A New Beginning

by Michael Phillips

  My heart was pounding as I listened. Christopher sounded as if he might take the position! As if reading my mind, his next words resolved that part of the question.

  “So my half of the answer to your gracious request, Mr. Shaw,” he said, looking at Patrick Shaw as he spoke, “and you others of the committee—Katie, Douglas, Mrs. Bosely, and of course you, Harriet—” he said, glancing toward each of the others one at a time, “is this—that if the church wants us, after you hear my story this morning and have a chance to weigh its implications, then Corrie and I will remain in Miracle Springs, and I will become your pastor . . . and Corrie and I will together seek to serve and minister among you.”

  Chapter 13

  Christopher’s Story

  The words were no longer out of Christopher’s mouth before a shriek of happiness sounded, and suddenly I realized it had come from my mouth!

  I jumped out of my seat and ran up to Christopher and threw my arms around him, right there in front of everyone, while he watched in astonishment. What kind of undignified behavior was this, he must have thought, from the young lady who might well become the next minister’s wife? But I couldn’t help it.

  “Oh, Christopher,” I whispered in his ear, “I did trust you, and I do trust you . . . and I will be content to be with you wherever you go . . . oh, but I am so happy, I can’t deny it!”

  I took my arms from around him and turned around. Suddenly it dawned on me what I had done. There was the whole church looking at us and clapping, my own family most of all. I felt my face getting ten shades of red all at once, and I hurried back to my seat amid laughter which now mingled in with the applause.

  “Perhaps you may find my wife the unsuitable half of this arrangement!” said Christopher.

  Now everyone did laugh, including Christopher. Gradually the commotion settled down. Christopher waited until quiet had again descended, then took a deep breath and started in.

  “The man you see before you and whom you know as Christopher Braxton,” he began, “is much different from the Christopher Braxton who grew up in the farming regions of the Ohio valley.”

  He paused momentarily. “The big problem I had when I was growing up,” he went on, “was simply that I did not feel that I was any good, or that I ever could be any good or could amount to anything. The memory of that feeling still lives with me and cannot help but affect the man I am today. These memories sometimes affect my confidence and weigh me down with inner burdens of insufficiency, even after all these years. I do not think I exaggerate,” he added, “when I say that scars remain upon my soul from those years which will probably be permanent in this life. And it is because of these scars that I compared myself to a lame nag a few moments ago.”

  He paused and smiled lightly, though, I thought, a little sadly too.

  “I would like to tell you briefly how these scars came to be on my soul, because if you take me, I’m afraid the scars come too, as part of the package that makes up the man called Christopher Braxton.”

  He stopped again and breathed in deeply, then began his story in earnest.

  “My father was married twice,” Christopher said. “I was a son of his second marriage. By his first marriage he had a number of children, but then his wife was killed in an accident. Some time later he married my mother, who was seventeen years younger than he. My father was a great deal older than me, and thus I never knew him well.

  “My father was of Hutterite German, or Anabaptist descent. He spoke a form of the German language known as high German. The name Braxton, of course, is not German. Originally we were known by the name Brandeis, but my grandfather changed it when he emigrated to the United States. My mother was of north German extraction and spoke a dialect known as low German. But the difference between my father’s people and my mother’s was more than that of language. The closest parallel I can make in our own country of this distinction would be the social and prejudicial division between black and white.

  “We lived in a mostly Hutterite community, where my mother was considered an outsider—almost like a Negro living in an all-white community. The Hutterites looked down on the ‘low’ Germans in exactly the same way many whites look down on Negroes or Indians, and my father rarely visited with our relatives on my mother’s side of the family because—at least so it seemed to me as a young boy—they were viewed as inferior. My father only wanted us to visit with his Hutterite relatives. Why he married my mother in the first place is a bit of a puzzle in my mind. But he did marry her, and this was the situation when my earliest memories begin to gather themselves in the distant regions of my brain.

  “But it was really no advantage to visit our relatives on my father’s side of the family either. When we saw them, all the relatives treated myself and my four brothers and sisters like dirt. We were a family, as it were, caught between the two worlds of high and low—outcasts really, not accepted by either, and looked down upon by both. Throughout my early years I continually heard things like ‘You’re no good, Chrissy.’ Therefore I grew up with that feeling that I was worth nothing as a human being. I knew I was a second- or even a third-class citizen.

  “The one bright spot in my life was school. I didn’t necessarily get treated any better there because we lived in a Hutterite community. But I loved learning. Books and stories were like treasures to me. They offered me a way to escape my pain.

  “If anyone had said to me in those days, ‘Someday you will be the pastor of a church . . . there will be people you will speak to . . . you will teach and help them . . . you will counsel and marry them . . . you will stand in front of large groups of men and women,’ I would have laughed at the impossibility of the very idea. The thought that I might someday do something—anything!—worthwhile was incredible to me. What could I—little Chrissy Braxton—possibly be but a complete failure?”

