The Blessing We All Long For

Isaac Blessing Jacob, a 1635 painting by Matthias Stom.
(Wikipedia)

One of the saddest stories in the Hebrew Bible is that of Isaac's son Esau, who returns from a hunting trip eager to prepare his father’s favorite meal in celebration of the blessing he is about to receive as his oldest son. 

Tragically, he finds that Isaac, his aging and almost blind father, has been tricked into giving the coveted blessing to his younger brother Jacob. 

When Isaac realizes he was conned, he "trembles violently," knowing that the birthright blessing, once given, can never be revoked. 

Esau, beyond devastated, let’s out a loud, agonizing cry, weeps bitterly, and begs, “Oh bless me too, my father!”

Isaac laments, “ Your brother has deceived me, and has taken your blessing.”

Esau responds, “Isn’t that why he’s called Jacob (supplanter)? He’s taken me twice now, he took my birthright and now he’s taken my blessing. Haven’t you saved a blessing for me?”

The patriarchal blessing is a big deal, like a lifetime of Christmses and birthdays rolled into one. It involves inheriting property as well as authority and power. and is validation and celebration of the eldest son’s special place in the family line.

While that kind of blessing may not be what we long for today, the primal need for the blessing of our fathers and our mothers and from other significant people in our lives, remains a powerful one, the need for unconditional love and embrace. Bestselling authors Gary Smalley and John Trent, write about this in their book The Blessinge:

Children desperately need to know - and to hear in ways they understand and remember - that they're loved and valued by mom and dad.

Affirming words from moms and dads are like light switches. Speak a word of affirmation at the right moment in a child's life and it's like lighting up a whole roomful of possibilities.

I was fortunate having a father who was a genuinely good man, generous to a fault, and never intentionally hurtful in any way. In many ways I'm in awe of him, but he grew up in a home in which his father became a widower for the third time when his third wife, my father’s mother, died in childbirth when my dad was only 3 years old. His grief-stricken father, my grandfather Dan, was unable to say "I love you" or to hug or praise my father or the rest of his six older siblings.

My father did impart to me his heart for those who are hurting and his good example as a person of integrity and generosity, and I got from him much more than he had ever received from his grief stricken father, whom he described as “a man of sorrows.” 

What he wasn’t able to give me, given his family upbringing and the the Swiss-German culture he grew up in, was the ability to  embrace me and tell me he loved me, and spend much one-on-one father and son time with me when I was a child, even though I believe he did the best he knew. And we did form a closer bond later in life, and learned to hug and express appreciation for each other.

I wrote a journal letter to him some years ago that was something in the mode of Esau’s “Bless me too my father,” addressed "Dear Dad," in which I told him how much I loved him and how much I had always longed for his spoken words of love and affirmation. I followed this with a journal letter of response and blessing from him, addressed "Dear Harvey," with words I truly believed in my heart he would have responded with, if he could have, from the other side of the grave. This was a truly powerful part of the journaling exercise, the wished for letter that expressed what I was sure would have come from deep inside of this genuinely good man. 

I suspect most of us, at some level, understand the heart cry of Esau, “Bless me, too, my father, and my mother,” as a wish for filling whatever hole in the soul we may still find within us.

I’ll never forget an experience I had attending a week at the Wellspring Retreat Center (after my parents had both passed) sponsored by the Church of the Savior, a Washington, DC, based ministry founded by Gordon Cosby, an elder churchman, writer and fatherly figure I had always admired. I’ve long forgotten what he spoke about in the one session in which he was present, but I’ll never forget what happened to me after he spoke and was leaving the room. While turning around to make a few more comments he, for whatever reason, laid his hands on my shoulders as he stood next to my chair by the aisle, unintentionally imparting what felt like a blessing on me. I can still feel the warmth, the affirmation, the confirmation associated with that simple gesture.

In light of my own longing for this kind of grace I’ve collected words of blessings over the years from many sources, many of which I’ve shared with members of our family and others over the years:

One of these is the blessing an aged Jacob gives his son Joseph, along with those he gives his older brothers. Has Jacob's night long wrestling with God, his later act of repentance and reparation with his brother Esau, made him a changed man? 

