Northern Lights over Mt. Rushmore

Last night Jonathan and I had the awesome privilege to witness Northern Lights streaking all around Mt. Rushmore. 

We had just attended Susan Hunt's funeral in Rapid City and burial in Oelrichs, SD, (where Jonathan had recently visited Susan's husband Keith who needed an estimate and input on a house repair issue) and were on our way back to Rapid City to spend the night at a friend's RV before a medical appointment for me 

when Jonathan started noticing Northern Lights. Family chats were blowing up with photos of the aurora. We had just passed the exit to Mt Rushmore, and together decided to turn around and head to Mt. Rushmore to see if we could get photos of the aurora behind the mountain. 

And did we ever!

It was like the perfect ending to a beautiful day. This funeral service was one of the most beautiful, positive, and uplifting funeral services I have ever attended. I didn't know Susan personally, but her brother-in-law Derald Hunt was our former pastor for years in Colorado. Years ago Susan and Keith had worked with the same mission in Mexico that my sister-in-law Regina had.

Ten of the eleven Hunt siblings (including our former pastor Derald Hunt) attended the funeral, as did many nieces and nephews of Susan Hunt, including our fellow SIM missionaries, Ned and Judy [Hunt] Sherman, (daughter to Derald) and other South Dakota friends.
Jonathan and I slipped into a packed church just as the service was beginning and watched from the very back seat. 

Just to hear the Martin and Bethany Hunt family of seven children sing "Beyond the Sunset" was worth the effort to attend. My mom and sister Dorcas and I used to sing that song a lot as a trio, but I haven't heard it sung in real time in years. Their family arrangement, accompanied by recorder and guitar was outstanding. 

And then Keith Hunt with sons Jeff and Martin, accompanied by a grandson on bass guitar and two other guitars, sang "I Claim the Blood"--heartfelt, beautiful music flowing out of the singers and guitars and resonating with relatives and friends who worshipped with the music, hands uplifted, faces upturned. 

"She lived without sin," her husband humbly testified of her, and that was saying something because a husband knows how a wife lives and how she treats him and their children and other people, and how many can humbly say his wife lives without sin?

Sons, husband, and friends all testified of this woman that she had lived a loving, patient, kind, and godly life. Respect was all through the service. 

She loved people, they said of her, and she never carried a grudge. 

I watched a daughter-in-law and son stand at the grave side, looking one last time, a daughter-in-law who shared the same name and who shared how when she arrived to meet her potential mother-in-law for the first time, (knowing you only have one chance to make a first impression!)

that lady, Susan Hunt, came out on the porch clapping her hands, she was so excited to get to meet the other Susan! That relationship remained that way through the years--Susan loved her children, in-laws, and grandchildren. 

I stood that evening, in coat and hat in the chilly November outdoors, looking up for a long time at the aurora near Mt. Rushmore's George Washington profile.  

Jonathan and I kept hugging each other--so thankful to still be together after the deaths of several friends or acquaintances.

"Why does God keep sending such beauty across our paths all the way along this journey?" Jonathan whispered to me as he wrapped me in his arms. 

"I guess He sees all we've been going through," Jonathan said. 

"And He loves us," I whispered back. 

He is our heavenly Father.

And we are both mesmerized. 

Another Needle Poke--Another Chance to Trust

Today I sat in a doctor's chair all over again. A mystifying rash has almost imperceptibly been spreading in a spot for a few months now. One doctor after another has been baffled, suggesting this or that. Is it fungal? Is it staph? Is it a skin cancer unrelated to the original cancer?

Finally I had to make an appointment at the dermatologist's office. We really need answers, in case it is a new cancer or related to the old cancer. 

And sure enough, the doctor wanted to do a skin biopsy. 

I was okay with that, having hoped they would do one, just in case. But the thought of "biopsy" sort of sent shivers up my mental spine.

The last ones I had were anything but lovely and comfortable.

"The punch is like a cookie cutter," the nurse explained. "We'll numb it with lidocaine first. And then afterward it will need two sutures."

So the biopsy "punch" (after the initial lidocaine needle jab)was significant enough to need two sutures.

Please!

