Author: Joyce De Ridder

Categories
Relationships

The Joy of Getting it

Isn’t it exhilarating to finally understand something you have been trying to learn?! I love to learn and I love to teach. There is always reason to celebrate whether I am doing the learning or I am helping someone else.

Most of the time we have to use words to explain something and that can be troublesome when it’s hard to grasp the meaning of a word. I am often looking for a definition that aids me in applying a word to my life. I’ll share here a few words that I have learned to put to work.

Delight

For example, when the Bible tells us that the Lord delights in us or when we are told to delight ourselves in the Lord, I want to know how I can describe and experience what delight looks and feels like. Somewhere a long time ago I read a definition that satisfied me and gave me an experiential understanding of delight. It is this: to love with enthusiasm.

Ponder

Or take the word ponder. It says in the Bible that Mary pondered what was told to her. It is not a word I use. What does it mean to ponder something? I was helped by this definition: to ponder is to give something mental consideration with heart approval.

Love

What does it look like to love others. On several occasion I heard people say incomprehensible things like “I don’t really like him, but I love him in the Lord.” Now what does that mean and how do you do that?

Is love a feeling? If so, how do I love those I don’t know? I don’t want to be overly simplistic here, but when I wanted to get a handle on this, I was helped by a pastor who said when we love other people we have “a relaxed mental attitude toward them.” Of course, that is not the whole of love but it is a starting place. When I apply that definition, I realize that it is not possible to judge someone at the same time I am having a relaxed mental attitude toward them.

Grace

Or take the huge concept of grace which I am forever experiencing and learning about. I learned about saving grace when I became a child of God. I learn every day about living grace. And I watched Joe Ann experience dying grace. I don’t know that there is a single definition that explains it although I know it from experience.

When I asked about its meaning as a child, someone said, “Grace is God’s riches at Christ’s expense.” That’s a nice acronym but it wasn’t satisfying.

One day while watching a tennis match I caught a tiny piece of its meaning. Everytime a player was a point away from winning the match, the announcer would say, “Advantage, Williams” or whatever the player’s name was. At that moment it occurred to me that God announces that in every situation in which I find myself. “Advantage, Joyce.” I have the winning edge in things that are frustrating, joyous, sad, perplexing, or any situation in which I find myself; he gives it to me. The match may not be over, but the advantage I have is that I can meet the challenge in him.

Attitude

We have all heard the word attitude invoked many times. We’re told to have a good one, change one, or get rid of a bad one. This brief definition of an attitude is my favorite because it tells me what it is and suggests how I can deal with it. An attitude is an emotional habit. When there is a recurring attitude, I recognize it for what it is and know that habits are not easy to break but they can be broken.

The definitions I share with you are like shorthand to me. I like them because I often have to put these words to work on the spur of the moment. These definitions help me understand what I am doing or what I need to do.

Do you have some to share? I’d love to hear them.

Categories
Slovakia Memoir

Missionary Internship

Dr. O'Brien at Missionary Internship Graduation

Today, as I am writing, it is January 19th, an unforgettable day for me. Seventy years ago, January 19, 1953, I became a follower of Jesus Christ. I was a week away from my 11th birthday and it became the day of my new birth, a day that made an eternal difference.

Twenty-nine years later on January 19, 1982, my youngest sister, Susanne, took her own life at the age of 31 by a gunshot to her head. For most of that year I felt like I was hearing people from underwater drowning in an internal sea of tears.

I begin my memoir with that year not because of what happened in January but because of a meeting in December where I met the man who was to introduce me to Joe Ann Shelton five years later. I will pick up here with the third paragraph of chapter one.

I was teaching at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas. What I do remember is an incident in December of 1982 that led to my meeting someone very significant to my story who was part of God’s plan that resulted in the two of us, Joe Ann and me, being in Slovakia in 1997.

Prior to meeting him, one of my students told me that since she was twelve years old she felt called to be a missionary. I asked her what she had done to clarify her sense of calling. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked, “What do you mean?”

