Month: January 2017

Grandparents’ Stories

What missionary prayer cards used to look like

Last weekend Michelle and I visited some family friends in a city called Bourg-en-Bresse. These are families that knew my mom’s parents while they were missionaries in France. I recorded one of their stories in a newsletter sent at the same time as this post. If you are not yet receiving those newsletters and would like to, please request an add here.

Grandma C : My mom’s mom died of leukaemia when I was quite young, so I do not have many of my own memories of her. It was, therefore, a joy and an adventure to hear these long-time friends recount stories of things she had done or impacts she had made. A lot of the stories her friends told me were of meals she hosted in their apartment including “tuna rolls” which were not, as our California readers might suppose, sushi, but rather a baked dish wherein canned tuna was spread over a strip of dough that was subsequently rolled up and baked with white sauce. I’m imagining a cinnamon rolls but with tuna instead of raisins, sugar & spices in the middle. If that doesn’t sound appetizing, rest assured, it went over well with the French woman who copied the recipe and served it to her own family.

My parents and grandparents in 1977

It seems that Grandma C also had a lot of space in her life for others. Another woman from the church told me that she deeply appreciated Grandma’s mid-week lunches. She would have one or more women from the church over to eat, talk, study and learn together. What struck this woman, now a grandmother herself, was how often Grandma was asking questions. “What do you think about this? How would the French respond to this situation? How could one explain this idea to someone with a different background?” This woman found such curiosity endearing and disarming.

I think that one of the chief advantages we get for living abroad is seeing how another group of people respond to the universal difficulties and challenges of life. Ironically, it is in requesting those insights that we get the chance to confer some of the that benefit on our friends from other cultures. But that humility seems a prerequisite and truly stood out to this dear friend even thirty years after Grandma died.

Mom and Grandpa singing together at his retirement service

Grandpa C : One of my favorite anecdotes about Grandpa C from our time with these families in Bourg-en-Bresse has to do with bananas. There was a time after my grandma died that my grandpa stayed in the home of another family from their church. One afternoon one of this family’s children offered Grandpa an overripe banana, perhaps in an overly aggressive way (as children sometimes do). Grandpa’s exact response escaped the hearing of the boy’s mother, but the child quickly left to entertain himself outside or elsewhere. Afterwards she asked my grandpa about the bananas and he replied, “I’m terribly sorry, but even the smell of overripe bananas doesn’t agree with me.” I’m not sure I got the quote right, but it really touched her how gentle he was even in expressing a negative opinion. (We speculated that it might have had to do with the time he spent as a hostage in Congo or his service as a submariner in WWII.)

“He helped us repair our house.”

“He’s the one who put up this wallpaper. Look, it has lasted 30 years without peeling.”

“He knew how to get anything working again.”

“He taught me a lot about gardening. I still have the tools he gave me when he left.”
“When they left on furlough, they let a struggling young woman stay in their house.”

“I never, ever saw him get angry or lose his composure.”

Grandpa C with the gentleman from “the snow rescue story” (in newsletter)

These are just some of the testimonies given about Grandpa and the impression he left on people. In some ways, it strikes me just how ordinary most of those memories seem. Home improvement and maintenance. Sharing hobbies. In many ways I grew up thinking of the grand adventures Grandpa C must have had – the travails of growing up on a farm during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, the trials of Navy life in the Pacific theatre in the 1940s, the turmoils of bringing your wife and young daughter to Zaire/Congo and evacuating them multiple times during the struggle for Independence and then civil war. But his most indelible impact seems to have been in all those daily moments, compounded over a lifetime, of loving his neighbors. It is a special heritage to me that his legacy should be at once so attainable and so aspirational.

What’s Good For You

Why would a language school require all students to give their testimony in French in front of the entire student body?
Because it’s good for us.
How many times did you hear that phrase or a similar phrase growing up? Eat your vegetables. Play outside. Do your chores. There is something about doing what you would rather not in order to get to a result that you would like. Perhaps nowhere is that more tangibly, palpably demonstrated than public speaking in a foreign language.
Michelle just completed her first address to the student body in French. It was fantastic! She presented herself, her spouse (me), and the work in Burundi. She then told the story of how she bought her mahogany Kawai baby grand piano after graduating CSUN. Like so many stories of God’s grace, it falls into three parts, the prayer, the pause and the piano. OK, maybe not all stories of God’s grace end with a piano, but so this one does. Here’s an abridged transcript of what Michelle said in French.
“After graduating from CSUN, my dad gave me a gift of $5000 to buy a new piano. I searched through ads and in musical instruments stores. The shop owners would just laugh when I told them I was looking for a baby grand (my old piano had jagged keys that sometimes cut my fingers when I played it) and quickly ushered me to the back of the store where the upright pianos were. The best I could figure, I needed at least $7000 to buy a baby grand.
Then, one day, I came across what seemed like a good possibility. One shop had a black baby grand piano for sale within my price range. The salesman said that I needed to buy it on the spot, as there was another woman interested in the piano. Feeling rushed, I called my dad who advised me to pray about it before buying it. I told the clerk I needed the night to pray about it and when I called the next morning, the other customer had already purchased it. Months went by without anything better.
Had I passed up God’s provision? Sure it didn’t have the best sound, the action was heavy and it was boring black. I prefer natural wood colors. But it was the only baby grand I had seen in my price range. Until one fateful day when I saw an ad in the paper. “Baby grand piano. Good condition. $6000.” It was extremely brief but something in me told me to call on this piano. The seller invited me to come check it out. When I arrived, we went inside his deceased mother’s house and pulled a heap of blankets off a beautiful mahogany baby grand. Opening the cover I found the felt still on the keys. The tone was remarkable. The action was crisp and light. I was delighted. This was an excellent piano.
He showed me the paperwork that accompanied the piano. His mother had been the original owner. What’s more, it had been constructed in the year of my birth. And even more, he said that during the Northridge earthquake a speaker had fallen off a shelf and scratched the back of the lid. He wanted to reduce the price so that we could fix it. (Later I visited a piano store just to check on what this piano would sell for in their store. The vendor’s estimate: $25,000!)
This is how God works. He is good and He is in control. He knew all the pianos in the area and He directed me to that one in His time. He doesn’t always say ‘yes’ but He is always the same.