Os Imprevistos/The Unexpected

The older I get, the more I try to prepare myself for the unexpected.  A proper mental attitude can be helpful, not only for large and significant issues, but also for those of lessor import.  Actually, unexpected happenings can often have positive, even humorous outcomes.   Sometimes I think back and say to myself:  That unexpected occurrence turned out OK after all.  I certainly would have missed a memorable experience if everything had gone as expected!

Our recent trip to northern Brazil produced one such experience at departure time.  My wife and I had arrived early at the gate in the Miami airport to board our midnight flight.  We stood there as time passed and airline personnel checked and rechecked the passenger list.  Finally, when I peered into the darkness and saw the plane backing away from the gate, I knew we would not be going on that flight!   We’d been bumped, along with six others, with no choice but to wait 24 hours until the next flight to Brasilia.  We’d packed a change of clothes in our hand luggage, and were grateful for the hotel and food vouchers.  But the best part of the unexpected inconvenience was the sizable compensation from the airline in the form of two checks, $1,300 each.  Not bad for merely delaying our trip by one day!

 Tired but safe, we settled in at the campus guest house in north Brazil two days later. The challenge was to establish a suitable routine for sleeping, eating, studying and giving class each day during August.  We’d been there and done this type of teaching during many years prior to 2010, so no big deal, right?  Wrong!  Somehow we’d forgotten how humid and sticky the climate really is.  Our bedroom was adequate, though small, and had no air conditioning, so we used a fan.  During the wee hours of the morning one or the other of us would wake up under the mosquito net suspended over our bed, feeling uncomfortable and try to adjust the fan for maximum effect until day break.  Shower baths with refreshing cold water kept us comfortable during the day.  Twice I lathered up with soap, only to have the water go off at that very moment!  Not to worry, both times someone went to turn on the campus pump right away, and all was well again.  

One night we were just dozing off when we heard a muffled thump, as if something heavy had fallen nearby.  I assured my good wife that it was merely the rats or bats running around or colliding above the ceiling, or the wind that had lifted the plastic ceiling a bit, before returning it suddenly to its former position.  But that wasn’t it.  The next morning we discovered that the wire we’d strung across the room to hang clothes on had fallen to the floor, thus the loud thump hours before. So much for worrying about unconfirmed evidence of active rodents in the guest house ceiling! 

More about our Brazil trip later.  As you can see from the video, there are interesting things to see in Brazil, including the umbrella ants at work.

 

Catch up time

What with all the problems accessing this blog, time has slipped away!  Been busy caring for garden and steadily harvesting two plantings of sweet corn, string beans, and waiting for the cantaloupes and small watermelons to ripen.  Squash are about over, my latest tactic to get to know our neighbors, as I took around some of the little yellow crook necked ones.  Ladies appreciated the gesture!  Is dry as a bone again with temperatures during past ten days over 100 every day, some days around 105.  So, will continue to water the front lawn and ignore back yard, full of weeds and native grasses, mowing both about every two weeks.

Then there's the project for AICEB churches in Brazil.  Was asked to prepare five Sunday school lessons on missions, based on the book of Philippians in the New Testament, all in my best Portuguese.  Submitted the project a couple of days ago (about thirty hours of study), made suggested corrections and now await editing by the folks who will soon publish the material for the churches.  Discovered that the Philippian church in Acts 16 and Paul's letter to the church ten years later contain interesting principles for missions:  the message of missions, the Gospel of Christ; the cost of missions, various difficulties and suffering; examples for doing missions, Paul, Jesus Christ, Timothy and Epaphroditus; & the means for doing missions, both divine and human.

In just four weeks we shall wing our way back to Brazil to the place we worked for many years.  God willing, t'will be a good visit of five and a half weeks, July 27 to September 4, teaching Biblical anthropology for a month at the Bible college as a volunteer.  Still must review material, do new reading, prepare lesson plans and assignments in coming weeks.  What a challenge after being gone for over two years!  With passports, e-tickets, and mosquito net in hand, away we go, trusting the Lord to make us a blessing among a people that have blessed us so much in the past.  Send a comment if you want to wish us well as we enjoy our friends, Brazilian coffee, açai, guaraná, galeto, farinha & afternoon naps in a colorful hammock!

