15. Blueberry and College
© 2020 Daniel YordyAugust 1986 - August 1987
Framing Blueberry for Me
I was part of the Blueberry Community for more years than any other of my community experiences. There I knew my greatest achievements and my greatest failures. There, I tasted the greatest power of God in His people and the deepest shame of humiliation.
I realize now that I must slow down the pace of this account. For you to know the word of Christ coming through me now, you must walk with me through these years. I hope that you will be amazed at the goodness of God and rejoice in the beauty and glory of His Church; I hope that you will share tears with me and wonder at the hand of God contending with the heart of a man.
I can easily divide my time at Blueberry into three distinct parts. First was my four years of college, truly among the best years of my life. Second was the next three years during which Maureen and I were married and our son Kyle was born. These years were, shall I say, confusing. And third was when we returned to Blueberry from Oregon for another year-and-a-half. Only one word fits my perception of this time – grief.
I have re-written this introduction several times. My memories of Blueberry draw me in more than any other time period. I had not remembered how much I had loved Blueberry at the beginning. In fact, I saw, in a flash that the time of grief was separate from my first seven years. Set free from the grief, the confusing time diminished in its relationship to the love.
Yet I am all turned inside out. And as I progress forward in this account, I am experiencing every human emotion at mildly traumatic levels. Because I place the Lord Jesus Christ upon myself, upon all that I am, I know that the end of this passage IS a wide open door. My writing of these times is the costliest thing I have done in my life. I do it for Father’s sake.
I have called Blueberry “the womb of the church,” and indeed, that’s what it was for me.
The Blueberry Community
The history of Blueberry is relevant to this story, and so I want to share a brief outline.
There was a fellowship in southern Ontario under the ministry of Tony Materick with whom I had worked briefly at Bowens Mill. In this fellowship were several Dutch families, along with a few formerly Mennonite families. Former Mennonites included Alvin and Marie Roes and Elmer and Mary Gerber and their families. On the Dutch side were Kars and Minnie Kiers, and John and Mary Katerburg, among others. I will not include names not relevant to my own experience, however. John and Mary’s daughter, Martha, was my student for five years.
When Sam Fife began preaching community, the first communities to form in Canada were Hidden Valley, begun first in southern BC, and Graham River Farm, Shiloh, and Headwaters, to the west of the Alaska Highway. This was the early summer of 1972. At the same time, God was speaking the same thing to the group in southern Ontario. In the late summer of 1972, Elmer Gerber and Kars Kiers drove up together to Fort St. John to look for property for another community. They were advised by the brethren already there to find property to the west of the Alaska Highway, but they did not witness to that area for them. Instead, they found a section of land on the north side of the Blueberry River, four miles east of the Alaska Highway. They both heard God speak to them, “This is the place.” From having sold their farms in Ontario, they purchased that property and prepared to build a Christian community there.
Alvin and Marie Roes came to Blueberry in the summer of 1973. They had a string of children, all of whom I met, but their older ones remained in Ontario. Moving with them to Blueberry were Shirley, Ruth, David, Elizabeth and Rachel. David was around my age and Elizabeth a few years younger. The Roes’s mean a lot to me and became part of the joy of my life.
There were others that joined with these three families. When I arrived at Blueberry, however, only the Roes’s remained from that original group. Kars and Minnie had moved up to Headwaters and the Gerber’s had moved over to the Hilltop community. My family and I would join with Kars and Minnie Kiers as well as Rick Annett, also from southern Ontario, and his wife, Shirley (Roes) at Blair Valley, the last of my community experiences.
Then, when the Hidden Valley community, which had moved up to a property south of Dawson Creek (where I had attended my first convention in 1977) closed down shortly after that, a number of people from Hidden Valley moved to Blueberry. John and Nathel Clarke were two leading ministries in the move fellowship. I remembered having laughed harder and longer the first times I heard Brother John preach than just about any other such. They had gone from Hidden Valley to Blueberry with their children, John Mark, and Nadeen, Martin, and Anne Lincecum, already, in June of 1977, before the convention I attended.
