by Lynn Austin
I sharpen a pencil and sit down at my desk, gazing at the family photograph we all posed for years ago and Christina’s playful smile. It takes me a while to figure out where to start writing, but at last I begin.
Geesje’s Story
Holland, Michigan
49 years earlier
There are times in life when we must leave the past behind without looking back, the same way we did when we said good-bye to our loved ones in the Netherlands and left our homeland forever. We must set out in the direction God is leading us and sail forward in life from that day on. That’s what I had to do after Hendrik left. My journey back to wholeness and peace, one painful step at a time, seemed as long and arduous as the trip across the ocean to America had been. I needed to ask forgiveness from the people I had hurt. I needed to ask God to forgive me. I needed to lay aside the bitterness I felt toward Him for all the losses in my life and begin trusting Him again, believing in His goodness and in His love for me. I hoped that if I did all of those things, I would have a fresh, clean start.
My adopted sons Arie and Gerrit taught me about starting fresh. As Maarten and I walked up the hill to the log church with them one bright Sunday morning in November, I realized how happy and content they were. They had suffered the loss of their parents just as I had, yet they now embraced their new life with Maarten and me with energy and curiosity. And hope. I needed to do the same thing, learning all over again the importance of embracing the community of believers I lived with and worshiped with.
I paused partway up the hill to rest and rub my aching back. I carried the extra weight of our soon-to-be-born first child. The town we’d named Holland was rapidly growing, and the view from the rise near the church revealed spreading patches of cleared land and columns of smoke rising from numerous chimneys to curl into the clear fall sky. The people who lived here were my sisters and brothers, my family. We had suffered persecution together in the Netherlands and endured all the trials of the journey and the taming of this land. There wasn’t one woman from among the original settlers who didn’t know about Hendrik and me. I had talked about him every step of the way and dreamed aloud with the young women my age about being married and having homes of our own. We had shared each other’s grief when so many of our loved ones died of malaria. They tried to share my grief when I believed Hendrik was dead, many of them coming to mourn with me as I wept. But I had turned away from them, so overwhelmed by my anger at God because of Hendrik’s senseless death that I stopped going to church. I refused to talk to Dominie Van Raalte when he tried to comfort me. I didn’t tell anyone of my decision to return to the Netherlands with Maarten for fear they would try to talk me out of it. Several women did come to talk to me after the elders read the banns announcing my upcoming marriage to Maarten. One of Mama’s friends even stood outside our cabin door after I refused to let her inside and begged me to take more time to grieve before marrying so hastily. I didn’t listen to her. Now, as Maarten and I tried to move forward in our marriage, I finally realized how much I needed the community’s help and support.
“You all right?” Maarten asked as I stood looking down at our settlement. He scooped up Gerrit, whose little legs had grown tired, to carry him the rest of the way.
“Yes. I just need a breather.” I saw Maarten’s look of concern and added, “The baby will come soon, but not today.” We started walking again.
Maarten had always been very involved in our community, helping the other settlers any way that he could, sharing the hard work and the suffering with them, even during the months when I stayed away from church. I wasn’t the only one in our kolonie who grieved the death of a loved one, but by isolating myself from everyone, I had missed out on God’s comfort. He used other people to extend His compassion and care, but I had refused it. That sense of love and Christian community was what had attracted Hendrik to our faith years ago. Now I knew that I needed my fellow church members beside me through my baby’s birth and to help me raise and educate my children. And to learn to love my husband the way I should.
The log church was wonderfully warm inside with fires blazing on the two hearths. We removed our coats and hats and found our places on the wooden benches. I clearly remember the sermon that Dominie Van Raalte preached that morning, because he might have written it especially for me. The text was Jesus’ commandment from the twelfth chapter of Mark to love thy neighbor as thyself. Dominie said that loving our neighbor didn’t necessarily mean we must feel loving emotions toward them, but that we must speak lovingly to them, rather than in anger or derision. And we must do acts of lovingkindness and compassion, deliberately and frequently, demonstrating the undeserved grace God shows to us. If we spoke loving words and did loving acts, then genuine love for our neighbor would have an opportunity to grow and flourish.