Here's the blessing he imparts his next to youngest son:

"You are a fruitful vine,

a fruitful vine near a spring,

whose branches climb over a wall.

With bitterness archers attacked you;

But your bow remained steady

your arms remained limber,

because of the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob,

because of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel,

because of your fathers’ God, who helps you,

because of the Almighty, who blesses you,

with the blessings of heaven above,

blessings of the deep that lies below,

blessings of the breast and womb.

Your father's blessings are greater

than the blessings of the ancient mountains,

than the bounty of the age-old hills.

Let all these rest on your head,

may continual blessing rest on your brow."

(Genesis 49:22-26)

"You Can't Stand Up All By Yourself"--Thirty Years Of Celebrating Families at FLRC

At last night's fundraising dinner marking the 30th anniversary of our agency, the amazing local men's a cappella group Cantore sang,

Ah, you can't stand up all by yourself,

You can't stand up alone...

Those words by Jesse Winchester were especially appropriate as an introduction to the talk I was asked to give at that event, as follows:

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The family is an amazing institution. I love being a part of an agency that has “family” as a part of its name and its mission, something we celebrate this evening.

     I remember reading about this little boy who announces to his mother, 

“When I grow up I want to marry you.” 

His older sister chimes in with, “Oh you can’t marry your mother,” 

“Then I’ll marry you,” he said, disappointed. 

“No, you can’t marry anyone in your own family.” 

He’s shocked. “You mean I have to marry a total stranger?” 

     Well, that’s the way families start, two unrelated strangers forming a new social unit, then their children leave them to repeat the same thing, and the cycle of life goes on.

     We each owe our very existence to this kind of social organism. As someone has said,"There is no such thing as a baby. It is always a baby and someone." Without some serious nurturing by  some other human beings (even the less than functional ones) a child would not survive, or if it could, it wouldn’t be truly human, or even animal, but more like a vegetable. We need relationships with others in order to become ourselves.

The Ancestral Family

But FLRC is about more than just supporting the nuclear family of father, mother and one or more children. From a family systems perspective, we see each of us as linked to a lineage that includes all of our many ancestors, who have not only given us our DNA, but whose stories have shaped us in far more ways we realize. The more we come to know about them, the better we understand and know ourselves.

     As African-American author August Wilson has said, “Children who do not know their grandparents, and their grandparent’s stories, are lost people.” So in the spirit of something my oldest son once said, “If you want to make a point, tell a story,” I’ll begin with some of my own ancestral story.

     In 1742, one of my great, great, great, great, great grandfathers, Christian Yoder, at age 16, got off a packed and loaded ship, the Francis and Elizabeth, at the port of Philadelphia with his father and we’re not sure how many of his family members, to start a new life in a world free of religious persecution and likely, as a person of peace, to avoid being conscripted into the Swiss army. 

     Later, in 1776, when his own sons were of draft age, he packed up his family and belongings in a Conestoga wagon for a 200 mile trek from eastern PA to move to what was then the wild west of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in part to keep his own sons from being coerced into fighting and killing, either on the side of the occupying British army, or with the rebel Continental army. From there his descendants moved further west and finally into Oklahoma and Kansas. We all have such migrant stories, unless we’re native Americans, or our forebears were brought over in slave ships.

     Then in 1946, when I was 6 years old, my parents, Ben and Mary, packed up their belongings in a freight car which my father accompanied on a 1400 mile journey by train from eastern Anderson County, Kansas, to Augusta County in Virginia, and my mother shepherded us eight children on that same long journey by passenger train. 

     The older I get, the more I realize how much my life has been shaped by my family story. That became so impactful the last night I spent with my father at the Waynesboro hospital in October of 1985. He was dying from a lung disease, and in taking my turn being with him at night, I was in the reversed role of parent looking after a needy, diminished and sometimes confused version of my father. 