Following the conversation that ensued, I thought about her and other students who needed to have some way to determine over the years whether they were truly called and suitable for a career in missions. As my thoughts evolved, I put together a proposal for a summer missonary internship program designed to help university students explore their call to missions. It would require them to work under the supervision of a Southern Baptist ethnic pastor in one of the 19 different language churches in Houston for the summer, live with an ethnic family, and study the language with a native speaker. These requirements would be part of four courses established for the internship program for which they would gain twelve hours of credit.

To get approval from the university to conduct the program and obtain supporters like the Women’s Missionary Union in Texas and in the Houston area, as well as others, I put the proposal together in a slideshow outlining the components and began meeting with potential supporters. The last person I met with that December was Dr. Bill O’Brien, the Executive Vice President of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now the International Mission Board). He was speaking at a youth conference in Dallas and I went there specifically to meet him and share the program idea with him.

All went well and people were able to catch the vision and back it. The program was launched in the summer of 1983 with 14 students who worked in Chinese, Korean, Laotian, and Spanish congregations. It successrfully clarified for some students that a career in missions was their calling and for others that it was not. A flim was made to document the program and Bill O’Brien came to speak at the graduation ceremony in August.

In the spring of 1984, I interacted with Bill one more time when I took the film to be shown to a group at the Foreign Mission Board headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.

I did not see him again until December at a mission banquet in Houston right after I had resigned from Houston Baptist University. A week later I had a call from the Foreign Mission Board asking me to interview for a position. After three interviews, I accepted a position in the Medical Services Department as the coordinator of short-term medical volunteers and began my new job on March 1st of 1985.

I tell that story not only because of meeting Bill O’Brien who would later introduce me to Joe Ann but also because when we went to Slovakia we created an internship program for students who graduated from Calvary Schools in Holland where I had been the principal. Our first two interns came in the summer of 1998. One of them, Jeannette Wolters, married Ben Gerth and went to Tanzania as a missionary. The other, Vanessa Lake, came back to spend 15 months with us after graduating from Moody Bible Institute before going on to the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague.

Categories
Relationships

Being Held

I like this image for its symbolic value – being held by a hand. It is a tiny reminder to me of the hand of the living, eternal God that is infintely bigger than me and able to hold me.

For years I have gone to bed at night thanking God for the everlasting arms that are beneath me. I also quote the lines below from Martyn-Lloyd Jones almost every night. The realization that I am a day closer to home allows me to go to sleep with joy. 

Here in the body pent,
               Absent from Him I roam,
               Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
                 A day's march nearer home.

Those words become sweeter as each year goes by. I often speak them to God by changing the word Him to You. Not every night is naturally joyful, of course. There are nights when I add these words from Zephaniah 3:17, “he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing” and reword them as a request to God.

You may wonder why I am sharing so personally in a public blog. I do it because I believe there are people who crave and need the intimacy with God the Father that is available to those of us who are His children and we are invited to it. Maybe there are others who enjoy this intimacy but could use a reminder today that they are being held by an everlasting, loving Father.

In this new year I have had people dear to me who have died and others who are actively dying now. The comfort I have felt is in knowing that those leaving know the Lord Jesus and will be with him.

Others I know are entering unknown but difficult paths of different kinds of separation. Those of us who are left can walk beside them, offer the touch of Jesus through our hands and arms and through our presence.

While moving my books around recently, I picked up one written 50 years ago that I have had in my library almost that long. The title is Loneliness by Robert Weiss. He wrote that there is very little research and writing on the subject of loneliness and hoped that his book would encourage other social scientists to write on the subject. I paged through my copy to see what I had underlined many years ago.

Picking here and there I found these things worthy of reflection even as I think about intimacy with God. Loneliness is an experience of relational insufficiency, particularly an intimate relationship of knowing you are known and understood without having to explain. There is trust in that kind of relationship and the sense of knowing the other as well.

