Thanks

There's a kid down the hall. He's got a baseball game--the whole team was in the motel's breakfast room not long ago, a sea of red. He's one of 'em, cap on backwards for style.

We're away from home and in a motel for the first time in a long, long time, my first trip out from home since Thanksgiving, not that last one either. We're going to see how it goes, this tag-team of me and my wife/nurse/housemaid. I'm not swift.

I've left the room before her because I couldn't be slower if I was harpooned. It's not that long ago that it took the a whole baseball team to get me out of the car, but I've graduated from the wheelchair, and then from the walker, and I'm on the cane now, slow as molasses and wobbly as a drunken sailor. 

So this kid--I swear, fifty feet down the hall--spots me coming and kindly opens the inside exit door. Two of his teammates have already exploded out, but he sees the crippled guy stumbling down the hall and he think what he really should do is hold the door open. So he does. 

Little inklings of grace.

So when I get up to him, I tell him what a wonderful thing it was for him to think of this guy with the cane way up the hallway. I want to grab him and hug him, but it wouldn't be kosher. Maybe if I was female.

Anyway, I stumble through the door and by now his brawny coach/dad has just caught up. He heard me. In a minute he knew the whole story. "That's really great, Jonathan," he says as I finally get out the door.

Inklings of grace.

And another. I'm several days off on my visit to the dentist. I thought the appointment was today. When I drive in, I'm sort of non-plussed because the parking lot is empty, but I park, stumble up the curb (got the cane again), and a dental assistant steps out. "Are you here for an appointment?" she says sweetly.

I tell her yes, and that I think I'm on time.

"Wrong date," she says, follows me in. "No appointments today--we're working on some new program.. . ."

She's very sweet, accustomed to dealing with old joes with memory issues. Then, just as I turn around, she says, "Your shoestring is open"-- and, lo and behold, it is. . .hence the photograph. 

So here's to all of those who help those of us who require more help--the kid in the baseball cap and the office manager who make my life--and the lives of countless others--just a step or two easier.  

Inklings of grace. You're a blessing. 

(I'd like to hug you, but it wouldn't be kosher.)  

Twenty years ago, Siouxland

 For years, I went out on Saturday mornings, looking for the dawn. That shot above is 20 years old, from  a Saturday morning in early May right here, probably somewhere west of town.

I never realized how much beauty could be staged just beyond our back door until I was almost sixty years. I wasn't awed by the near infinity of space, land and sky, until then, until I went out deliberately not to miss it. 

There's absolutely nothing unique about that picture above, but the shots I took that morning is clear evidence of my desire to know how to style the beauty that was all around that morning. Trying to capture that morning in a single exposure is silly, and that too is something it took me most of my life to learn--silly, but well worth the effort.

The shots I took that morning show me trying hard to find a way to tell others how gorgeous the world really showed itself to be.

Maybe silhouettes.

I don't remember the morning, but the story is in the pictures. Very few have ever treasured this particular place for its beauty. But when the immensity of land and sky lights up gorgeously, if the sun wraps the sky in a wide wardrobe of color, this world's sheer beauty can take your breath away. 

That's what I likely told myself on the drive back to town--that, and I'll be back.

Fifty years ago

Thursday, April 30 was a monumental anniversary I had to hear on the news to remember. April 30 is the date tanks rolled up to Saigon, today named Ho Chi Minh City. It's the date some of us remember U.S. helicopters frantically attempting to lift U.S. personnel and their Vietnamese friends out of the war-torn country to peace and safety. April 30, 2024, marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war [I should, I suppose, capitalize War, but it's difficult].

Today, still moving into senior housing in Sioux Center, we wouldn't have to travel far to meet up with a Vietnam vet among the 100 or so residents.

During the Vietnam War era (1964–1973), approximately 27 million American men were eligible for the draft. Out of this pool, 2.2 million were drafted into military service. Not all draftees were sent to Vietnam, however; only about 650,000 of them actually served in-country, making up roughly 25% of the total U.S. forces stationed there. 