For a moment, all I could think about was some of the needle jabs I've gotten in the last three years, especially the one the day before my May surgery. I found myself yesterday sitting in that doctor's chair (or was it a patient's chair?) starting to feel resentful. 

Not another needle jab. 

Please. 

Not another biopsy.

Please.

Then I caught myself. If I have learned something during this cancer journey, it has been to not worry about tomorrow before it comes. 

Not to worry about the pain of the needle jab until it actually jabs. Why ruin the bearable present with imagining the future unbearable pain? I sat in the sterile doctor's office looking at the wall and door ahead of me and willing myself to think about something else--something besides the needle and the punch. 

I was having a hard time. 

Maybe I could have thought about the beautiful burning bush blazing red leaves in front of our pastor's wife's home, where she made me stand so she could take a picture and send it to me. 

I could have thought of any number of things. Mainly, I just tried to not give in to resentment over a little needle jab while I had to wait for the nurse to run upstairs for an instrument they needed that they don't keep in stock downstairs. 

The puncher maybe. Who knows?

And then I thought of something to be thankful for--that I was not alone.

Jonathan had come in with me and was sitting in a chair behind me--the one who took me out to eat in Custer the night before, after a funeral and burial. We ordered one plate and shared it at a Mexican restaurant--unusual in that it doesn't serve alcohol.

  Jonathan could have stayed out in the van doing whatever on his phone. Jonathan himself is struggling with painful knee issues after hours crawling under the Winner church and having his knee swell and flare up with a case of something that is such a long word I don't remember it. He was limping stiffly down the stairs to my appointment in the basement of the building, forgetting we could have taken the elevator.

"Thank you for coming in with me," I said to him over my shoulder as I waited for the jab.

It was so much better than being resentful. 

So much better than imagining pain.

So much better to choose to trust God and give thanks.

"No Beginning Too Late, No Ending Too Soon" in God's Goodness

I have never personally met the Paul and Dorcas Smucker family of Oregon, (she a minister's wife, mother, blogger and author and he a grass seed packer, Mennonite minister, and school administrator) but I have read her blog for many years and purchased nearly all of her homey, cheerful, humorous, and fascinating books. Again and again she sounds as if she is one person to whom I could relate in a lot of my own life and journey as a mom of a large family with involvement in ministry. 

Dorcas had just managed through a deep time of anxiety and heartache a few years ago after she nearly lost her husband to a farm/business-related accident and had spent months and years at his side as he recovered.

I know she was too busy to connect with me personally much, but she did more than once, even reading my book Roses in Kiev and putting in a word for it on her blog. (I was busy sending out books for a short time after that.) I felt as if, through her blogposts and writings, I connected with her. And so it was with felt grief and shock that I tried to process the news of her adopted Kenyan son collapsing after a brief illness--and not reviving. I just tried to put myself in her shoes, that's all.

While the Smucker family had been in Kenya volunteering at an orphanage there about twenty years ago, they had been drawn to the youngest boy, Steven, ten years old.

"Give a portion to seven, and also to eight," the Smucker family of seven read in Ecclesiastes one morning in Kenya as they were praying about adopting Steven.

"Seven is us now," a daughter said, "and with Steven it will be eight."

And for her (and the rest of them) that settled it. 

God's Word had spoken.

Steven grew up to be an EMT and firefighter despite and perhaps because of his tender heart.

He couldn't even bear to watch one of his friends kill a spider!

No.

You don't squash an innocent spider around Steven.

Yet he could work at wildland firefighting like a champ.

I took time Friday to watch the livestreamed service at Fairview Mennonite Church. I respect Mennonite and Amish people. I lived among Amish and Mennonite people for a while, and my longest lasting friendship has been with Old Order Mennonite girls-turned-middle-aged (or past that now).

I still handwrite letters to them.

I found it interesting to see that there was only one enormous arrangement of flowers on the casket, and one basket to the side. Perhaps other flowers were elsewhere, but perhaps this was a Mennonite tradition of simplicity. I really don't know.

But I did notice the way the minister spoke, prayed, and read, as well as the way the Smucker son read the Scripture, pausing after each verse or sentence.

Slowly,

clearly,

deliberately,

pausingly.