     On my way home after that emotionally exhausting night, I found myself crying, not just over missing the extraordinary father of my memory, but crying for my past missed connections with him, growing up as I did in times of financial stress on our 120 acre farm, often wishing Dad would have more time to go for a walk or go fishing with me, or just have conversations with me. And yet I realized he gave me so much more than he had ever gotten from his father, and his own childhood. 

     My dad’s mother, grandmother Elizabeth, died at age 35 when dad was only three, from complications in giving birth to what would have been her fourth child with my grandfather Dan. And this was, tragically, the third of Dan’s wives to die. His first wife Lucy died at age 23 of measles, leaving him a widower with two young children, John and Anna, named after his parents. On the day of Lucy’s burial, little Anna also died, of measles. Dan’s second wife, Rebecca, at age 29, died of tuberculosis, leaving him with young John and five other children, the youngest of whom also died, of tuberculosis, within six months of her mother’s passing. After losing his third wife, my grandmother, Dan married a fourth time when my father was eight. In an extended recorded conversation I had with my father, he told me he had often cried himself to sleep wishing he could have a mother like other children did, rather than just his grief-stricken father and others who helped take care of their household, He knew Dan mostly as a “man of sorrows”. 

     But along with the blessing of gaining a stepmother at age 8 came other sorrows. The fourth wife, Miriam Mullet, was a widow with fifteen children and stepchildren. When Miriam married my grandfather Dan, a number of her oldest children were already grown and gone, but the remaining family of fun-loving Mullets never blended well with the somber and strict Dan Yoder side of the family. The resulting stress and ongoing grief could have turned my father into a bitter and negative person. Instead, he and my mother, who has a fascinating story of her own, were known as among the most hospitable and gracious people you could find. I can never be grateful enough for all I’ve gained from this part of my story.

     Without a doubt, my becoming involved with hurting and distressed people as a pastor and as a counselor was shaped by that history, and here at FLRC we are always interested in encouraging people to become better acquainted with their past story, and to get in touch with more of themselves by becoming reconnected, by "re-membering" forgotten or dismembered parts of their past as a way of their finding greater wholeness.

The Family Of Faith

A second even broader concept of family that FLRC represents is the family of faith. Perhaps our special niche as an agency devoted to “hope, health and healing” is that of encouraging, wherever possible and whenever appropriate, clients maintaining life-giving ties not only with their biological extended families, but with their chosen kin based on spiritual or other kinds of communities with whom they share common values and a common care for one another. Our agency was birthed by members of the Virginia Mennonite Conference, folks with a tradition of strong ties with each other, where no one starves unless everyone starves, and where whenever there are losses or griefs nor special needs, that no has to ever go through them alone. We are never about proselytizing, of course, but to affirm that individuals, couples, families and children greatly benefit by being surrounded by constant care and accountability that add to their strength and durability.

      I’m often saddened by people in crisis in my office having a very limited network of care around them, making their distresses doubly difficult to bear. 
     I’ll never forget having someone from another community share with me something that happened to her years before as a young adolescent. Her family were relative newcomers in their town, and they had neither extended family nor congregational family ties, so her mother decided to invite some of her classmates and neighborhood peers to a birthday party for her.

       As a middle schooler she was somewhat overweight, subject to teasing and sometimes near bullying in school because of it, so the idea of having a nice party in her honor was special. The day came, with all the preparations made, her mother had decorated a special cake for her, the time came, and they waited. And waited.
     But no one showed up. No one. And no one had bothered to send any regrets or to see that she was given a gift anyway. It was one of the darkest days of her life, one she still can’t think about without re-living some of the desolation and rejection she felt. 

     That should never ever happen to a child, or to anyone. We all deserve to be a part of what in my German tradition we called a freundschaft (our blood relatives), and a gemeinschaft (a community of people with close ties) former strangers who enjoy birthday and other celebrations together, people who show up at weddings and funerals and graduations and picnics and Sunday dinners. Individuals and nuclear families thrive in the context of these extended families of people who love each other and who powerfully influence each other and each others’ children. It does take a whole village, or a whole congregation, to raise a whole person.