Mother

My mother, Anna Margie Stoner, was forty when I was born, and Daddy turned forty-two soon after.  If it hadn’t been for my brother, six years my elder, I would have experienced the older-parent, only-child syndrome, because my two sisters had already married before I was old enough to remember anything.

I do recall a lot about Mother, memories primarily related to the fifteen years we lived in Alabama.  For her and Daddy it was a second career adventure under God’s leading.  For me it was normal growing-up time.  Both my parents were nearing fifty years of age in 1951 when we moved to Alabama, and looking back I marvel at how they enjoyed life and accomplished much during those years.

Mother was a doer.  She believed that dirt was incompatible with her Christian convictions.  She worked very hard to keep our home neat and clean.  The men in our family had to be very careful not to drag dirt into the house on their work shoes.  Periodically Mother waxed the linoleum kitchen floor.  Sometimes just after she did this, I did something I considered to be a great sport.  I would coax our husky farm dog, Mack, into the house via the back door when Mother wasn’t looking.  Then I would place his paws on the edge of the slick kitchen floor and give him a firm shove across the linoleum to the other door.  The old mutt knew what was coming but usually consented meekly to playing my game, bracing his legs awkwardly in a half-crouching position as he glided swiftly along, mostly on his toe nails.  He didn’t bark, whine, or bite; he only displayed a worried look on his face until gladly regaining his freedom as he hit the screen door and bounded outside!

Gardening was a family project, but after the produce was gathered, Mother had the greatest share of the work.  She did some canning but mostly froze the corn, beans and other vegetables.  We had brought a twenty cubic foot chest freezer along from Pennsylvania so we could stock up with food to carry us through the fall and winter.  Fall was butchering time and this also added to our food storage.  Some of the broilers from our chicken raising operation always found their way into the freezer too after each flock went to market.  Mother taught me how to kill and dress poultry.  I always thought a more fitting term would be to undress the chickens as I learned how to behead, scald, and pluck those birds!

One of my mother’s gifts was to offer warm hospitality.  Young and old and many between enjoyed her culinary creations.  Relatives and friends would come occasionally from Pennsylvania.  Preachers and missionaries who visited our country church always seemed to end up around our table sooner or later.  Mother’s barbecued chicken was my favorite, I think, despite the fact that I spent a great deal of time and effort hand feeding thousands of chickens during those years.

My college roommate, Chan P, made an instant hit with Mother when he came to visit for the first time. He gave her hugs and bragged on her cooking, including her special iced coffee brew.   Chan had been quite a pagan before his dramatic Christian conversion at twenty-one.  Apparently he found something in my home that he’d missed in his own, and delighted to come home with me for visits.  I liked the arrangement, too, because Chan had a 1957 Chevy with a racing cam that seemed to speed up significantly as we drove the last few of the 220 miles from Birmingham for a weekend visit. 

Mother hummed or sang as she washed dishes and hung out the laundry.  She ordered religious books from Moody Press for distribution among a number of families in the community.  She was a Sunday school and summer Bible school teacher, thoroughly knowledgeable of the Gospel, Bible stories, and how it all related to herself and others.  I still recall a series of flannel graph lessons she taught us youngsters about time and clocks.  Missionary friends with Overseas Missionary Fellowship, now OMF, helped Mother sponsor a regular prayer group for mission work in the Far East.  Later this led to regular attendance for her and Daddy at a regional OMF prayer conference held in Georgia.

Mother had one small innocent vice that she passed on to me.  When driving the ten miles back from grocery shopping in town, neither she nor I could resist opening a loaf of ‘light’ bread.  That’s what it’s called in Alabama, and we enjoyed a piece or two of the soft, delicious stuff as a kind of appetizer before the approaching supper hour!