I didn’t love Maarten, but I needed to obey the Bible’s command. Perhaps my love for him would grow, as Dominie promised, if I spoke loving words and did loving acts. It would be a tragedy if Maarten lived his entire life wondering if I loved him, wondering if I was thinking of Hendrik every time I held him or kissed him.
I was still thinking of the dominie’s sermon at home later that afternoon, after the children had been fed and put down for their naps. The Sabbath day when we rested from our daily work would be a good time for me to begin all over again with Maarten and share my heart with him. The November day was sunny and warmer than usual, so we bundled up and sat side-by-side in the sunshine on the low front step of our cabin. “I don’t think I ever asked you this,” I began, “but why did you leave the Netherlands and come here? How did you reach the decision to emigrate?”
Maarten clasped his hands around one upraised knee as he pondered his reply. “At first it was like catching a fever. Everyone was talking about emigrating and constantly discussing it, and their excitement became contagious. Then at one of the meetings that I went to with your father, Dominie Van Raalte advised each of us to pray individually and ask God to clearly reveal His will. He explained how hard emigrating was going to be and the difficulties we might face. He said knowing that we were obeying God’s call might be the only thing that would help us through all of those trials.”
“So you were certain that you were called to come?”
“Yes. As I was praying about it and reading my Bible early one morning, a verse in Genesis seemed to jump off the page: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, and unto a land that I will shew thee.’ God was speaking to Abraham, of course, but I heard Him speaking those words to me, too. Abraham hadn’t been able to worship God in the land of his ancestors, and neither could I.”
I shivered with a sudden chill as the sun disappeared behind a cloud for a moment. “And yet you were going to disobey God and take me back to the Netherlands?” I asked quietly.
Maarten shrugged his wide shoulders. “Dominie tried to talk me out of it, but . . .” He didn’t finish.
He would have disobeyed because he loved me. I felt ashamed that I had misused his love to make him sacrifice his convictions. Now I was glad that he hadn’t taken me home.
“You never felt God’s call to come here, did you, Geesje?” he asked after a moment.
“No, because I never prayed about it or asked about His will for me. I was too caught up with being in love. Faith in God had been so important to my parents—and to me at one time. But I wanted my own way, not God’s. At first I begged my parents to let me stay behind. Then when Hendrik agreed to move to America, I figured that must be what God wanted for me, too.”
A cardinal swooped down and landed on the bare ground in front of us, flashing his scarlet feathers. He cocked his head inquisitively, as if asking me a question, then flew away again. I stared at the tiny prints left behind in the sandy soil. “I know I’ve drifted far from God. I want to get back to that place of certainty and closeness to Him, but there are so many questions and doubts blocking the way. I keep thinking about my parents’ deaths, and
I can’t make sense of it. What a cruel waste after they’d traveled so far. And what about all those other Christians who followed God’s call and then died on the Phoenix?”
Maarten drew a deep breath, as if preparing to scale my mountain of doubt. “You weren’t in church during the weeks that followed the malaria plague or after Dominie read the announcement about the Phoenix, but he talked about all those deaths. He said we shouldn’t try to analyze God’s will or look for reasons to rationalize it or explain it. He read us the verse from Isaiah where God says, ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . . as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ Dominie admitted that reading a verse or two of Scripture doesn’t stop our sorrow and grief—”
“Or our anger,” I added. “I was so angry with God for taking Mama and Papa.”