Our lonely self is tense, restless, unable to concentrate, driven. I know that self, although I sometimes deny it is my “real” self.

Loneliness is not the product of being alone; one can be lonely in a group. It is the absense of an intimate relationship.

Weiss writes, “our problem in estimating the prevalence of loneliness is that loneliness is not a condition like a broken leg, which one has or doesn’t have, but it is nearer to fatigue, a condition that can vary from the barely perceptible to the overwhelming. How much loneliness must one feel for it to be counted?”

In Ecclesiastes we read that God has planted eternity in the human heart. We are made for a relationship with God, which we know through Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh. While God is physically absent and invisible to our physical eye and inaudible to our physical ear, we see him and hear him in his Word. And he sees and hears us.

One of the beauties of this relationship to me is that we are not equals. He is Creator and I am creature. He is father and I am child. His love is perfect and mine is not. He is never changing and I am always changing. When I understand these roles, I can grow in the relationship.

I never have to wonder where he is or how he feels about me. I never have to fear rejection or separation or abandonment. Human intimacy is wonderful and we need intimate relationships with others but it has none of these guarantees and cannot be compared.

This morning as I got ready for another day’s march toward home, I was reminded “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

Being held by God is a comforting experience at at any age.

Categories
Poetry

Habits and Change

There is a poem by Portia Nelson that most people who are in recovery from some addiction or destructive habit have read or heard. Although I worked for many years with those who were addicted to a substance, I believe An Autobiography in Five Chapters is a poem that speaks to most of us.

Someone who was interpreting for Joe Ann at an AA meeting in Slovakia told us that he had gotten into a habit of playing games on the computer and that it had become a habit that absorbed more and more of his time and was interfering with what he should have been doing. There are people who spend more time than they want to on social media or watching television or eating the wrong things or any number of things. I believe the reason these habits are so difficult to break is because we experience them as pleasant, a relief from stress, or an escape and we like what we feel. When they become habits we do them unconsciously and they have a life of their own. We are all good at rationalizing, justifying, and minimizing what we don’t want to give up.

If you have a habit that you want to change, think about replacing it with something better. And let someone know that you are working on getting rid of a habit. Ask them to ask you how your doing. I think this statement: “you alone can do it but you cannot do it alone” applies to most of us trying to make significant change.

An Autobiography in Five Chapters 

Chapter 1 
I walk down the street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless. 
It isn't my fault. 
It takes me forever to find a way out. 

Chapter 2 
I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I pretend I don't see it.
 I fall in again.
 I can't believe I am in the same place.
 But it isnt my fault.
 It still takes a long time to get out.
 
Chapter 3
 I walk down the street.
 There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
 I see it is there.
 I still fall in ... it's a habit. 
My eyes are open.
 I know where I am.
 It is my fault.
 I get out immediately.

 Chapter 4
 I walk dow the same street.
 There is a deep whole in the sidewalk.
 I walk around it. 

Chapter 5
 I walk down another streer.
Categories
Relationships Self Reflections

The Love of Learning

The image above was painted by my dear friend, Johnni Johnson Scofield, who took up watercolor painting when she was close to 70. I have always called this painting her self-potrait. Johnni loved learning.

Earlier this week my bookcase looked liked this. Then, I invited a young pastor, who is a real student of God’s Word, to come and help himself to what he wanted of Joe Ann’s theological library, half of what you see on these shelves. There is a wealth of theological exposition in those volumes; just looking at them made me feel rich. But like all of our riches, what good are they if they are not used? I picked up a volume of the set of fouteen by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the book of Romans and paged through it. The underlining and the notes show they were used by Joe Ann. As much as I think I would use that set, I know I will not. Why should they and others be left until I die?