Once Mother’s back gave her trouble, causing her to be bedridden with traction attached to her legs for some days.  The most serious health condition she faced during those fifteen years was the time she swallowed part of her dental bridge work while eating toast one morning.  An x-ray showed that the piece had lodged in her colon, fortunately removed by major surgery some days later.  I don’t recall if she was able to reuse the item or had to get some new bridge work!

It was during the Alabama years that Mother took up fishing at her doctor’s suggestion.  Daddy, Mother and I would drive 60 miles to Milton, Florida for an afternoon and evening of fishing enjoyment.  We didn’t always catch lots of fish but certainly were contented observers of God’s creation.  Mother took her fishing seriously, even praying for a good catch, but always able to chuckle and attribute whatever the outcome was, to a satisfying combination of the Lord’s doing, along with her best fishing efforts. 

Mother lived to see all but one of her grandchildren.  The last one was our son, Mark, whom she knew about, prayed for and keenly anticipated meeting at our next furlough from Brazil.  But the Lord took Mother to heaven before that, after two years of diminishing strength and suffering from cancer.  She and Daddy had moved back to Pennsylvania for retirement, and that’s where her seventy-six years of earthly pilgrimage drew to a close. 

Earlier she and Daddy had visited us in Brazil in 1973, soon after their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Their three-month visit was drawing to a close when Mother wrote the following in her diary one day after shopping and preparing to return home to the States:  “It was a very good day!”   Her life could be summarized similarly:  It was a very good life.

Charles Stoner
First written in 1993
Revised, May, 2012

Drinking from the Saucer

As we pulled into the mall area for lunch, we looked up to see a young couple holding a handwritten sign: In Love, Out of Gas. We probably should have helped them and their dog, perhaps by following their fuel-starved vehicle to a filling station and treating them to a half tank of gas. But we didn’t. On the road again, my wife and I pondered how much we too are in love, even after nearly 42 years of marriage. But we haven´t run out of gas lately, even with the rising price of the precious liquid.

Perhaps our good fortune can be expressed in a song title we heard on the radio about a week later: I´m drinking from my saucer, Lord, because my cup has overflowed. This was after attending my 50 year high school reunion where sixteen of our class of thirty gathered for lunch at a resort in Asheville, NC. Nine spouses joined the grads, and all present wore name tags to aid identification. Special sharing times generally reflected overflowing cup experiences through the years. However, four classmates of the original thirty have died, one a homicide victim. Several of the remaining ten desired to come but couldn’t, and a few had not yet been located.

A highlight of the reunion was a DVD made available with 8mm movies taken by Greg during our senior year of high school at Ben Lippen boarding school. Sports and other activities were filmed and one section featured the class trip to Washington, DC in the spring of 1961. Camelot had just gotten under way and a clip included a scene of Jackie Kennedy dressed in pink, arriving for a ribbon cutting ceremony somewhere in Washington. My roommate, Tom who was happily standing nearby, blurted out, Oh, she´s so beautiful! For which remark he is forever remembered!

Our two-week road journey included other interesting visits, some near where I had grown up in south Alabama. My former Sunday school teacher treated us to pecan pie. A nice overnight visit with an elementary classmate in his lovely home near Mobile. A ride with a former neighbor in a golf cart down to the farm pond. A short visit with an attorney and his dear wife in their nineties who spoke of their church and visit to Brazil many years ago. College friends included a dear lady, now 96, Mom who mothered us all, and one of Vivian´s first cousins and his family near Birmingham.

In south Georgia we spent a night with the retired pastor of the small country church which I attended in Alabama during childhood and youth. Before we retired that evening, Godfrey insisted on phoning a friend in Illinois. Then he handed me the phone and I was pleased to hear the voice of Harold, the evangelist who preached on the occasion of my profession of faith 57 years before! How special to hear this man ask about my life, family and work, ending our chat by saying, Let me pray for you right now! And that´s what he did!

At times during these enjoyable visits, it took extra effort to remember names and events. That’s a problem our radio preacher friend aptly summed up when he said, My memory is running out from under me! But memory was restored for the most part during our enjoyable visits as we journeyed and chatted with many friends in various places throughout the Southeast. Truly we have good reason to be drinking from our saucer, because our cup has indeed overflowed!