He looked at me as if he couldn’t comprehend my anger. “But your parents are in paradise, Geesje, in the very presence of God. So are all the believers who died on the Phoenix. If we could only grasp what heaven is like, we wouldn’t cling so tightly to this life. It’s like . . . it’s like this baby you’re carrying in your womb. The only world he has ever known seems safe and warm and secure to him. Leaving it to be born must seem like a death to him, and a very painful one. But the new world he’ll suddenly enter is filled with light and air and sound and color and loving arms to hold him. It’s so much more glorious than the dark, cramped life he knows now. He would never choose to remain there—or to return to it. Our life here on earth isn’t all there is either, any more than our life in the womb was. Dying wasn’t the end of your parents’ lives. It was only the beginning.”
Tears filled my eyes as I remembered holding my mother’s hand as she lay dying. “Mama told me she felt God’s presence near the end. She said He was right there beside her. She wasn’t afraid of dying.” My fingers and cheeks felt icy, my tears warm as I wiped them away. “I miss my parents so much.”
“I miss mine, too. But in a way, having them with us makes it too easy to be carried along on the current of their faith instead of developing a vital faith of our own. It’s easier to ask their advice and trust them to guide us than it is to study His word and listen for His voice ourselves. If I always carried Gerrit on my shoulders, he would never develop the strength to walk by himself or learn to find his own way through the woods.”
That’s what I had done. I had let Mama and Papa carry me, pray for me, advise me. Now I needed to grow up and walk on my own. I felt the baby kicking strongly inside me, running out of room. I lifted Maarten’s hand and rested it on my belly so he could feel the movement, too. I watched his face as he experienced the wonder of it and saw tears form in his eyes.
A week later on a cold Sunday afternoon, our son Jakob Maarten de Jonge was born. The love I felt for him nearly overwhelmed me, and I knew it was just a small taste of the love that Father God had for me. I had done nothing to deserve such love, just as little Jakob had done nothing to deserve mine, and had, in fact, caused me great pain. But I loved my son enough to give my life for him, simply because he was my child. As I fell asleep with exhaustion, holding the miracle of tiny Jakob in my arms, I felt my faith and trust in God begin to sprout and grow once again.
Chapter 25
Geesje’s Story
Holland, Michigan
49 years earlier
When we first settled in western Michigan, the canopy of trees overhead was so thick I could barely glimpse the sky through the tangled leaves. The silence of that vast wilderness terrified me, especially at night or when I was alone with the children. At first we shared the forest with the native Ottawa Indians, our closest neighbors. They taught us to make a sweet, honey-like syrup and crumbly blocks of crude sugar by collecting sap from certain local trees each spring and boiling it down. But as more and more settlers arrived in the coming years, we squeezed the natives out as we slowly tamed the forest they depended on for their livelihood. They eventually migrated north to a less-settled part of the state. Reverend Smith and his family, who had worked with the Indians at the Old Wing Mission, moved along with them.
Gradually, the silence of the wilderness yielded to the constant noise of construction: the thunk of axes as we chopped down the great forest of trees; the groan of splintering wood as trees toppled; the whistles and whips of the teamsters as they worked their oxen to move logs and uproot tree trunks; the pounding of hammers and rasp of saws as our community slowly rose up from the forest.
In the spring months after Jakob was born, the town elders decided to start a Dutch-language newspaper. Maarten went to a meeting at Dominie Van Raalte’s house to discuss the details. I was excited for him. The newspaper would require a printer, and Maarten would finally be able to return to the work he loved and was skilled at doing. I couldn’t stop peering out of the cabin door as I waited, watching for him to return. When I finally saw him walking up the path, his shoulders were slumped and his head hung so low I couldn’t glimpse his face. I stood on our doorstep, waiting, fearing bad news.
“What happened?” I asked when he finally looked up at me.
“Geesje . . . Hendrik is back.”
“He’s here? In Holland?”
Maarten nodded. “He arrived just as our meeting was about to end. He wanted to talk to Dominie Van Raalte about purchasing farmland. Hendrik asked me to stay while they discussed it because I could vouch for him. Dominie suggested that he look at some parcels in Zeeland where a lot of newcomers are farming.”
I swallowed and tried to speak. “Is that what he decided to do then? Settle in Zeeland?”