When he left my house, the bookcase looked like this and I was deeply satisfied. The exercise of relinquishing treasured things has been good for me. It was a reminder that there is much more I need to release that can be used by others. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but I am hoping that I will expend the time and energy in the months ahead to let go of more tangible objects. I suppose the reason I have so many in my storage area is that it is the easiest place to put something I no longer need or use or that is taking up space I want for something else. It takes thought and work to decide what is junk that needs to be discarded, what needs to be given away and where or to whom, and what should be kept and why.

My bookshelves are full again. They now hold books with my notes and underlining. As I sat quietly this morning sipping a cup of coffee with my little dog on my lap, I began to think of intangible things I also need to look at and about which I need to make some decisions. Just as we sort through piles of material things and put them in boxes to be dumped, given away, or kept, I know I have a storage room in my head that needs to be decluttered. There are things there to let go of that are junk and of no use to me or anyone. I have tried over the years not to allow too much of that in my storage area. But there are many more things that if I took them out, unwrapped them, or dusted them off would be wanted and useful to someone.

Don’t we all have things like that we should and could let go of? One of the greatest things I learned from those who see the value of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and practice them is that they share their experience, strength and hope with others. And those who hear them can take or leave what they want and can use. AA and similar meetings remind me of a potluck where everyone brings something to share and all those attending can take what they want. If you come to a potluck without anything yourself, there is more than enough to go around.

There have been more times than I care to remember when I have left a person or a group and felt stingy. I really hate that word and I hate that feeling. Not offering a word of encouragement. Not acknowledging someone’s pain. Failing to give praise due. Not extending my hand to touch or arms to embrace. Holding back a compliment needed for a good effort or a task completed. Not seeing something and saying something.

I know the greatest gifts we have to give one another are not tangible. I started out writing about the love of learning and it seems that I may have taken a detour. Not really. I have gained much that is intangible from tangible things like books. But maybe more of what I have learned is from the stories of people’s lives spoken and unspoken but shared. I have nothing new to pass on. Like giving away Joe Ann’s used books, I’m just passing along what has been underlined in my own life. Those tested and worn gifts are what I like best from others too.

One man gives freely, yet gains even more: another withholds unduly, but comes to proverty. A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed.

Proverbs 11: 24-25

Categories
Slovakia Memoir

A Christmas Celebration

Sitting in my study on Christmas Eve in 2022, while there is a blizzard outside, I am remembering fondly one of my favorite celebrations of Christmas in Slovakia. It took place probably 15 or 16 years ago and was celebrated at the end of a week in July with a group of a dozen children and half that many adults.

For three years in Slovakia we organized summer residential camps for children who had a parent addicted to alcohol. For one week these children between the ages of seven and twelve were out of their normal home environment spending time with adults and other children who understood them and knew what it was like to be growing up in a family where everything revolved around alcohol.

We had decided to make the theme of this particular week of summer camp a celebration of birthdays. Many times children who live with an alcoholic parent don’t have wonderful memories of birthday and holiday celebrations. There are times when a parent doesn’t show up or someone is drunk or maybe there is no celebration. There may be fighting and tension and sometimes more tears than laughter.

We decided we would celebrate every child’s and every adult’s birthday at camp that week. Each day of the week we celebrated all those who had a birthday in a three month period. Monday we celebrated January, February and March birthdays. On Tuesday we celebrated those who had birthdays in April, May and June, and so on through Thursday. Since the children’s parents would come for them on Saturday after lunch, we reserved Friday night to celebrate Christmas and the birth of Jesus.

Paper, and stamp art material, stickers, colored pencils and everything needed to make birthday cards and write birthday wishes were available. Every afternoon there was time to prepare cards and put them in a special mailbox to be delivered to the recipients that evening. Special desserts of cake or ice cream were on the menu each day. Everyone at camp that week had a special time to be recognized and celebrated.

Joe Ann and I had a lovely artificial tree which we brought to camp. As a part of our daily activities we prepared for our Christmas celebration. The children made the decorations for the tree – paper chains, snowflake cutouts, and more. We strung the lights and added some special ornaments. One day cookies were baked and everyone decorated cookies.