My Father Remembered

January 14, 2012 marked the 110th anniversary of my father's birth. As a tribute to his memory, I wrote the following composition:

Daddy
Admirable fatherhood is an illusive quality for me to describe, especially since joining the ranks of those who hope to attain it. However, I can say that I certainly admired my own father, Roy Weaver Stoner (1902-1984), whom I called Daddy, or Pa, most of my life. He was an unpretentious man, about five feet, seven inches tall, with a ready chuckle and friendly approach to people and life in general.

I never knew my father to draw a paycheck except when carpentering soon after he married, and I wasn’t around in those days. After that he owned his own market business in Pennsylvania, and then farmed in Alabama for fifteen years. That took him to retirement when he did small remodeling and painting jobs and mowed lots for grocery money. But during retirement he mostly enjoyed doing volunteer maintenance in several Christian camps in the South that he and Mother visited over the winters while living in their Airstream travel trailer.

Daddy was a frugal, hard-working man. If he didn’t have the money for something he needed, he waited until he did. The market business in Pennsylvania prospered well enough for him to build a home and eventually purchase two medium-sized farms which he rented out. I am the youngest of four children. My two sisters, Becky and Ruth, married while I was quite young and lived in Lancaster County, PA. When my brother, Bill, was thirteen and I was seven, we moved to South Alabama to help with a home mission project of our church.

Just before we moved, Daddy worked a couple of months building our new house in the piney woods ten miles north of the town of Brewton, AL He had the help of Harold, Ruth’s husband, and a couple of other men. Some years later he sold the farms in Pennsylvania and bought another in Alabama where Bill and Hope lived for a time after marrying.

Daddy taught his children to work well physically. My brother and I always had chores to do before and after school. I would get off the school bus at 3:15, have a snack, and change to old jeans and pull on my high-top work shoes. Then I helped out with what needed doing around the farm until chore time. Chores lasted until dark: feeding the twelve hundred laying hens, or five thousand broilers, and tending the cows. Before breakfast and school I had fewer chores, usually to milk the cow or do part of the chicken feeding. During the summer months the work increased with garden and field tasks. It was a matter of sharing what had to be done. Daddy did his part, and my brother and I learned to do ours. We thought that such chores were required of all kids our age!

Daddy trusted us early on. For instance, he taught me when I was still a mere lad, how to operate the tractor and pickup safely, though not out on the highway. The result was that years before I was old enough to get a driver’s license, I had driven various vehicles regularly on back roads. He also showed me how to handle firearms safely, beginning with a Benjamin air rifle and moving up to a pump action .22 rifle, and finally how to shoot the sixteen gauge shotgun that kicked hard and left black and blue bruises on my shoulder at the beginning of hunting season each fall.

My father was well respected in the community as an honest farmer and businessman. He was friendly to everyone, even to the unfortunate who happened along occasionally. One evening a fellow who had had a few too many drinks chugged into our lane in his old car and just sat there. Mack, our dog, made such a fuss that no one in his right mind, and certainly not a person under the influence, would venture to get out of his car. Finally, Daddy went out to see what the ruckus was about and stayed so long talking to Jack that we began to wonder what had happened, and if Pa was still safe. Daddy didn’t seem upset or unduly concerned, apparently thinking it best to humor Jack a bit before suggesting that he crank up his car and drive home slowly. Back then there wasn’t as much concern for drunken drivers on the road, and Jack did find his way home eventually.

A man lived about five miles away who really appreciated “Brother Stoner” and his fine Christian testimony. One day when chatting with Daddy, he said he wanted my father to preach his funeral sermon. Well, Daddy could give a good Sunday school lesson, but he didn’t consider himself a preacher like Bro. Hollinger or other respected country preachers in those parts. Daddy told us about his friend’s desire, adding with a chuckle, that it might be easier if the man outlived him! They were both in apparent good health at the time, and I don’t know which one went first since we moved away from the area before any such arrangements became necessary.

