Resources 7 Paths Blog My Personal Gift to You: This I Believe
My Personal Gift to You: This I Believe
Brother & sister love
Christmas is a personal time, a family time, and a time to give gifts. Usually I use this space to write about leadership and organizations.
This time I’d like to give you the gift of a very personal, generational family story.
A couple of years ago All Things Considered, a National Public Radio program, featured a series of people reading essays they had written called, “This I Believe.”
At the time I thought of trying my hand at writing a “This I Believe” essay and submitting it. I never got around to it but recently wrote one for a weekly column I do for our small town newspaper.
Here, adapted from the column, is my gift to you.
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Life has a way of cutting people down as if they were dandelions. But if you have ever tried to cut down dandelions you know how fierce they grow again. Many a lawn with dandelions has been mowed only to be full of dandelions the next day.
Life cut down my father-in-law. Ralph Larson, on November 13, 1951. Ralph was a General Conference Baptist missionary in Ethiopia at the time. He and an Ethiopian friend were riding a motorcycle to another part of Ethiopia to explore the possibility of starting mission work there.
An Ethiopian who opposed Emperor Haile Selassie, and was hoping to foment a revolution by killing a white man, fired shots at the men on the motorcycle, killing Sarah’s father and injuring the man riding with him.
Sarah, who has been my wife for 34 years, was in the womb when her father was cut down. In April the following year, she was born in Duluth, Minnesota, an orphan.
When Sarah was 18 months old, her mother remarried and three weeks later her second husband contracted polio and died a week later. Sometimes life can be incredibly cruel.
When Sarah was four her mother remarried a third time, this time to a man who had trouble with alcohol. Her family moved a lot. In fact, by the time Sarah was 18, she had moved 21 times.
Sarah’s father, Ralph Larson, is buried in a cemetery in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. In the late 1990’s I realized that in 2001 he would have been buried there for 50 years and no one from his family had ever visited his gravesite. I began dreaming that our family would be able to travel to Ethiopia to visit the grave on the 50th anniversary year of his death.
Unfortunately, not all dreams come true. The 50th anniversary year passed and no one from his family visited his grave.
But like mowing dandelions, that was not the end of the story. In the winter of 2002 our second daughter, a senior in college, saw an Ethiopian friend on campus that she had worked with at a camp the previous summer. She warmly greeted her friend with a hug. He in turned introduced her to a friend that was with him, a young man from Ethiopia.
His friend was a computer systems student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. After the brief encounter with our daughter the computer systems student wanted to spend more time with her. He only knew her first name but, being a computer student, he figured out how to e-mail every student with that first name at her college.
Our daughter responded to his e-mail and that was the beginning of their romance. They were married in August of 2003.
In December 2006, they spent a month in Ethiopia, giving our daughter an opportunity to meet many of her husband’s extended family. Also, they became the first members our family to visit Ralph Larson’s grave.
A couple weeks ago our daughter e-mailed us a picture she called “Brother & sister love.” In the photo their three-year old son and four-month old daughter are smiling, obviously enjoying being together. As I gaze at the photo I marvel at the wonder of these children who have their roots in Ethiopia, the land where two of their great-grandparents served as missionaries.
This I believe: dandelions bounce back, there is power in the resurrection, and, that when life cut down Ralph Larson, love found a way to give him two lovely Ethiopian-American great-grandchildren through a daughter and granddaughter he never met.
***
Happy holidays, dear readers.
Wisdom for the week. Love, fierce as a dandelion, finds a way.
Tags: Ethiopia, Family, This I Believe
What a beautiful, and beautifully told, story of you and your family, Rich and Sarah…and how fitting to be shared at this time of the year. Our prayers and best wishes to you all for a most Blessed Christmas and to all you love where ever they may be in the New Year.