On Friday we had the Jesus birthday cake, a special round, three-layer cake with a chocolate cake layer on the bottom, strawberry in the middle layer, and a layer with green food coloring on the top. The cake had white icing and around the outer circumference of the cake were chocolate hearts and in the center of the cake was a single candle.

After we finished eating our cake, we shared its symbolism. The colored cake layers represented the reason for Jesus’ coming – our sinful, fallen nature, the blood of Christ shed for us, and new life for those who receieved his gift of eternal life by trusting in him. The round cake represented the world and the chocolate hearts the people of the world. The center candle represented Jesus, the light of the world. Then we had a short program that included the Christmas story, some singing of carols and a small candle for each child to light from the larger candle and place on top of the cake.

Finally, there were gifts. A church responsible for distributing the Samaritan’s Purse shoebox gifts to children in Slovakia had some boxes left from the last Christmas. They shared them with us and we were able to put under the tree an appropriate gift box for each boy and each girl at camp filled with games, candies, stuffed animals and other items. It was a joyful time for all of us.

Tonight I hold in my mind the joy of that July Christmas celebration, remembering each child, wondering what has become of them and saying a prayer that they have received the gift that Jesus offered them.

a birthday cake
shoebox gift
Jana’s birthday cards
Categories
Poetry

Living a Life that Matters

She lived a life that mattered

Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom

Psalm 90:12

What Will Matter? 

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.
There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days.
All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten
will pass to someone else.

Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.
It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.
Your grudges, resentments, frustrations
and jealousies will finally disappear.
So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire.
The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
It won't matter where you came from
or what side of the tracks you lived on in the end.
It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.
Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

So what will matter?
How will the value of your days be measured?

What will matter is not what you bought
but what you built, not what you got but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success
but your significance.

What will matter is not what you learned
but what you taught.
What will matter is every act of integrity,
compassion, courage, or sacrifice
that enriched, empowered or encouraged others
to emulate your example.

What will matter is not your competence
but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew,
but how many will feel a lasting loss when you're gone.
What will matter is not your memories 
but the memories that live in those who loved you.
What will matter is how long you will be remembered, 
by whom and for what.

Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident.
It's not a matter of circumstance but of choice.
Choose to live a life that matters.

Michael Josephson

I am remembering Joe Ann this Christmas with joy and gratitude for the way she lived her life and the contribution she made to me and so many others.

Categories
Self Reflections

If it’s worth doing…

You all know how to finish the title sentence above, right?

As an undergraduate student at Texas Woman’s University, I had a teacher who was stunning in the way she looked every day. She was dressed impeccably, hair and make-up perfect; she was never in a hurry and never seemed to get ruffled. When she walked into the room I always looked at her from head to toe to see if there was any flaw. She always knew the content she was teaching and presented it well. She seemed so put together in every way that she was intimidating.

Imagine the surprise of our undergraduate sociology class one morning when Miss Porter began the class by saying “Think about this. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.”

Had she finally made a mistake? Had she misspoken? Apparently not because she repeated the statement and added, “Is that good advice? Why would anyone say that?

She wanted some response from us and she got some feedback. Some said it might have been said as a joke or an excuse, or said to provoke an argument. The responses came without giving the statement serious thought and the preponderance of responses was that it was not good advice.

When the input ceased, Miss Porter went on, “Imagine that someone did make that statement and that it was good advice. In what context might that take place?”

Our thinking took a turn and the comments were a bit more thoughtful until we came to a point of seeing that if someone has something valuable to offer another – a product, a program, a proposal, or anything of any kind – it was not necessarily a good thing to wait until you had it perfected.

While some people do shabby work and are willing to put anything forth and consider it “good enough”, there are others who offer nothing because it just is not right yet. They are paralyzed by their perfectionism. Or maybe fear.

Courage to try

The first time we do anything we are by definition doing it without experience. We can get advice from those with experience, we can learn and prepare, and then we try to our best according to the ability we have.