Daddy hired a couple of local fellows periodically to help out on the farm, especially when his sons were off at boarding school. He loaned one fellow money to buy his first car, a used 1951 Ford sedan, allowing the young man to pay off the loan by working for him for several months. During one of our visits back to Pennsylvania, he left Ray in charge of the farm and sent him a paycheck through the mail. Ray never received the check, so Daddy wrote him another when we returned home.

The rest of the story is that some twelve years later, the local post office discovered Daddy’s undelivered letter containing the check, and tried to deliver it to Ray, who in the interval had passed away! By this time my parents had moved back to Pennsylvania. The local newspaper, The Brewton Standard, picked up the story and printed a photo copy of the outdated check with an article about it. Under the photo was a fitting caption describing how the Post Office had indeed kept the promise to always deliver the mail, though in this case it had taken much longer than anticipated!

Our family became part of a new church plant ten miles up the road. The hopeful group met for several months in a church building owned by another denomination until we could construct our own facility in the Range community. The Stoner family was in on this building project from the beginning, Daddy as chief builder and block layer, and Mother and I helping too. I think Bill was off at boarding school during those days. We used our own electric-powered cement mixer which I became skillful operating when the men poured the sanctuary floor: sixteen shovels full of sand, four of gravel, and two or three from the cement bag, the correct mixture for each wheelbarrow load, along with just the right amount of water from the hose.

I was going on eleven and proud to be part of the building project that my father was directing. Shortly after its completion, Grace Fellowship Church was the scene of my own spiritual conversion in 1955, but that’s another story. The building still stands, passed on twenty years later to another church group.

My parents gave me the same opportunity they’d given to my brother, to go away for my last two years of high school to a Christian school in another state. All went well until spring semester during my junior year when a letter arrived, telling of a fire back on the farm, caused by a faulty gas brooder in one of the broiler houses. Within an hour, two sizeable chicken houses, the barn, and Daddy’s newly constructed custom butcher shop were completely destroyed.

This event definitely changed the future course of the family. My brother decided to get a job in town. I finished high school in North Carolina and went on to college in Birmingham, going home for only part of each vacation period. Daddy and Mother soon realized that their sons’ futures were probably not in the poultry and butchering business, even if they could rebuild. There had been no fire insurance. My parents took a write-off on their income tax that year, farmed a couple of more years, and moved back to Pennsylvania for retirement.

Obviously, the fire was a difficult experience for all of us, but Daddy somehow found the grace to sum up his own reaction in the words of Job: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” With that spiritually mature attitude, Daddy positively influenced my own faith journey probably as much as the sum of all our church activities and regular Bible reading before meals during all those years on the farm.

Years later Daddy sat down one Friday evening after a work day at a camp in Florida and wrote a letter to each of his four children. The next morning the Lord took him home to heaven through a boating accident. He was eighty-two. He used to say that everyone had to die of something, and for him it was very sudden and unexpected. I greatly cherish my memories of Daddy, and thank God for his legacy. Certainly he was a remarkable man and an outstanding father.

Thanks, Dad! (On the occasion of Dad’s 68th birthday, January 14, 1970)

Thanks, Dad, for being persistent. Many times I didn’t like chores and work, but where would I be today if I’d not learned the satisfaction of a job well done?
Thanks, Dad, for being patient. It would have been easier and safer to do it yourself, but you allowed me to learn to drive on the back road to the farm.
Thanks, Dad, for being so practical. When things needed fixing or building, I learned that resourcefulness is the key to satisfying accomplishment.
Thanks, Dad, for your sense of humor, not often expressed in flagrant laughter, but in life’s quiet and constant paradoxes, comments revealing balanced insight.
Thanks, Dad, for your faith. Spiritual values are caught as well as taught. I learned that churches need preachers and also others, to teach, to build, and to mow the grass.
Dad, these are a few of the things that are impressed on my memory, qualities God allowed you to model, to make my life a richer experience.

Your son, Charles