Some that followed the Clarkes to Blueberry in the fall after that convention included Charity Titus, Edie Dwyer and her son, Bryan, Sue Sampson, Dave and Norma Smilie, among others, as well as Randy and Martha Jordan who came a bit later.
By the time I arrived at Blueberry in 1986, there were around one hundred people living in the community. A number of other families had moved to Blueberry through the intervening years. That number, however, included somewhere around twenty who were there as students coming for either college or high school. There were two types of students, those, like myself, who were not only attending school but who were also part of the community. For us, our work in the summer was counted as covering the costs of attending school. Then there were several who came only for the school time. These paid a small fee each month for room and board. There were no tuition costs.
Here is a map of the Blueberry Community, that is, the area of the buildings. I will show a closer up in the next letter that will include more of the names of who lived where.
To understand the layout, you must picture that feature of land in the taiga regions of the globe in which the layout consists of flats, then slopes up to more flats and so on. The greenhouses were on the flat that was just above the Blueberry River, then there was a small slope up to the flat on which the School and Tabernacle were situated along with several of the cabins, the washhouse/shop, and the old barn. A number more of the cabins were on the long steeper slope up, with the Austen house and Clarke cabin at the top on a bit of a flat before the road went on up to the larger flat above the river valley.
The ridge to our west was not common, that is, it was a complete ridge, going up steeply from behind the Henshaw cabin. The road going up between the Austen’s and Clarke’s became quite steep, matching the less-steep upslope from the root cellar. Thus the entire range of community buildings was in a hollow, with the ridge to the west, the crown of the valley slope above us to our north, and the Blueberry River below us to our south and east. All of the cabins were within sight of each other and of the two central buildings. I would guess that the Austen house was maybe 75 feet higher than the Tabernacle.
The vegetation was mostly spruce and poplar trees; with poplar trees intermingled with grassy areas throughout much of the family area. There were a few spruce as well, but most of the spruce was up on the higher slopes or along the Blueberry. The Blueberry River itself was not that large, comparable to Crabtree Creek back home. It was too large to just walk across. The soil of the benches was loam that became deep mud when it rained.
Most of the cars were parked on the other side of the river and to arrive at the community, everyone had to walk down the road between the ridge and the river and past the spring from which we got our water before arriving at the first buildings. You could drive to Blueberry from the other direction over several miles of dirt roads. The decision was made not to put in a road bridge because had they done so, the road through the middle of the community would have been accessible to the public and therefore legally owned by the province.
Covenant Life College
I arrived back again at Blueberry in August of 1986. I was 29 years old. The first college courses started in September. I loved college. I was at Blueberry on a student visa. With a letter of enrollment from the Blueberry school, it was an easy thing to get a student visa at the border. Then, Mr. Wenham, the immigration officer in Dawson Creek, renewed the visa as needed for seven years.
The primary motive for the creation of a full college inside the move fellowship was the fact that all of the communities and fellowships throughout the move each had their own school. Thus the need for teachers educated inside of a Christian and Feast of Tabernacles viewpoint was very great. Discussion concerning a college had begun soon after Brother Sam had passed on and by the spring of 1980, when I was at the Albuquerque farm, the idea was known by all.
Covenant Life College is registered with the state of Alaska with its base at the move community near Haines, Alaska. The college, while designed to maintain the high standards that would be expected of any college, was also designed to be flexible in a number of ways. One way is that there were a number of branches of the college in differing places. The first branch of the college to start unofficially, in the fall of 1982, was in the fellowship in Brussels, Belgium. In August of 1985, Maureen flew to Brussels to begin her first two years of college there. I was aware that she was planning to do so when I left Bowens Mill that June.
The primary branches of Covenant College began in September of 1983, at Haines and at Blueberry. Charity Titus was the head of the college at Blueberry and Delores Topliff moved to Blueberry with her two boys, Andrew and Aaron, from the Shiloh community, in order to be one of the main teachers in the college. Shirley (Roes) Annett began college the first year it started at Blueberry as well as Luann Larson and Patrick Downs, who lived at Hilltop. Then, at the same time Maureen went to the Brussels branch, her sister, Lois Mack, also began at Blueberry and thus was a fellow student with me there, one year ahead of me.