Despite his being a member at a church anything but Mennonite now, the Smucker son read Scripture in just the same way the Mennonite minister read Scripture. No hurrying through the passage, no drama, just plain, simple, unhurried reading, pausing for emphasis and for meditation.

And then there was Steven's fire chief--one of my favorite parts of the service (not counting the song I'll mention later and not counting Steven's sister's eulogy). 

"He didn't just fight fire," the chief said, "but fear, exhaustion, and other things."

And Steven, who had a knack for wrecking things, said the chief, would always end up with everyone around him laughing, including himself. 

"My bad! My bad!"

As the wrecked things added up and had to be paid for, though, it left us all knowing that Steven was a very real human being who wasn't perfect.

"Perfection isn't the goal," the fire chief explained. "Heart is."

Heart is the goal.

I was copying notes as fast as I could. 

I have three sons, one lacking only two years of being as old Steven, and two others younger.

Two of them are also volunteer firefighter or EMT. 

Perhaps that is why the fire chief's eulogy meant so much to me.

None of us knows when it will be our son--or ourselves who will be called to leave this world of suffering and pain.

But one of the things that stood out to me, in the many things that were said during that somber service, in the middle of the memories of how much Steven loved everybody, even animals and all God's creatures,

was that "he loved Jesus."

"He loved Jesus."

This was the testimony Steven left behind. There was One Steven especially loved. 

And that One was Jesus.

Because of that choice and that love and that relationship, those of us left behind grieving with our friends the Smuckers have hope.

Even if we do not have joy right now, we have hope.

And that hope is not based on whether someone is a volunteer firefighter or not, whether one is a Mennonite or Episcopal or Wesleyan or Baptist or not,

whether one lives in Oregon or South Dakota or not,

whether one is serving on a mission or on a farm or not,

but on the choice to believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, Who came to save His people from their sins.

I watched as scores, perhaps hundreds of people filed out of the church--me noticing all the different Mennonite coverings (or not), everything from scarves to white caps to black coverings or none at all, people of every stripe and color and shade--

nothing cookie cutter about the attendees of this funeral service.

"You didn't have to be somebody to be Steven's friend," someone said. "He would want us less worried about material things and more about relationships."

He would want us to leave his service and find someone to love and care about,

praying when they are weak,

rejoicing when they recover (as my niece Amaris is now improving significantly in Missouri after years of being bedfast with lyme and coinfections). 

Steven would want us to find someone to love and laugh with,

or cry with.

Tomorrow my husband and I are to attend a funeral of a friend in Rapid City, and at Thanksgiving time be with Jonathan's dad and new wife, and others of our children in Colorado, for Thanksgiving. 

May we let a little of Steven Smucker's legacy rub off on us. 

But before I close this post, I was able to find the words to a song a trio sang toward the beginning of Steven's funeral service. I had never heard that song before, and I absolutely loved it. 

I replayed that part of the service and the fire chief's eulogy for my family that evening. 

My husband's eyes were also wet with tears when this song was done.

Nothing is lost on the breath of God,

   Nothing is lost for ever;

God's breath is love, and that love will remain,

    Holding the world for ever.

No feather too light, no hair too fine,

   No flower too brief in its glory;

No drop in the ocean, no dust in the air,

   But is counted and told in God's story.

Nothing is lost to the eyes of God,

   Nothing is lost for ever;

God sees with love and that love will remain,

   Holding the world for ever.

No journey too far, no distance too great,

   No valley of darkness too blinding;

No creature too humble, no child too small

   For God to be seeking, and finding.

Nothing is lost to the heart of God,

   Nothing is lost for ever;

God's heart is love, and that love will remain,

   Holding the world for ever.

No impulse of love, no office of care,

   No moment of life in its fulness;

No beginning too late, no ending too soon,

   But is gathered and known in His goodness.

Words and music: Colin Gibson

If anyone would like to watch this song, or the service, here is the link (below) . The song begins at approximately 39 minutes and 13 seconds into the service. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1i6iPiSBYU

Before the Cold Comes

"The forecast is for just twelve degrees by Saturday night," our pastor's wife told me. So I am getting outside all I can these warm, sunny November days, soaking up the Vitamin D and the warmth and the last golden leaves of autumn. 