So how many Vietnam Vets are there, in truth? It's  hard to know the exact number, but let me try to do the math. The number of Vietnam War veterans still alive today is estimated to be around 610,000 who served in land forces and 164,000 who served at sea, according to research from the American War Library. This means roughly one-third of those who served in Vietnam are still living, which means that on my morning walk, I wouldn't have to get far up the street to find someone who remembers the jungles.

Fifty years ago, I was a recently married graduate student at Arizona State University, willing--even proud--of waving my 4F draft status card should people ask. My heart was, and is, perpetually silly, enough out of cue for the medics at Sioux Falls to pass me into draft eligibility.  Let me make this clear--I missed the most important conflict of my own late 60s era.

I was driving a school bus for a little Christian school in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona in 1973. When I look back on it now, all of it seems rosy, especially going out into the desert to pick out the dairyman's kids. Everyday I got away from the central Phoenix apartment while my wife hurriedly, I'm sure, got ready to teach at the same little school. 

Here's what I remember. The radio was on, tuned to public radio, I'm sure, as the kids stepped up and in. The news included, almost as an afterthought, the fact that with the withdrawal of all U. S. personnel and the fall of Saigon, one could safely say that the Vietnam War [upper case] was over. It was over, I thought, as I was coming from Tempe toward central Phoenix along Washington Avenue. It was over, the whole fricking mess was over.

The kid in the seat behind me, a cute kid in fourth grade maybe, a kid who quite regularly had an opinion on things, was sitting  up close as if listening to the news. 

"Hey, Stevie," I said over my shoulder, "you hear that?"

He hadn't.

"The Vietnam War--it's over."

He did a kind of fourth-grade thing just then, kind of cheered, as if the Phoenix Suns had just hit a buzzer-beater.

And then, in a far more inquisitive tone, he leaned up forward, hoping for wisdom. "Who won?" he asked me.

It's much easier to say, today, "wasn't us." But back then, the kid, Stevie, the cute kid, was in fourth grade. Maybe ten minutes later I'd let all the kids off the bus at Phoenix Christian. I figured I'd let the teachers take care of answering that one, if it even came up. 

In Ho Chi Minh city, then and now, there was a real celebration. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 By day the LORD directs his love, 

at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life.

 Half of all marriages fail.  Why?  Good question.

 Some of the best researchers on the subject, professionals who’ve listened to hours and hours of conversation between ordinary married people, have come up with very interesting findings. Good lovin’, they claim, may not be at the heart of long and happy marriages, even though good lovin’ is what we’d like to believe in; a marriage drenched in passion isn’t necessarily a marriage which will last.

Okay, but what then?  What researchers have come to understand is that the success of a relationship may be more dependent on the ability to fight than the ability to love. Go ahead and read that again.  Marriages fail, they claim, when spouses can’t deal with inevitable conflicts.  Maybe I can put it this way—couples who learn how to fight, learn how to love.

 Conflict occurs even in the best of relationships.  Those marriages that make it, do so because spouses learn to keep those conflicts from escalating into the kind of murder that kills love and respect.   

 I don’t know how our fights—my wife and mine—rank with others.  There have been some stiff ones, I know.  Thankfully, I’ve not been around enough other couples’ tiffs and rants to judge the relative nastiness of ours.  But we’ve been married now for 52 years, and I seriously doubt we’re in any kind of trouble, thank the Lord.  We must have learned to manage our brawls, I guess, but don’t ask me to write the “how to.”

 The fact is, it’s impossible for me to imagine myself alone now.  In the give-and-take of marriage, I’ve pretty much lost the egoism that being single affords. I’m not perfect, and I still want what’s mine—and then some; but I can’t remember the last time I told myself, bitterly, that the only reason I’d done something I didn’t want to do was because, dang it, I was married, done something totally (grrrrr) for her.  It’s been a long time, thank the Lord.

 All of which is not to say we’re home free.  I’m not too old to be shocked, even by myself.