     Just last week we experienced the tragic loss of one of my grand nephews, Cameron Yoder, age 23, of a congenital heart condition no one had known about, leaving behind a young widow after a marriage of only three years, and two precious daughters, one just under two, and another only 3 months old.

     Hundreds of members of both their freundschaft and their gemeinschaft were present at the memorial service held at Bethel Mennonite near Gladys, with an a cappella music group singing “I’m Just a Poor Wayfaring Stranger”, bravely claiming what we all prayed could be an anchor for this devastated young family--and for the rest of us who are left behind.

"I know dark clouds

Will gather 'round me 

I know my way

Will be rough and steep

But beautiful fields lie all around me

Where God's redeemed

Their vigils keep”

That, too, is a part of the FLRC concept of family.

God's Worldwide Family

But a final part is an even larger vision of family, one that includes God’s dream of a world "freundshaft" redeemed from every tribe and language and nation who are being restored to God’s shalom, that Hebrew word for peace that means harmony with all creatures and with all creation, where nothing is marred and nothing is missing. It’s the grand vision God has for a world in which wolf lies down with lamb, and no one will study war any more. In one sense, we can never be completely whole unless and until the brokenness of the world is healed and all are reconciled to God and to our every neighbor, including our enemies. 

     None of us can be fully whole until our starving fellow human beings, war and famine refugees around the world receive their share of God’s daily bread, where those who are cold and without shelter are offered clothing and safety and warmth.

     None of us can be fully whole until all of the tears in God’s family are being wiped away, until the emotionally and physically ill and disabled are being loved and cared for, the lost and the lonely, the orphans and widows, the sick and the aged are all sheltered as a part of God’s beloved family.

     None of us can be fully whole until the life and wellbeing of every child is nurtured from the womb to the tomb, where the married and the single and the celibate are honored and celebrated in our families and communities.     

     None of us can be fully whole until prisoners are released and restored and the oppressed go free and liberty is proclaimed throughout every land, until God’s will is being done right here on earth as it is being done in heaven, where God’s rule, God’s kingdom, unites us all as one family of grace and shalom, and where life becomes one ongoing Christmas gift exchange.

     We are all called to be a part of this, for the next thirty years and beyond, no longer just living by the values of the past, but inspired by the values and the vision of God’s forever future.

     I close with some words of the prophet Isaiah, with his grand vision of God’s dream family that I want to see people getting some taste of whenever they visit our FLRC house at Newman Avenue, and wherever they visit any of us wherever we live and work, 

      “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light…In that glorious day of peace there will no longer be the issuing of battle gear; no more the bloodstained uniforms of war…  For unto us a child is born…  and he shall be called “Wonderful Counselor,” “Mighty God,” “Everlasting Father,” “Prince of Peace.” He will bring true justice and peace to all the nations…  (from Isaiah 9)

     …the Lord Almighty is preparing a wondrous feast for everyone around the world—a delicious feast of good food, with the finest of wine…  he will remove the cloud of gloom, the pall of death that hangs over the earth…  The Lord God will wipe away all tears and take away forever all insults and injustice. The Lord has spoken—he will surely do it!”  (from Isaiah 25)

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To make a contribution to FLRC's scholarship fund to assist low income clients without insurance coverage go to: http://www.flrc.org/harrisonburg-counseling-services-family-resource-center-support-donations.html

Grandfather Daniel J. Yoder, A Man Of Sorrows

In one of my last extended conversations with my dad, he talked at length about the intense life of grief his father Dan experienced, having lost three wives and two young children by the time he was 45.

Grandfather Dan, who died before I was born, grew up as the oldest of 11 children in the John and Anna Yoder family in northern Indiana. In his late teens he fell in love with sixteen-year-old Fannie Troyer, and after a rather brief period of dating, proposed to her. Young Fannie, instead of instantly agreeing as he had hoped, asked for some time to think this over before giving him an answer.