If I think back on every area of ministry in which I have worked, I realize that there was always an element of fear of not being able to do it well when I started out.

When I was a teenager, I was asked for the first time to teach a weekly Sunday school class for young children in an afternoon outreach ministry. I said yes, although I wasn’t sure I could do it. I know I wasn’t a great teacher but I learned from the experience -preparing, presenting, listening, responding, handling a group, and more. The next opportunity to teach was not quite as scary and I found that I liked teaching. The more I taught, the more I enjoyed it.

Many times I heard Joe Ann say to people, “Obey the light you have and your light will increase. Disobey the light and your darkness will increase.” When I said yes to an adult who asked me as a teen to teach, I had no sense that I could do it, but he believed I could. He held out a light and offered it to me. I took it and it was fanned into a bigger light. Eventually, I learned that sometimes God uses the potential others see in us as the light we need to obey.

Responsibility to challenge

As I’ve gotten older, I have also learned that sometimes I need to be the one that recognizes potential in another and offers them that light. Although I was not able to articulate this in the past, I know that I have been doing it without awareness. Now I see that being observant of those coming along and challenging them to do what they think they can’t do is a responsibility I have.

At a farewell celebration for a young woman who was venturing out on a career that was going to take her overseas I overheard an older man say to her, “My wife and I are very proud of you. We saw things in you that made us know that you were the kind of girl who would do something like this.” Her reply, though not accusatory, was a question. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Complimenting the effort

I loved watching Joe Ann work with a music group because she worked for excellence not perfection. When it was time to perform, they performed and she said to them afterward, “You did well for where you are.” It was a compliment that came with a challenge to improve.

None of us will ever go from doing nothing to doing something perfectly. If it is worth doing, we need to be willing to do it poorly to the best of our ability with the promise to keep on trying.

When we make maximum use of what we learn from our experience, it is always better next time. We tweak what needs little adjustments. We add, substract, change, modify, adjust, and more.

Assessing the worth

I read somewhere that when people have a vision for a ministry and decide to lauch it, they should ask themselves if they are willing to stay with it for three to five years. Why? Because it will take that long to establish it to the point it can be handed off to someone else.

When I look back on our years in Slovakia, I see that those things that have lasted beyond us and grown were those undertakings we at first did poorly but found worthy of working at and investing in. Also, the people in whom we saw potential and confronted with their own gifts and emerging abilities, have blossomed.

Now that I find myself at a new time and place in my life, I am asking what is so valuable that I should invest my time, my energy, my material resources, my heart, my life into it? What is so valuable that I will stick with it no matter what happens?

Where do I find my answers? I ask God to give me a passion for what he has for me. Then, I ask for direction and courage to follow the light in that passion. The older I get the more I realize that the new things I find worthy of doing I will do poorly, but I’m willing to keep trying.

Categories
Self Reflections

Then and Now

All that you are ever to be you may already have been.

Bob Pierce

I am adding a new category this week called self-reflection. I do a good bit of it these days and decided to share some of my thoughts.

Then

Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision, came to speak at our church in the 1950s when I was in my early teens. I don’t remember anything he said except the quote above. As a young teen my head was full of the future and what I wanted to do and be someday. I was imaging a long life ahead of me and plenty of time to do all the things I dreamed of.

I was aware of the question “What is your life?” in the New Testament book of James and the answer that follows, “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” But I don’t think I applied it to myself at thirteen or fourteen until I heard the statement from Bob Pierce that night. It jolted me into considering the present and I resolved to make now count.

Over the years, every time someone I knew seemed to die too young – a high school classmate who died over the summer after our freshman year, my Aunt Gert’s nephew, Warren, who died in a auto crash at eighteen, my niece, Gwen, whose life ended of cancer before she was forty – I thought of this statement. It caused me to take a fresh look at what I was doing with life at that moment.