 Mostly, this great psalm, Psalm 42, is lament.  Three times (vss. 5, 8, 11) when he’s almost lost in the dark night of the soul, David has to pinch himself to God’s goodness; he has to push himself to engineer an way out of seemingly pathless despair. Twice, in fact, he falls back into the darkness after trying the best he can to pull himself out.

 I don’t want to be prescriptive because God’s love comes in so many shades and sizes that no one size fits all; but I’m wondering, when I feel the wild emotional amplitude of this famous, short psalm—I’m wondering whether some believers, not all, need to understand that, like a marriage, God almighty and his people—some of us at least—stay together only because we’ve learned to fight, and in so doing, how to love.

No one ever talks about that in Sunday School, but the proof is here in one of David’s roughest song, full as it is with darkness. And there are others like this one, lots of them, more than we’re often willing to admit or certainly advertise.

Maybe David—or whoever wrote this great psalm—has learned how to love the Lord in all his mystery, only because he’s learned also how to fight.          

In them thar hills

Darn thing would have made a wonderful, a truly memorable monument. Maybe Sioux City has more than its share of monuments, but just think of it--a broken down wagon, its canvas cover torn into shreds and flagging in a light wind, all that wagon's sharded ends blackened by flames, just one kid, forlorn and crying, left alone on a path to nowhere. 

If that monument, life-sized, were put up when first it was imagined and offered back in the 1870s, by now it would be right downtown--or maybe somewhere up on on the Hill. Hundreds of people on their way to work might well pass it daily, rain or shine, and simply assume it honors Sioux Citians ravaged by Indians way back when.

Dead wrong. That ravaged wagon in bronze or pewter or ivory wouldn't commemorate some long-forgotten Dakota massacre. That charred wreck of a prairie schooner would have stood as a reminder of government treachery not circling savages. Wasn't an Indian around when that wagon went up in flames. The government did it, burned up it and a dozen others out there in Nebraska, pure and simple, a U.S. Cavalry attacking a wagon train from northwest Iowa.

Dead wrong again. Sioux Citians like Charles Collins and John Gordon risked fiery attacks from unhappy Native bands as well as arrest by the U.S. Calvary, because the treaty signed at Fort Laramie in 1868, just seven years earlier, had unambiguously given the Black Hills to the Lakota in exchange for their granting safe passage to the Great Northern.

Men like Collins and Gordon, and hundreds, maybe thousands of less conspicuous others, wouldn't buy the 1868 treaty. They felt their good old American freedom was shackled by a court order that kept them out of the Hills for no reason other than the color of their skin--white. 

Besides, everybody knew the Hills were full of gold, full of it. Try keeping gold-diggers out of creeks they shouldn't be panning. Not going to happen if there's gold in them thar' hills. 

So when for the third time Sioux Citians created a wagon train that got up close to Indian territory, none other than General William Tecumseh Sherman--you know, of "Sherman's March to the Sea," of Civil War fame, said, "No, you won't, John Gordon," and when John Gordon did it anyway, fancying up one of the wagon's with a big sign which announced "O'Neill's Party," which was nothing more or less than a bald-faced lie. Have no doubt, they were on their way to find gold.

That's why the wagon burned. That's why the cavalry did it.

Back in Sioux City, you can only imagine the outrage.

So if there were a gorgeous ten-foot high memorial to the Gordon wagon train--everything beautifully drawn in bright and burnished bronze--I'll let you guess who would love it and who would hate it--and why.

For Ken Venhuizen (2)

For Ken Venhuizen, 1938-2024

(continued from yesterday)

How did they manage so many friends? I mean, if they spent ten years in Sioux Center, I’d be surprised. You might think the price of coming and going as regularly as they did would generate rootlessness, no place allowing time enough for relationships to mature.

Not so. Every person in this sanctuary knows that wasn’t true of Ken or Betty.

What’s worse, Ken was wild as a colt even when it was time time to be put out to pasture. He must have tired some time, but not in my presence. His fuse was ever lit, his outsize energy was a constant rumble. Even late at night he sat at our table with his juice cooking. One can only wonder what the Creator of Heaven and Earth does, as we speak, to keep him occupied.