Theirs was something of a star crossed relationship in the first place in that Dan was Amish and Fannie a "church house Amish" a less conservative group that later became a part of the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference. In those days, before such inventions as cars, phones and TV's, the differences between the groups were not so obvious, but Dan's parents nevertheless frowned on the relationship.

Girls marrying in their mid teens was not uncommon in those days, but Fannie's less than enthusiastic response may have been one of Dan's first major setbacks, and rather than risk her rejection--and perhaps to please his parents--Dan never went back to Fannie to get her answer, something he felt badly about later.

Fannie, by the way, later moved to Kansas to do housekeeping for an Amish widower, Abraham Nisly, and ended up marrying one of his sons, Eli, who later became an Amish bishop. By a strange twist of fate, Eli and Fannie became my mother Mary's parents. So Fannie, instead of potentially becoming my paternal grandmother, became my maternal grandmother.

Meanwhile, Dan courted and married an Amish girl, Lucy Lehman, and the two moved to a newly forming Amish settlement in Mississippi.

Here is where Dan's troubles really begin.

At age 23, Lucy died of measles, leaving him a heartbroken widower with two very young children, John and Anna, dutifully named after his parents. On the day of Lucy's burial, little Anna also died of measles.

Soon thereafter, Dan married Rebecca Schrock, and the two had five more children together. Then  his beloved Rebecca died of tuberculosis, leaving him a widower with six young ones to care for. Then only months after Rebecca's death, his youngest daughter Mary likewise died of tuberculosis.

Dan then married Elizabeth Miller, and the two moved to Yoder, Kansas, and had three more children together, the youngest of whom was my father, Ben. Then when my father was only three years old, Elizabeth went into labor with what would have been their fourth child, and died of complications in childbirth.

"The next five years were like a blur to me," my father told me. "I would often cry myself to sleep wishing I had a mother like other children did. And my father, a 'man of sorrows', wasn't able to comfort us because he was going through so much grief himself."

When my dad was eight, Dan married again, this time to Miriam Mullet, a widow. Miriam's first marriage had been to a widower who already had nine children when his wife passed away, and the two of them then had four more.

Some of Dan and Miriam's older children had already grown and left home, but their large blended family failed to blend well, and Dan experienced additional grief trying to deal with all of the conflict and stress involved in trying to keep their tribe together and functioning. One of his teen age sons (who slept with the older boys in their farm's tenant house), ran away one night and got married in another state, adding to Dan's feelings of loss and depression that went all the way back to the loss of his first love, Fannie.

Much later in life Dan apologized, not to Fannie, but to her husband Eli, for the way he had treated her years before. Perhaps he felt God was somehow punishing him, in that his first three wives died young and Fannie enjoyed good health and lived to a ripe old age.

Needless to say, my father had anything but a happy childhood. But by some miracle, he became one of the kindest and compassionate persons I have ever known. I'm blessed as I reflect on how my forebears' faith in God and love of family eventually brought them through their most difficult and dark times.

Remembering Dad

My father died on this day in 1985, after a long bout with emphysema and bronchiectasis. I had spent my last memorable twelve hours with him two nights earlier, taking my turn being by his bed at the Waynesboro, Virginia, hospital.

At age 80, dad was down to a fraction of his normal weight and strength. Sometimes disoriented, he couldn’t understand why I had to restrain him from getting out of bed or removing his oxygen tubes. In a strange reversal of roles, I was now the parent wishing I could somehow hold and comfort him in his pain and distress.

I don’t cry easily, but I couldn’t help losing it during my 45-minute ride home. Not only was I grieving the loss of my one and only dad--gentle, hospitable and generous to a fault--I was also mourning the father with whom I had never fully connected as I wished.

Financial struggles as I was growing up limited my father’s energy and time for us nine children, especially us younger ones. I realized in a new way on that long ride home how much I ached for more memories of fishing, playing ball or going for walks with my dad. I also wished I had been able to share with him more of my feelings, struggles and dreams as I was growing up. I also realized that any lack of closeness between us as adults was as much my fault as his.