South Dakota will be barren for the next five or six months. I have to store up sunshine and flowers.

The zinnias that bloomed for months are long gone and brown. But their memory remains in my heart.

In fact, a few flowers were still bravely blooming again last week as I strolled through Hannah's flower garden, looking for a few stray blooms to share at the care center. How the ladies there do love to receive a few fresh flowers in the vases I left!

As Crystal was waiting for whoever she was driving from the care center at her job yesterday, one of the ladies met Crystal in the hall and was so glad to see her.

"I lost a relative this week," the lady explained, saying she was looking for a way to get to Kyle, SD. Then, "Will you pray for me?"

And Crystal was happy to do so--a moment like a summer butterfly landing on a pink zinnia.

I go outside to soak up sunshine because it's good for me to do when I've been somewhat inundated with tragic news.

No fewer than three strong men collapsing and not being able to be revived--

an old acquaintance, Ethan Crouch in Indiana;

another Facebook acquaintance, Ricky Hoff of Hobe Sound, FL;

and the adopted Kenyan son of my blogger friend and Mennonite pastor's wife, Dorcas Smucker, in Oregon.

Her son Steven was only thirty-one, a strong young man, an EMT and volunteer fireman. 

Sunday morning, after a couple days of illness, he suddenly collapsed and was gone. I plan to watch the livestreamed funeral service Friday. 

Three men collapsing within a week and a half. 

And then my sister-in-law Anita has been keeping me updated about Naomi, one of the orphan girls she and Elon and family helped care for in Mongolia, who was in a terrible accident and is hanging between life and death. I pray for her peace with God, for His mercy and salvation.

And our friend Elaine Bump texts me that she had to shelter in place yesterday when the UPS plane exploded at the Louisville, KY, airport only a few miles from their home, with eleven fatalities.

It's why I go outside into the sunshine.

It's why I continually turn to God and try to remember to soak in His love.

Behind every dark cloud shines the smiling face of Jesus. 

And before the cold, we are allowed to gather the last blooms of summer and revel in the crackly, golden leaves still clinging to the tree. 

In Two States at Once--the Blessings of Two-ness

Two weeks ago on our way home from Missouri, after spending the night in Council Bluffs, we decided to head off in time to take in a walk on the Pedestrian bridge across the Missouri, a bridge that connects Council Bluffs, Iowa, with Omaha, Nebraska. 

It was a very blustery morning, but we walked halfway across until we could stand, if we wanted, in both states at once!

Jonathan is standing in Nebraska, holding hands with me in Iowa!

Is it only in spots like that in which a person can stand in two states at once? 

I think how God made couples often so perfect for each other--so that when one of them is in a state of medical need or being down in the dumps, the other can help lift them up or pull them across into a better state.

For years, Jonathan has helped and supported me through my cancer battle, but last week he was hit rather suddenly with an acute case of prepatellar bursitis in his knee from spending hours on his knees working under the SIM church in Winner.

He was in so much pain that he could barely hobble around. I was pushing our wheeled office chair into the kitchen to help him get around, and helping him with his socks and shoes and happy to do so.

"You took care of me for years with my cancer journey," I told him. "Now it's my turn to help you."

I loved the pair of pigeons on that bridge as much as anything that day!

It reminds me of what the wise man in Ecclesiastes wrote. I read it the other day as I am slogging slowly but surely through Ecclesiastes. 

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion, but woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up.

"Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; but how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken."

While living as a married couple or belonging to a team holds its challenges and difficulties, there is tremendous blessing in not being alone.

When one falls, we can lift each other up.

When one is cold (as I usually am), we can warm each other.

When one is distraught, we can comfort each other.

And when we rejoice, we can celebrate together! 

Messes I Did Not Create but Must Clean Up

Today several of us, as the old King James Bible would say, girded up our loins, donned old jacket and clothes and headed out to the garage to deal with a lot of messes--messes that I, for one, did not create. 