Joe Ann was sixty-five when we went to Slovakia and seventy-seven when we returned to the U.S. By the way she lived her life, she didn’t say at that time or anytime, “I’m content with what I’ve been and done. It is now time to relax, retire, and take it easy.” Of course, what she was able to do changed with age, health, energy, and other limitations, but it didn’t diminish who she was; until the end she was living her life aware of the importance of now.

Now

My dear friend, Frances Fuller, who finished a book called Helping Yourself Grow Old at age ninety is continuing to make positive contributions to the lives of others in a number of ways. Her writing today is still about aging and can be found in her blog.

There are others around me both my age and older who are also good role models for me by enriching the lives of their familes, friends, and others as they live each day in menaingful ways with gratitude for the gift of now.

When I was working on my doctorate in sociology, my related field of study was gerontology. Then, I studied aging and now I am one of the aged. The quote from Bob Pearce that spoke to me deeply when I was a young teen is still relevant to my life today. Whatever happens to me in the years ahead, I want to continue being and doing with purpose.

Categories
Slovakia Memoir

Thanksgiving and Harvest

I spent this Thanksgiving Day with my sister and her family – her husband, children, grandchildren, and their spouses, four great-grandchildren, and a granddaughter’s boyfriend. There were 18 of us in all and a few others missing, a grandson in the military and a granddaughter, who with her husband and four boys we would not see until the week after Christmas. Everyone not only contributed to the meal but also to the noisy, joyful interaction. It was a change from the last several years and a lovely day that included some treasured memories.

Our first Thanksgiving in Slovakia

I thought back 25 years years to our first Thanksgiving in Slovakia, November 27, 1997. By that time we had been there for three months. A couple of weeks before our American holiday arrived, Joe Ann and I talked about how we might use that day as an introduction of ourselves to our neighbors. While we were able to interact with those at the church who spoke English and with others through interpreters, when we were on our own in the apartment building we had no way to communicate with our neighbors. We didn’t know what they knew, if anything, about our reason for being in Slovakia. We were simply two American women living on the 3rd floor.

Since we had not met the families in the other 15 flats, we decided to write them a letter. We found some printable Thanksgiving stationery on the internet. Wrote our letter and had Daniela translate it for us. In the letter, we introduced ourselves and told them about Thanksgiving Day in America. We said we were thankful to be in their country and appreciated living in the same building with them. We told them we were grateful for their kindness and patience with us and our limited ability to interact with them. We also said that to show our gratitude we wanted to give them a gift.

Among the things we brought with us from the States was a box of Joe Ann’s cassette tapes. When the letters were ready and signed, we put them in an envelope along with a cassette. On Thanksgiving Day evening we knocked on the door of each of the other 15 apartments at 25 Bernolakova Street and gave them our Thanksgiving letter and tape.

Meeting a Slovak neighbor

Although we lived in our flat for over eight years, we didn’t get to know many of our neighbors. However, one afternoon we were surprised in the elevator by a woman who inititated a conversation.

“Hello. How are you?” the woman said in English.

Taking the question literally, Joe Ann replied, “I haven’t been feeling well.”

“Then, you must come see me,” said the woman.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Yes, I am Iveta Nedelova. I live on the eighth floor. My office is at end of this street.”

“Your English is good,” Joe Ann commented.

“Thank you. It is not as good as I want it to be,” Dr. Nedelova responded.

“Then, you must come to see us. We will talk together and you can improve your English.”

The beginning of a relationship

Besides spending time in conversational English together, Iveta became our doctor, gave us our flu shots each year, and helped me when I had knee surgery in Slovakia. Her son, when he was in high school, helped us with a camp for children from addicted families. She has been with us twice in Michigan, once alone and again before the pandenic with her husband and son. She serves on the board of the Slovak nonprofit we were part of forming in 2006.

But that is only a part of Iveta Nedelova’s place in our lives. It began in 1997 and continues to this day. We meet weekly on Skype. When my memoir is complete and our story is told, you will find her in several places. She is one of the cherished Slovak friends I am thankful for today.