Maarten exhaled as he nodded again. Then he added, “I thought you should also know that Hendrik is married now.”
“Yes . . . Well. So am I.”
I spoke matter-of-factly, but the news hit me very hard. I had watched Maarten and the other men chopping down the forest, and I always felt such a devastating loss at the moment when a towering tree started to fall over. A beautiful living thing had been killed, falling with a crash. It would never live again. That’s how I felt when Maarten told me the news about Hendrik’s marriage. All hope for Hendrik and me was gone and would never live again.
Maarten followed me as I turned and went inside the cabin. As if sensing my sorrow, he scooped up our two older boys and took them outside, leaving me alone with the sleeping baby. I don’t know how long I sat near the hearth, gazing into the empty fireplace, feeling sorry for myself. Eventually, the sound of Maarten splitting logs outside broke through my grief. I stood and watched him through the window, chopping wood as if he was furious with the logs. It was selfish of me to ignore my husband’s feelings while I wallowed in my own. I thought back to all the ways I had seen my parents show their love for each other, and I walked outside, took the axe from his hands, and held him tightly in my arms.
“You never told me what Dominie Van Raalte said about the newspaper. Have they decided to go ahead with it?”
He sighed, like a locomotive releasing steam, and hugged me in return. “Yes. And they asked me to print it. They’re going to help me secure a loan so I can purchase the equipment I’ll need and set up a shop where the town center will be one day.”
I lifted my head from his chest and looked up at him. I could see how quietly happy he was, and I was sorry that the news about Hendrik had diluted his joy. “Will the equipment be hard to find?”
“I don’t think so. I may have to travel to Kalamazoo to see about ordering a press. And it will have to be shipped here from Chicago, somehow. I suppose by freighter across Lake Michigan, then dragged over the sandbar and put on a flatboat for the trip up Black Lake to Holland. The leaders are still trying to figure out how to open a deeper channel between the two lakes.”
“We’ll need to build a shop where we can set up the printing press, won’t we?” I added. “I don’t think it will fit in our cabin.”
“No, it won’t. But we can sta
rt small and simple, at first.”
I felt pleased that he had included me. “I’d like to help you with the business,” I said. “I watched you and Papa all those years, and I helped out now and then when Papa had a large order to fill. And I can help with the bookkeeping the way Mama sometimes did. We’ll do it together, Maarten.”
“Maybe our three sons will join us, too, someday. I’ll hang a big sign in front—‘de Jonge and Sons, Printers.’”
He rested his hands on my waist. They were so huge he could nearly encircle it with his fingers, especially now that I was getting my figure back after Jakob’s birth. I knew Maarten was acting cheerful to disguise his own pain, pretending to be brave as he pushed his fear and sorrow away. We both were. I laid my head on his chest as I tried to erase the picture of Hendrik with another woman—his wife. Holding her. Kissing her.
“I remember the first time you held me in your arms, Maarten. It was on the night in Arnhem when that gang of ruffians smashed all our windows with bricks and stones. You came up to my bedroom to see if I was all right. Remember?”
“I do. You felt so tiny and helpless. And you were so scared. I could feel your entire body trembling when I held you. That’s when I knew I wanted to protect you and take care of you for the rest of my life. And I always will, Geesje. For as long as I live.”
I was sorry that Hendrik had returned, and yet at the same time I was glad. I wouldn’t have to wonder what had become of him. I would know where he was and maybe hear about him from time to time. Maybe see him. I was vain enough to wonder if he’d returned to this area to be close to me.
I looked up at Maarten again and said, “You’ve given the children and me a very happy life here. I’m so grateful for that.” I could tell by the tender way he held me, the soft way he looked at me, that he loved me. I didn’t ever want him to feel unloved in return. I had never spent a single day of my life feeling unloved, and I vowed that if it was within my power, Maarten wouldn’t either. “The life we have is a very good one,” I told him.