I was part of the largest single group passing through the Blueberry college at the same time, around ten individuals at the start with some going elsewhere and others coming in so that ten of us graduated together. During these years, the college was a primary focal point of the community, in spite of the fact that there were only about twenty to twenty-five students at any one time.
The Raja’s
Victor and Nancy Raja, their two daughters, Freda and Ruth, along with Mike Pelletier were my home and family through the four years I was in college. Victor and Nancy were from the Montreal area and had been part of the Headwaters community from early on. Their two older boys had been among those young people who were not happy at Headwaters. At the time I stayed with the Raja’s, the older boys lived and worked in Fort St. John. Both Victor and Nancy were elders.
Victor was from southern India, a Tamil, dark of skin. His heritage was out from the Pentecostal revivals in southeastern India including from the ministry of Smith Wigglesworth. Victor was a cheerful and intense man, but maybe a bit narrow-minded. Nancy, on the other hand, was of Scottish decent, a mother to me, most certainly, but maybe a bit brash in her expression. Freda and Ruth, then, were half Scottish and half Tamil.
Freda started college that same year I did; she was several years younger than I. I do not know why I forget, except that I close things off to protect myself. But Freda was most definitely the dearest sister to me as a sister in all my community experience. Ruth was a bit like her mother and was much younger, just in grade school when I first arrived at Blueberry. The whole family welcomed me into their home as a son and brother. And I was most comfortable and glad to be part of their family.
Let me add this perspective regarding Nancy Raja. When I moved into their home I was basically ignorant of how to live with others, especially females, in a home. Nancy, without being overbearing, though always definite, took me in hand, so to speak, and prepared me in such ways of doing that would make me much more suitable for a wife than I would have been. Brother Victor corrected me only a few times and in mild ways, one of which was to take me out to the outhouse after I had used it to show me that the ladies do not like finding the toilet seat up. That was the last time I did such a thing. What I mean to say is that Nancy Raja filled the place of a mother to me much more substantially than I have thought about before now. Thank you, Sister Nancy, I am deeply grateful even if I am limited in showing it.
Here is a drawing of our home.
Mike Pelletier was from the Boston, Massachusetts area. He had arrived at Blueberry in June, the same as I. Mike came early to take charge of the bee and honey program, which was his primary work through all the years he was there. Mike had also come to be an English teacher, and so he and I took most of our courses together. Mike did not start teaching the first year, as I did, and when he finally had his own class to teach at Blueberry, he discovered that classroom interaction with kids was not for him. Nonetheless, he graduated with the same degree as I. We were the same age; we got along well together. We had similar interests; we argued a lot. But in the end, we never really became close friends. That doesn’t mean anything against either of us; it’s just the way it was.
The First Semester
Below is a drawing of the School, a place in which I spent much of seven years of my life. The school and Tabernacle were matching in the roof line, outward size, and the placement of the bearing posts. I will include a drawing of the Tabernacle in a bit. Both buildings were two stories, but only up from the first inner row of posts, making the upstairs thirty feet wide inside instead of fifty. The upstairs of both also had an outer wall of only maybe six feet in height, so the buildings were not overly high. In the upstairs of the school were the primary grades; it was open with dividers except for the far end, which was the “gym,” ten feet by thirty feet enclosed with a higher roof line. The gym was sometimes used as an additional college classroom.
In the downstairs of the school, there were only a few fixed walls, with only the science room being entirely closed in. There were also a few half walls. The classrooms were separated only by heavy, but movable dividers. Charity Titus could see and hear most of what was happening in the school from behind her desk, with no obstructing view. The floor was strong vinyl, and the ceiling was tiled. The outer walls, posts, and beams were all rough solid spruce, however. The outer walls were six-inch square stacked spruce beams with fiberglass pressed in-between.