Yet I was very much aware that he had given me much more as a parent than he had ever received from his own father. That truth had come to me in a new way a year earlier, when he and I had a 1 1/2 hour conversation in which I recorded many of his childhood memories. While I already knew much of the story, to have a recording of it in his own words was priceless. 

A defining point in my father’s life was his losing his mother when he was three. And this was my grandfather Dan’s third time of becoming a widower. His first wife Lucy had died of measles at 23 after only four years of marriage, leaving him with a two-year-old son and nine-month-old daughter. On the day of Lucy’s funeral, daughter Anna also died of measles.

A decade later Dan’s second wife Rebecca died of tuberculosis at age 30, leaving him with five more children. Later that year their youngest daughter Mary died of the same disease, also at nine months of age. 

Two years later Dan married Elizabeth, my grandmother, and had three more children, the youngest being my father, Ben. Then at 35 Elizabeth died of complications from her fourth pregnancy, leaving Dan, at 44, with nine living children.

My father has few memories of his next five years except of sometimes crying at night wishing he had a mother like other children he knew. He also wished for a warmer, more nurturing father instead of one he aptly described as a “man of sorrows.”  Surely he was "acquainted with grief."

As if this weren’t enough family drama, five years later Dan married Miriam, a widow with nine children of her own. While eight-year-old Ben was glad to have a real mother again (and some new siblings) their blended family didn’t blend well, and the rest of my father’s childhood was marked by constant family tension and friction. 

I’ve sometimes wondered what kind of dad should have come out of this troubled story, this mys-functional family. But instead of his becoming a highly depressed or bitter man, Ben became one of the kindest and most gracious people I’ve ever known--even though he had never learned how to hug us as children or to lavish us with praise (we did teach him to hug in his later years!).

On his deathbed he breathed the words of his favorite song, “Blessed Assurance,” the title of which appears on his tombstone, set right next to my mother’s, who had died of cancer fourteen years earlier. With her he had learned to live a new life, celebrate a new lyric, as in, “This is my story, This is my song, praising my Savior  all the day long.”

He left no estate to divide among us, and barely enough savings to pay for his funeral. But we all received a much more valuable legacy, that of a sturdy faith and a graciously lived life.

Today I wish I could tell my father one more time how grateful I am for the way he turned his grief into an amazing grace. As I reflect on his life story, I am better able to embrace my own.

In Praise of Mothers

This is one of the few photos I have of my sweet mom,
 Mary (Nisly) Yoder 1904-1971

This is a message I gave at a service at Strite Auditorium at Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community in 2019:

On this Mother's Day I'm reflecting on some of the ways mothers, and the loss of mothers, affect us, and how they have impacted my own family of origin. I'm sure many of you would have similar loss and blessing stories of your own.

My mother was born in rural Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1904, the ninth child of devoted Christian parents Eli and Fannie (Troyer) Nisly. Her father, my grandfather Eli Nisly, was a beloved bishop of their church. Her mother Fannie had lost her mother at a very young age, and as a 19 year old moved to Kansas to help with housekeeping for her future husband Eli's father Abraham and children, whose wife, my grandfather Eli's mother, had died young. So this is how these two motherless young people met and eventually married and had 13 children of their own.

My parents married when mom was 21 and my dad 20. After working on my grandfather's Dan Yoder's farm near Thomas, Oklahoma, they travelled some 200 miles by team and wagon from Oklahoma to Kansas in the middle of winter, where they started their family.

With only a sixth grade education, my Mom loved life, loved learning, and always encouraged us to do our best at school. And in the spirit of Proverbs 31, she, with her family's help, put out two gardens every year, canned and froze tons of food for her family, raised canaries to sell, grew lots of flowers, constantly entertained guests from the church and visitors from out of town, and took care of numerous foster children who were motherless, besides raising her own family of 8 children. My parents then adopted my next younger sister, number 9, who came to our home at four weeks as their first foster child, Mary Beth, who had had only a grandmother looking after her, and who was essentially motherless when she came to us.