We shall not refer to any names of who may have been responsible, because, for one thing, at least a couple of the messes were not created by people but by chickens or chance. Shall we just say that when chickens manage to find the garage door open, they enjoy visiting and finding spots on shelves to roost where they knock this or that onto the floor, including cans containing hundreds of screws or bolts. And then somebody who did not make the mess must clean it up. 

I could insist on someone else doing it, of course, such as Danny who climbed about 50 feet up this tree while on the elk hunt, but my men work their jobs all week (unless they are hunting or some such thing) and I feel the least I can do is pick up screws off the garage floor when we are all trying to make sense of the messes out there and organize what they have to deal with in order to do their various remodel jobs. 

However, it isn't just the chickens making the mess. Chance seems to enter the garage, too.

Don't ask me how it happened, but a clear plastic bin that had a crack in the bottom just randomly fell off the shelf and landed on the garage floor. And don't ask me how it happened, but somehow during our move two and a half years ago, a bottle of some kind of red, oily fluid leaked all over that bin and gloriously oiled every can and bottle in the bin. 

And further, don't ask me how it happened, but a lot of the red oil leaked out of the bin onto the garage floor, soaking into everything that already happened to be touching it (to say nothing of several square feet of garage floor).  

 

Three unhappy pairs of eyeballs eyed that mess this morning. 

Jonathan, a master at constructing new buildings and remodeling old ones, has heart failure every time he looks at such messes in the garage. 

And his wife, who cannot even begin to build a house, seems to be able to figure out that all we need is a few rags and plastic gloves, and one by one we wipe off bottles and cans and decide what to do with each one. And then we take the bin of oil out and drain it into an old box that goes into the burn barrel.

When the last can and bottle is cleaned and placed on a shelf, I find a dustpan with which I go outside to dig up some wood chips and old sawdust and bring back in to soak up the oil on the garage floor. 

Then there are dozens of other messes to figure out and sort and organize and sweep or put away or throw away.  

 

I stood there in the garage thinking how some of us did not make the messes out there, yet we had to clean it up--just like life. 

There are an awful lot of messes that aren't even our responsibility or our fault, yet we end up in the middle of the need to clean up.

Hurricane Melissa, for one example, in Jamaica and Cuba.  

Hurricane Mess in the Garage, Marriage, or Church. 

Sundays we go to church, and dead or dying beetles and wasps are all over the foyer floor as well as the basement steps. It isn't our fault those stupid bugs came into the church and died, but we have to clean them up.   

 

Well, with common courage and pluck, we cleaned up the garage messes that we may or may not have created, and in the end, we got it cleaned up well enough that Danny could bring in the Honda to change the oil while Jonathan and I sliced and bagged hams and a bacon that we helped Shermans butcher last winter and finally got around to smoking today while Jonathan was nursing the prepatellar bursitis in his one knee (due to crawling around for hours under the Winner church earlier this week). 

 

Those hams and bacon looked and smelled amazing! Somehow it was a good ending to the end of a good day in which we simply cleaned up messes that we had not made so that we would have space to do work that needed to be done.

"Whatever your hand finds to do," the Good Book says, "do it with your might."

Even if you have only a little strength, find some mess to clean up, even if it doesn't belong to you. 

Make a clean space for something good to be accomplished--even if it's only a place to change the car oil, or a corner to play music, or a spot to worship God.

God is a God not of chaos but of order,

not of confusion but of peace.  

 

The Great Hunt of 2025

Five of our children plus several other young people participated in the Great 2025 Elk and Deer Hunt.

 

This photo just arrived today from Tim, who got his buck near where he lives in Colorado.  

Earlier, on the first evening of elk season in the mountains, Sam bagged a cow elk! Then his friend DJ Hagerty got a bull elk!

I enjoyed reading Danny's list (above) of items to take along for the hunt--including purposeful misspellings! 

 

 

Tim and (not so) little sister Hannah  

A couple of young hunters watching the meadow 

 

The newest hunter--our precious little dolly who is so loved and happy in the photos they send of her.  

No end of new trinkets to play with in the hunters' tent! 

 Definitely she must check out how this hanger tastes! 

Ellie's mommy Rose finished making her very own moccasins, her first try at making moccasins from the deer hide she tanned herself. I think those are pretty amazing for her first moccasins!