moved again -- this time back to Winnipeg where our daughters and their families had by now made their homes. My father passed away in 2005 and my mother died early in 2008, just before we moved.
We will not move again! We discovered that it takes much longer for seniors to adjust to new places and make new friends. We still miss Ontario and the many friends we have there. We go back once a year because one of our daughters and her husband returned to Ontario with their four children (half of our grandchildren!). When we do that, I always ask Hardy to remind me again just why did we leave Ontario? Some people we know call Ontario "God's Country" but I've heard Altona (Manitoba) called that as well (seriously!).

Homesickness is a force to be reckoned with. That is why it is called a "sickness." It is a longing so profound that you can actually become ill from it. I think it usually has less to do with the place you leave behind, and more with the people who are no longer with you, although both play a part. You can long for a place with an ache in your heart, but if your family left it with you and are surrounding you, the place gradually becomes a pleasant memory, something you recall fondly, even to the point of embellishment.
I sometimes wonder what it will be like to leave this world, the only home I have known, and return to the true home from which I came.


"I do believe that we come from God and are returning to God, but we need a softening of the heart in order to see again and find our way home. I know of no way for hearts to be softened other than by a combination of love and suffering."   -- Ruth Patterson

Wounds, Scars, and a Broken Heart

Last night I had a dream in which someone gently touched the scars on my body and asked me why they were there. I replied, "Life gave them to me."

Most people who reach the age of seventy will carry a few visible scars as well as many not seen by the naked eye. Today I reflect on the visible scars and how they might be representative of the emotional scars I carry. They are evidence of both the pain and also the joy I have experienced in my life.

I received my first physical wound before I was a year old, but I have no recollection of the event that left a big raised scar. My mother told me the story.
I was four months old when our family fled Ukraine in October 1943. Our train took us to Poland and from there we made our way into Germany. To keep the infants safe from communicable diseases, the directors at our first camp had a rule that all children under a year must be housed in a separate building, where they were looked after by women hired for that purpose. Each baby was also allotted a supply of nourishing formula. The mothers were allowed to care for their babies during the day but at night they had to leave the building. None of the mothers liked this arrangement. They were accustomed to hold their babies close and nurse them on demand.

My mother and I are in the second row, fourth from the right.

One day as my mother came to see me, a caregiver had placed me under a heating lamp because I had a sore on my left buttock. (The diapers were probably not being changed often enough.) She asked my mother to take over while she went to attend to another chore. Unfortunately, the lamp was too close to my skin, and before my mother realized it I received a big burn. She felt terrible about this and blamed herself more than she did the caregiver who should not have left someone inexperienced in charge.

This scar is my battle scar, a reminder that pain is often beyond my control. I had no choice in the decision to be separated from my mother before I should have been. The emotional scars from that time are not visible but I have a physical scar to prove it. 

I have some scars on my abdomen. They are the result of three C-sections. These scars remind me that joy can be a companion to pain. When I see them, I remember how badly I wanted to have a baby after losing our first child and that I considered the physical pain and discomfort of the surgery worth the joy of having another child.

A third scar is midway between wrist and elbow of my right arm. It is a reminder that pain is sacrificial and worth enduring quietly for friendship's sake. Friends from Ontario had dropped in for a visit with their three boys and I was somewhat in a hurry. I burned myself while reaching into the stove to rescue some grilled cheese sandwiches that were in danger of sliding off the pan. It was a painful burn but I ran cold water over it and didn't mention it to anyone.

I'm in the process of reading a two-volume biographical novel by Hedy Leonora Martens: Favoured Among Women and To and From Nowhere, the true story of Greta Enns. Greta, a Mennonite living during the turbulent times of Stalin's Russia (1941-1976), carried many more scars than I was called to bear, both physical and emotional. She first lost her beloved husband Heinrich, who was imprisoned and never heard from again. Then she and her children were sent north to Kazakhstan, in the middle of winter, where they laboured under the most harrowing of circumstances.

Greta's courage leaves me reeling, especially when I think how close our own family came to experiencing a similar fate. I can only be thankful.

I am grateful to Martens for the meticulous research she did in bringing the plight of these women to our attention. My father's siblings had comparable experiences when they were sent back to Russia after WWII. We did not get the details of those stories, although some of my cousins, now resettled in Germany, have told us bits and pieces. 

The visible scars on our bodies are just a small indication of the emotional wounds we carry from the traumas life brings us. They remind me of Richard Rohr's words:

Your heart needs to be broken and broken open at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

Planting in January

One of my favourite Christmas presents is a perpetual calendar in a little cardboard box that contains a card for every day of the month with just one word on it. I love this because it gives me some direction and focus. For example, the word "praise" kept me from being critical and actually changed the way the day went for both me and my husband. 

The word for today is "plant." What? This is January in Manitoba and the deep frost has hit us. Plant what? Out there?

I think about it ...  I guess I wouldn't have to take it so literally. I could plant my feet in the snow and go for a nice brisk walk. Or it could be an indication for me to plant an idea and watch it sprout and grow. 

I'm reminded of Jesus' parable in the Gospels in which a sower sowed seed by the wayside, on rocky ground, and among thorns, and the seed was lost. But when the seed fell on good earth it grew -- yielding thirty-, sixty-, and a hundredfold. Jesus told them about the mustard seed which is the smallest of all seeds and yet grows to become the greatest of all shrubs. Jesus took an illustration from the daily life of the people to whom he spoke and gave it a deeper meaning. The stories he told were simple stories yet had profound meaning about change and growth. He was a master storyteller.

An excellent tool to help people on their way to spiritual and mental growth is the Enneagram. I first learned about the Enneagram in 2008, when we moved to Manitoba from Ontario. The main idea of the Enneagram is that we develop an illusionary self in the first half of our lives. The Enneagram helps us to unmask this illusionary self so that we can become our true selves. Lately, I have been thinking and reading about the Enneagram again. Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert first published The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective in 1989 (in German: Das Enneagram: Die 9 Gesichter der Seele). The English translation of the revised and expanded German edition was published in 2001. This is an excellent resource, if you are interested.

My sisters and I receive daily Enneagram messages electronically. They remind us of changes we need to make so that we can discover who we truly are. In order to be more transparent and accountable, we share our messages with each other. This is a growing experience for each of us.

"We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit, we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder precisely because it is so ordinary."  [Richard Rohr]