In spite of the fact that we were always poor, my mom always found enough to share with others, and was willing to take time to help mother and care for others in our congregation and community when there was a special need, an illness, or a new baby in the family. For ten years, in her later life, she learned to use a typewriter and was the children's editor for the English section of the Herald der Wahrheit (Herald of Truth) where she was known as Aunt Mary to young readers of subscribing families.

In spite of all of the stresses in her life, I don't remember mom ever raising her voice in anger, or slapping or spanking us in anger, even though I know we seriously tried her patience time and time again. I attribute all that to her good upbringing and to her faith, though she wasn't one to do a lot of talking about her relationship with God. And while I know she knelt by her bed to pray every day, I never heard her pray out loud. That was Dad's role, who gathered the family together to read the Bible and kneel with us to pray every morning before going out to do the day's work on the farm or before our going to school.

Then 52 years ago this spring, my mom was diagnosed with bone cancer and died in December of '71 at 67 years of age. I was 32, and our whole family experienced this as a terrible shock. Especially my father, Ben, who felt lost without her, and who not long after her death, married one of my mom's sisters who had become a widow.

My dad had lost his own mother when he was only three, and she was the third of his grieving father Dan's wives to pass away. The third. The first, Lucy Lehman, died of measles when she was only 23, leaving Dan with two young children, and then their youngest, Mary died on the day of Lucy's funeral, also of measles. Dan's second wife Rebecca died of tuberculosis at 29, leaving five more motherless children, and the youngest of these then also died of tuberculosis within six month's of Rebecca's passing. Then my grandmother, Elizabeth, Dan's third wife, died at age 35 in giving birth to a stillborn child. leaving my father and an older sister and brother and all their half siblings motherless. He told me once he often cried himself to sleep, wishing he had a mother in his life to comfort and care for him, rather than just a grieving father he called “a man of  sorrows.”

And then my grandfather Dan Yoder, eight years after my grandmother Elizabeth’s death, married a younger widowed mother of six children and seven motherless stepchildren, some of the older of whom had already married and left home. So my father grew up in a highly stressed and grieving blended family that never blended well, his father Dan and the new mother Miriam Mullet representing two very different family cultures, the Yoder side being super strict and somber, and the Mullet side being more spontaneous and fun loving.

Looking back I see my family of origin being strongly affected by the premature loss of mothers, my grandfather Eli's, my grandmother Fannie, father Ben's and his siblings' and half siblings' mothers, my younger adopted sister, and then we lost our own mother, at a somewhat later age, 67. It helps me understand an underlying theme of sadness and the need for approval and love and blessing we experience a lot of. Every marriage, someone has said, is in part an attempt to heal childhood wounds. As men, we fall in love with a beloved other we see as the consummate nurturer, someone who will care for us and stand by us and meet our deepest needs for love and care and belonging, as well as to provide that for our children. I know that, subconsciously or otherwise, affected my choice of the warm, deeply caring and nurturing wife and mother of our children, Alma Jean. She’s been a tremendous blessing!

God designed all of us in the human family to be dependent on mothers and mother figures not only to love and nurture us when we’re young, and to help us throughout life become better able to pass on love to others. 

One of my older sisters, Fannie Mae, named after our mother's mother, never married but became an RN and served as a midwife who delivered over 200 babies in a clinic in Belize and then in Paraguay, and later adopted an autistic and abandoned child that a Paraguayan orphanage begged her to find a home for in the states, and my sister ended up becoming her loving  single mother to Nina, needy and motherless. She is one of my heroes as a mom and a professional nurse, who now at 87, is a resident at Blue Ridge Christian Homes near Raphine.

And now she is being cared for by some of the most selfless, motherly nurses and nursing assistants you could find anywhere. All of us are blessed to have selfless people like that in our lives, who share the mothering qualities of our Abba, our loving parent God, with a big lap and a warm embrace.

I don't find it surprising that at FLRC, where I work half time, we have more people who call in wanting a female counselor than males. That's partly because we have more women clients than men, but I suspect there's also a sense that women are more nurturing in ways all of us, young and old, need and long for.