Way back when, a young chiropractor came to town, a man named Hagen, a mover and a shaker who built a pretentious place on a hidden lane just off a busy Sioux Center street. Locals furrowed an eyebrow, but Ken heard the guy knew how to swat a tennis ball, and became, thereby, one of the best friends Dr. Hagen had in town.

Now me? Once upon a time he got me on a tennis court. I thought of myself as a fair-to-middlin’ athlete back then. Besides, tennis didn’t look so formidable. Get yourself a big paddle and swing away. We played, sort of. When we quit that afternoon, why he never pulled out a racquet again was embarrassingly obvious.

Our David must have been in first or second grade when Ken and I took our kids to Oak Grove, where, in a path, a rock was that spring rumbling slowly up toward the surface. Quite carefully, Ken worked the dirt from around the stone—lots of scratchy digging.

I’m happy to say that the Siouxland quartzite is still with us. It made it through the flood, so it’s not as shiny as it was once, but not as muddy either. It’s the stone that Ken dug up from the dust of a path through the prairie and just for little David.

These are just a few of our memories of your dad, Kim and Jim and Kam. I hope we didn’t take him away from you too often. That he loved you doesn’t need to be said, really. But what’s amazing to me is how many of the rest of us he loved too. It’s so good to be here today and be together, because your parents’ capacious hearts should be remembered.

“My friends are my estate,” Emily Dickenson once wrote, and we feel that. “My friends are my estate.”

We are where Ken and Betty lived, and for that we’re all very thankful.

For Ken Venhuizen

 

Old friend Ken Venhuizen died on Christmas, December 25, 2024. A commemoration of his life was held at Westkirk Presbyterian Church, Des Moines yesterday, Saturday, April 26, 2025.

I'm told that Ken wanted me to speak at his commemoration, and I did. What follows, both this morning and tomorrow morning, is what I said about him, about he and Betty, his wife, and about friendship.

 

For Ken Venhuizen

Ken made tennis friends wherever he lived. As the decades passed, he kept winning tournaments in South Dakota, just moving up in flights until he had to be the only one capable of a decent volley. Had you asked him what moved him more, theology or tennis, he would have said theology—but I’m glad I never asked.

I’m happy and proud to say the Schaaps and the Venhuizens were fast friends from the summer of the American Bicentennial, 1976, when Ken and Betty and kids came back to North America from Korea, both of them still raving about the heat of something called kimchi. Ken was about to embark on a new teaching position in a department the Dordt’s administration wanted him to develop, not just sociology but social work, where he spent all his working life. I don’t know if Ken’s picture is up on the wall in the department, but it should be.

The Schaaps caught a break with the Venhuizens because of a blood connection between Betty and Barb. To my wife, the blond nurse who married a Grand Rapids-ite was “Betty of Uncle Oscar.” I won’t try to twist out how it works exactly, but the truth is, a friendship between the Venhuizens and the Schaaps in our mutual first weeks in Sioux Center, Iowa, got off to a roaring start by familial Dutch bingo.

Never once brought it up, but Ken and I were relatives of sorts too. A little surface scratching reveals that our esteemed grandfathers (Profs Gerrit Hemkes and Samuel Volbeda ) spent one year together at Calvin Preparatory School—1915 was my great-grandpa’s last; his grandpa’s first. All of which accounts for my being up here and not any of literally hundreds of other friends of Ken and Betty. It seems that one of their most wonderful characteristics is the ability to open their homes as easily as their hearts. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have become friends of Ken and Betty.

And the Venhuizens did not stand still—ever. Look around you. Take a minute to reach out a hand to each other and introduce yourself by place of residence—where you came to know Ken Venhuizen—this church sanctuary is an Atlas all its own.

Grand Rapids, Sioux Center, Sioux Falls, Corpus Christi, Malawi, the Gulf Coast, Des Moines—always, always friends. There are hundreds, even thousands, who might well say that, if the greatest gift of life is friendship, we’ve received it.