  Even though I had heard the story before, it was still difficult for me to imagine Christopher as feeling worthless. From the moment I met him, he had seemed so inwardly strong and so sure of himself. If it hadn’t been for him, I would not even be alive right now. The thought of our first meeting sent my mind back to those first days when I’d awakened on Mrs. Timms’ farm in Virginia after my injury. Even now I could see, in my mind, that strong yet tender face looking down at me—the same face I saw now behind the pulpit of my church.

  “My father was in his late sixties by the time I entered my teen years,” Christopher was now saying. “He had been a good man early in life, even a godly man whom many people looked up to. But besides losing a wife, he had lost a great deal of money when a depression hit. So by the time we children of his second family came along, he was aging and feeling many frustrations. He was beginning to show signs of mental infirmity, and from time to time he really treated us badly. When we misbehaved, even for some minor offense, he grabbed us by the hair and hit us with his hand. I was a timid and self-conscious boy, and the fear this caused within me was devastating. There is no other way to say it—I was terrified of him, even though, as I say, he was not by nature a cruel man.

  “So I did not have the experience of a warm and loving and personal father. At that point in my life, if someone had told me, in trying to communicate God’s great love and goodness, that he was my Father and loved me like a Father, my response would have been to stare in bewilderment. If God was like a father—as I envisioned the word—why would I want to have anything to do with him?

  “When I was fourteen, after an illness of about a year, my mother died. She was only fifty years old at the time, and there were still four of us children at home. At the age of fourteen, I watched my own mother die, and let me tell you—I was not prepared for that. If any family needed a mother, ours certainly did.

  “The very night of my mother’s death, at one o’clock in the morning, knowing that my father, now approaching seventy, could not possibly take care of us children, our high German relatives from his side of the family came in and broke up our home. My brother went to
an older married sister, I went to a half brother by my father’s previous marriage, my younger brother went to an aunt, and my younger sister went to a different aunt. My poor younger sister spent the next years moving around from relative to relative and suffered far more than even I did.

  “In any event, I lost my mother and my immediate family all in the same day. These changes came at such a critical time in my growing young life, when I already thought of myself as worthless. You can imagine how much deeper the wounds that were already there now went within me. As I said, I went to live with an older half brother and his wife, and I knew they didn’t want me.”

  I felt tears creeping up into my eyes as Christopher related his story. So much of what he’d told me those first days and weeks at Mrs. Timms’ about his struggles in his church had taken on even deeper meaning as I learned about his early life in more detail. How much more painful it must have been for him than I realized at the time.

  Christopher’s words came back to me about his ouster from the Richmond church: The following days and weeks were of such anguish and loss. My brain and heart were singed as with a scorching fire, and there suddenly seemed nothing left to live for. Everything I cared about had been swept away as by a hot desert wind—leaving nothing but the dry sands of the Sahara in its place. I felt worse than empty—emptier than empty. I felt a void, a nothingness, a hot parching thirst but with no water to drink, no water anywhere.

  Now as he described the loss of his mother, I saw how terrible the loneliness from yet another rejection must have been for him.

  “My half brother and his wife,” Christopher went on, “kept me for two years. One day my sister-in-law came and bluntly said to me, ‘You’re sixteen now. We can’t keep you here any longer. You’re going to have to find someplace else to live. You’re too old to go to school anymore. You need to find work and make your own way.’

  “I was devastated. I knew nobody. I had no place to go. I’d never thought much about what I’d do when I couldn’t go to school anymore. I didn’t know what to do. Desperation grew in me. I knew they wanted to get rid of me . . . but I didn’t know where I could go.

  “The summer came and I knew I had to leave. What a terrible feeling it is not to be wanted—to know that no one on the face of the earth wants you. That’s how I felt. Finally, it occurred to me that perhaps someone on my mother’s side, the low German side, of the family might receive me better than those on my father’s. All through the years, both sides of the family had treated us like outcasts. But I hoped, with my father and mother both dead, that my mother’s relatives might feel a little more sympathy for my plight.

  “So one day early in the summer I packed up all my earthly possessions, which only amounted to a few clothes and a book or two, in a case held together with string. I said my goodbyes to my half brother’s family, though none of them revealed the least display of love or emotion at my leaving. Then I walked out the door, having no idea toward what kind of future my feet would lead me.

  “I set out walking to the town of Willard, which was twelve or fifteen miles away. I’d probably walked a mile or two when a man in a farm wagon, pulled by two tired-looking horses, came up from behind and asked me if I would like a ride.

  “‘Thank you!’ I said, and jumped up beside him.

  “I was glad for the ride. Once we were on our way, however, the fellow looked over at me with a gruff expression.

  “‘Where you going, kid?’ he asked.

  “‘Willard,’ I answered cautiously. My voice was scratchy and high because it hadn’t completely changed to a man’s voice yet. I was really young. Even though I was sixteen, I probably looked twelve and was so timid I was afraid of my own shadow.