I'm teaching a parenting class of seven young women right now who are a part of a court ordered Day Reporting program. Five are mothers, with from one to five young children each, one is expecting any day, and another hopes to become a mother as soon as her current boy friend proves to be a stable part of her life. I'm moved by their stories, many have experienced little in the way of good mothering or stable parenting in their own lives, most are from broken homes, and all are a part of broken homes themselves, some were raised by grandparents, some grew up in and out of foster homes and juvenile detention facilities. All are trying to get custody of their own children and to establish a better home for them than they experienced themselves.

And I think, what a challenge. In the first session, we listed some of the good qualities they wanted their children to graduate from their homes with, wonderful qualities like kindness, respect, caring, honesty, creativity, empathy, confidence, hard work, etc.  And of course, they all realized that the best way to instill these values is not by trying to beat them into their children, or to lecture into them, but by consistently demonstrating those qualities in the context of loving relationships with their children as their mother. 

I’m more than glad to volunteer time for opportunities like that to pass on some of the good influences I've been blessed with in my life, through my mother as well as my dad, and other good mother and father figures in my life, and in the caring congregation I grew up in.

No wonder the writer of Proverbs calls people like that priceless, worth far more than rubies or diamonds.

May all of their children, all of us, rise up and call them blessed.

One Of My Ancestors Was An Unaccompanied Minor

Ships like these carried many of our
forebears to the new world.

Reading about month-long northward journeys of refugees fleeing violence in places like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras reminded me of the youthful flight of one of my own maternal ancestors.

We don't know the exact date of his birth, nor the names or history of his parents, but my great great grandfather Christian Nisly (or Nüsli, meaning a small nut tree;-) came to the port of Philadelphia in 1804 from Switzerland at only 16 or 17.

We know few details about his voyage, or whether he was accompanied by any relatives, but in migrating here he was completely separated from the rest of his family, never to see them again.

What would have motivated someone so young to leave all behind for an uncertain future in the new world? Most likely he and his Anabaptist family made this difficult choice to avoid his being drafted into the Swiss army, which regularly supplied mercenary troops to fight frequent wars in neighboring lands. As followers of Jesus opposed to killing people for any reason, this may have seemed like least awful option.

On the perilous month-long journey, young Christian and his fellow voyagers endured the hardship of a severe storm that damaged their vessel as well as experiencing the terror of being detained on the way by a hostile pirate ship of some sort, although we only have his sketchy notes to base this on.

Young Christian worked for an unrelated Zug family in Philadelphia for several years to pay for his journey, then moved to frontier Somerset County in western Pennsylvania, where he met and married Sarah Miller. There he was ordained to the ministry, and later moved to Holmes County, Ohio, where they raised a family of 14 children. He died there at age 73 in 1848.

Their youngest son Abraham and family moved to Indiana and from there to a new Amish community near Hutchinson, Kansas, a pioneer town then only 12 years old, in 1883, after his second wife Dinah died. Just two years later he himself passed away at age 61. He and Dinah's oldest son Eli, my maternal grandfather, was left to look after the remaining members of his family. 

At 19 Eli and another young male friend had traveled by freight train to Hutchinson, accompanying five train car loads of horses, farm implements and household furnishings belonging to their respective families. Over the first winter on the prairie, the two families lived in a single makeshift shack and used twisted bundles of grass and cow chips for cooking and keep themselves warm over winter.  

At age 23, and soon after his father died, Eli married my grandmother Fannie Troyer, then only 19. Fannie, whose mother had died when she was only 13, had responded to a call to go to Kansas to do housework for second-time widower Abraham Nisly while only a teen. After marrying Eli, Fannie bore 13 children, the ninth of whom was my mother Mary.

As I reflect on these parts of my family story I wonder about the impact of all the traumas the Nisly clan experienced through multiple premature deaths and many migrations. And I’m sure many of your immigrant family stories contain the same elements of both great hardship and great blessing.

Here are links to more family stories:

https://harvyoder.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-1742-journey-on-francis-and-elizabeth.html

https://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=a+man+of+sorrows