Oostburg CRC 150th birthday -- vii

Just one more thought.  

In those years we lived here—1980-82—I wanted my kids to see my dad on his knees, trowel in hand, wanted them to sense something of the oddly-hallowed ground where their own unknown great-grandparents had been laid decades ago. That’s why I took them along to Hartman cemetery. The experience didn’t charge them with respect, not in the least.

From the edge of the hill where the cemetery stands, you can still see the belt of lake water run straight as a ruler all along the horizon to the east. Freshly-tilled farmland patched meadows stretching into the woods that underline the seam of lake and sky.                        

The cemetery grass that day was freshly cut, the stones shiny in the soft yellow dusk of an early spring morning, and the whole place seemed to them little more than a playground they'd never spotted before, a schoolground obstacle course--at least a couple hundred different solid shapes in straight rows, perfect for climbing, even riding along like stone ponies.

But when they started in on leap-frog, I finally collared them. I tried to explain how such merry-making simply wasn't in good taste in a cemetery, but they didn't really understand, but they could just as well have been listening to a stone monument. So I settled them down—or tried to. “No more of that,” I said, and they looked up at me bewildered.

"Sometimes you get to wonder where all the faithful people have gone--men like Johnny Luteyn," my dad once told me, years ago, as if it were an editorial. He was feeling his age. "People like John Luteyn were powerful saints."

But I also remember what I was thinking in the middle of my father’s very serious lament. He knew this old man Luteyn in ways that I didn’t. To me, John Luteyn was simply an white-haired gent who sat in the same church bench every Sunday, maybe the last man in the church who could sing the Psalms in the Dutch language.

To my father, it may have seemed there were no more John Luteyns. To me, a whole generation behind, there still were. In fact, my dad is to me what John Luteyn was to him, and so were others in Oostburg CRC—men and women of real faith.  To some of you, maybe Norm Mentink.

All of which makes me think that perhaps I was wrong in chewing out my kids all those years ago in the Hartman cemetery for their graveyard game of leap-frog. It may not have been in good taste, what they did—but in spirit, it was just fine and to the point.

I hope and pray that my own children and grandchildren know the comfort and strength of the faith       their grandparents knew. That's at least part of the reason I brought them along to the graves of their great-grandparents.

It's not a game really, but it is a kind of leap-frog we all play.  Those people we respect for their devotion, their industry, their strength of character--for their faith--are themselves monuments who stand in our minds as stone-strong testimonies of belief and blessed assurance.

But those men and women are there to leap too, because once they are gone we do not stand still and lament forever the fact that they we’ve been left behind. We don't stand in the shadow of a tree that's been felled. Following the straight-and-narrow for 150 years of history doesn’t mean never turning corners. Life goes on. Only God Almighty is the great I AM.

The rest of us may well stand in Hartman Cemetery or Oostburg’s, south of town. We may stand there or here in celebration of 150 years of faith, but it's always time to move. It's September, and yet another church year has already begun, a whole new round of Bible studies and catechism, and huis bezoek.

Like it or not, we must all jump up and over what’s come before us just like the kids, push ourselves up on the strength of those cemetery monuments and then vault over and even beyond in the firm conviction that the Creator of Heaven and Earth was, is, and forever shall be here beside us on the land and in the woods of this beautiful lakeshore.

 The good news of the gospel is forever the same. It’s an old, old story, and it goes like this: He loves us. 

That’s it, isn’t it? Jesus loves me, this I know.