  “‘What you aimin’ to do in Willard, boy?’ the man shot back in a deep, angry-sounding voice. My spirit was already crushed. I was as worried as I could be, because I didn’t know what I was going to do in Willard. Just the sound of the man’s voice made me quake in my thin boots that hardly had any leather left on their soles.

  “‘I . . . uh, figured to get work in the fields,’ my high-pitched little voice answered.

  “‘Willard’s a tough place, kid,’ he said. ‘’Sides, you’re a mite on the scrawny side to get work in the fields. You ain’t gonna get no work in Willard nohow!’

  “I can still feel the hot tears as they began to burn out of my eyes at the man’s words. I glanced away and said nothing more.

  “After a while the man spoke up again.

  “‘Where you wanna go in Willard?’

  “‘My grandmother’s house,’ I answered, not daring to look over at him.

  “‘Where does she live?’

  “‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  “‘How you expect to get there if you don’t know where she lives?’

  “‘I . . . I was there when I was younger,’ I said. ‘I figured if I got to Willard, I . . . I’d be able to find it.’

  “The answer seemed to satisfy him for the moment, and he said nothing more.

  “I rode all the way to Willard with him, mostly in silence, my fear and uncertainty over my future mounting with every mile. As we finally rode into the small town two or three hours later, suddenly I saw a house I recognized as my grandmother’s.

  “‘Hey . . . there it is,’ I said. ‘That’s my grandmother’s house!’

  “The man stopped his wagon. I grabbed my case and jumped down.

  “‘Thanks for the ride, mister,’ I said.

  “I walked over to the house, timidly climbed up the steps, knocked on the door, and waited. My mother’s sister, Aunt Mary, an unmarried schoolteacher who still lived with my grandmother, came to the porch. She looked through the screen door hesitantly, then slowly opened it.

  “‘Chrissy,’ she exclaimed, calling me by the nickname my relatives had always used. Whenever I heard it I felt they were making fun of me. Now I was sixteen and still being called a little girl’s name. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. There was no hint of welcome or tenderness in her tone.

  “‘They . . . they made me leave where I was,’ I half stammered. ‘I . . . I got no place else to go.’

  “Aunt Mary looked me over a few long seconds in silence.

  “‘Well, I’ll go call Grandma,’ she sighed with notable reluctance, then turned and left me standing there.

  “Next, Grandma came to the door. She asked the same question—what was I doing there?—her voice containing even greater annoyance than my aunt’s. I repeated my story.

  “‘I’m trying to find a job,’ I said, ‘and . . . I need someplace to stay.’

  “She thought for a minute. ‘You’d best get yourself into town then,’ she said, ‘where the farmers gather. Ask around. See if there’s anyone needing a hired boy.’

  “By now I was really hungry. I’d been up since four in the morning, and I hadn’t had anything to eat all that time. But I didn’t dare ask for anything. So I just turned and did what Grandma said and wandered off in the direction of town.

  “I spent the rest of the morning knocking on the door of every farmhouse, asking everyone I saw about work. But it was no use. I was just a skinny kid with a high voice, and nobody needed the likes of me. At the grain mill I joined a group of men waiting to be picked by some farmers for work in the fields. Every man there was eventually picked but me. As the men began leaving in wagons, I hid behind a shed so no one would see me standing there alone.

  “Finally I walked dejectedly back to my grandmother’s. I was afraid to go knock on the door again. I knew they didn’t want me there. That fact was obvious enough from their looks and sighs and tones. But I had nowhere else. I literally had no place to call home.

  “So I walked around to the back porch and sat down, hoping in time that either my grandmother or my aunt would notice me and invite me in. Finally I heard the screen door open behind me.

  “‘What did you find out, Chrissy?’ asked my aunt. I told her I hadn’t found out anything. She turned wi
thout another word and went back inside.

  “A little while later my grandmother came out. She asked the same question. I gave her the same answer. Then she turned and went back inside.

  “I kept sitting there. I didn’t know what to do. I was so hungry I was beginning to get dizzy from the heat. Then, to my horror, I heard the clinking of silverware and dishes inside. I realized my aunt and grandmother were eating lunch!

  “The sound of it was too awful to bear.

  “I couldn’t stand to listen to the sounds of them eating. I got up from the porch and walked back around to the front of the house, lay down under a big shade tree, and finally cried myself to sleep.”

  Christopher stopped and looked down, blinking hard and sniffing a few times. He pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The church was still as could be. I could hardly look at him without bursting into tears myself. I was weeping just to listen, but I tried hard not to make any noise. I wanted to run right up in front of the church and throw my arms around him. It was so quiet. Everyone felt for him having to relive such sad and lonely memories.

  “Several hours later,” he went on, “my aunt came out, saw me lying there, and woke me up. I suppose she and Grandma had realized that if it got much later I’d still be hanging around by evening, and then they’d have no choice but to take me in.

  “‘You want to go see Amos?’ she asked, referring to my younger brother, who at the time was living with some relatives about five miles away.

  “I nodded. I scarcely paused to think that this was their way of getting rid of me—anything would be better than this, I thought.