Memories of Grandma

A few months ago a package arrived in the mail for our family. In it was a small Easter gift from grandma: four delicately crocheted and impressively starched cross bookmarks and a card with an Easter message. This reminder of resurrection and new life is a blessing to me as I hold the work of her hands in mine and remember all the things that her hands have made over the years. Beautiful and practical items that were her way of reaching across the miles - even around the world - at times when her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren have been distant. Mittens and pajamas, tiny Barbie dresses and snowflake ornaments, cozy afghans and warm sweaters. Works of love.

Beautiful and practical seem to me words that aptly describe my grandmother. Beautiful in her sweet smile and sparkling eyes - that sometimes seemed to hold a little mischief. But also the beauty of deep love for family and community. While we are many - the children, inlaws, grandchildren and great grandchildren of Helen Reimer - I have never felt forgotten or unloved. Grandma wanted us all to be included and cherished. And practical. Strong. How could she not be? To not only raised five daughters and care for many grandchildren over her life but also to financially support her family by being a part of the workforce. To physically nurture their bodies by growing a garden and making preserves and pickles, baking and noodle making, sewing and knitting. Practical, beautiful, loving provision and care.

While I’ve been distant in recent years, my childhood was full of hours spent in grandma’s house, in blanket forts in the backyard and eating creamsicles on the front steps, playing with the same games and stacking toys that were still in the cabinet in her Bethany apartment for my own and other children to play with. I will still think of grandma every time I ride the bus with my children and let them ring the bell the way grandma showed me how to do on the way to Safeway. I will remember her in homemade white buns with jam. When I knit mittens with stitches I first learned under her patient guidance. And when I open my bible to the place where it is marked with the cross that she made.

Proverbs 31 asks,
“A woman of valour, who can find?”
“...She is clothed with strength and dignity
and can laugh at days to come.
Her children arise and call her blessed…
“‘Many women have done noble things but you surpass them all.’”

May grandma’s laughter be met by her smiling Creator,
who is delighted to welcome her with loving arms.
May we children who have been blessed by her surpassing love
be people of valour, beauty and love,
reflecting the love that she has shown to us.



Amen.

Thoughts for an EPPisode

The following is a reflection I wrote for an Epp family reunion this past summer.  I was asked by my dad to reflect on family and genetic memory.

I’ve lived in Seattle for 8 years and before that most of my life apart from extended family and apart even from immediate family: time spent in Jordan with MCC, here in Rosthern at RJC for high school, in Winnipeg as an adult, and finally the move to the US 11 years ago.  Jesus told his disciples in Matthew that he came “to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” He left his immediate family and the work of his father to be an itinerant preacher and prophet and stir up all kinds of trouble.  While I certainly haven’t been set against members of my family – and I don’t necessarily think that Jesus was either – the call to go to seminary and to get married while there and then to ministry has meant being far from family.

Many of the members of the congregation where I serve as pastor and in fact many if not most of the people who live in Seattle are far from family.  We have all migrated from somewhere else – mostly from other parts of the States, but some like me from Canada or from other parts of the world.  And we build families out of the communities where we find ourselves.  It is a city of people who are looking to new starts and adventure.  Now, I might be one of the only Epps in Seattle (I Googled it and there may be one or two others) but my church family has become my primary network of care and support.

I think it may be true for my generation of this family more than any before that we are spread far and wide and see each other less and less often.  And it is often for really good reasons – I ran into Nathan a few weeks ago when we were both in Phoenix for a church convention.  He, like me has married and serves a church in the US. Others have left for work or to serve or to marry or for education.  David will be off in only a little while with MCC SALT.

But the thing is, it has in some ways, been my Epp family that led me to where I have been and what I am doing with my life.  When they took us off to Jordan and even in the stories of and travel to the Labrador coast, mom and dad were creating the foundation for service and travel.  The songs and stories at home, the visits to the homes of Epps (and Duecks and Reimers) at holidays and vacations shaped me into who I am.  The knowledge that I come from family in which there were many called to serve as pastors makes me feel deeply rooted in and proud of my work.  If genes have a memory, then they are telling their story in my choice of vocation as pastor and in my willingness to venture into a foreign land – in so far as the US is foreign.

Jesus may not have been so positive about the role of family – although clearly his family raised him as a knowledgeable and faithful servant of God – but Paul, a single dude, speaks clearly about the important of honoring the generation before, and about the influence in the life of faith  of parents and grandparents on the young.  He writes to his colleague Timothy in his greeting in 2 Timothy, “I am aware of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and now, I am sure, lives in you.”

It could as well be written, “I am aware of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandparents Paul and Lillian and then in your parents Larry and Denise, and now lives in you.” 

The challenge that I feel is that now I am raising yet another generation Epp.  In fact it was really important for me that Naomi share our name.  I was near Naomi’s age at the first Eppisode, in '81.  I am curious to know in another 30 years what she might remember about her family and its role in her formation.  I pray that God grant me – and Naomi’s dad Joe - the grace and faith and wisdom to be parents like those that Paul commends.  I am very grateful for the family that has formed me.