Even though I did a lot of construction work at Blueberry, nonetheless, especially for these four years, the college was my life. To know me, you have to go with me into this building and experience things as they meant to me. More than that, again, to a reader all these whom I mention are just names; to me they are precious beyond measure. I do not believe you can know me through these years without some idea of the Blueberry family. God calls each of us by name.
Because the dividers did not reach floor or ceiling, the entire atmosphere of the school was a quiet hubbub of learning. The high schoolers had their own classes separate from the college classes, but both used the same rooms as we moved around by our schedules. The center of the school was the open study area with the classrooms around the edges. This was one of the best applications of the pattern of home, “private edges – common core,” that I have experienced.
The college was designed to be flexible in another way as well. Because we often had teachers coming in from outside of the community, the semester was divided into a series of one-week, three-week, and nine-week blocks, or whatever was needed. We took only one course in a three-week block, which was very intensive, but we could take two or three courses in a nine-week block. I loved college, I loved disciplined study, I loved almost every topic on offer. And so I basically crammed in every single class I could. I got the college in trouble with the Alaska authorities because I got high grades in too many courses. But I am a fierce learner, and I thrived on almost too much.
More than that, having taken courses in other secular and Christian universities, including three years of graduate courses, I can state with certainty that almost all of the courses offered at Blueberry were at least equal to, in academic rigor, and often better than what was offered in secular colleges. Two courses at Blueberry, those taught by Moselle Clarke, were actually graduate-level courses, and, in my experience, equal to the best-taught in any graduate school.
School for us did not start until after the September convention, typically held at Shepherd’s Inn. Attendance at both the fall convention, and the winter convention in February was counted as part of our schooling. So, when I look at my transcript, I see that my first semester was much less than normal for me. The year started with Brother John Jeffries from the Haines, Alaska community, one of the traveling ministries, teaching a two-week block on Church History to all the college students.
Then, we started our first longer block, with much smaller, specialized courses; that is, only three of us were focused on English, the rest were focused on the sciences. I took three courses, Old Testament Survey, held in the science room with all the students in attendance, western literature, taught by Delores Topliff with Mike Pelletier, Terry Miller, and myself, and then World History, also taught by Sister Delores, but with several of the science students as well.
Terry Miller was from New Orleans, sharing similar interests with Mike and I, although he was a bit slower. Terry was also a builder; later I would teach him the entirety of a construction degree program. So – I spent more time with Terry Miller, in classes together, teaching him construction courses, and working with him in the construction jobs in the community, than any other person during my first seven years at Blueberry. Terry’s slowness aggravated me, and I have apologized to him since. He told me he did not remember that, he only remembered that I was always there for him. It’s a symptom of my limited autistic thinking that I never thought of Terry as a “friend.” When I think of it now, I realize that Terry Miller was one of the best friends of my life.
Delores Topliff was part of my life more than any other teacher in the school. Later, I would build her a new home. Delores was a strong woman who had raised two fine sons by herself at the Shiloh community, in what became a difficult environment over the years of early wilderness community. She was a great-hearted and enthusiastic teacher, but, the best way to say it would be that when she was a round peg, I was a square hole and when she was a round hole, I was a square peg. We didn’t always fit, and when we didn’t fit, it felt to both of us, probably equally, that there was a bit of hammering going on. Then, Delores also oversaw my teaching practicum.
It is important to me to place Sister Delores in my life. At the time, since she was an elder, I imagined that the difficulty was her fault. Over a period of eight and a half years, I experienced many difficult things with Delores. Now I realize that we were similar in not fitting. We just saw and responded to things so differently, and neither of us knew how to place the other. Yet never once did I experience anything of unkindness from her, and I hope that I never disrespected her. But I cannot write this account, I cannot bring the Lord Jesus upon every moment, unless I can look Sister Delores in the eye and know that we are nothing more than a couple of silly and bumbling humans, learning by every hard way to love one another. I saw Delores last at my daughter, Johanna’s, wedding. – Just now, in writing this, for the first time ever, I can look right through the outer shell and see Sister Delores’s heart. Her heart is and was always good; her heart is filled with Jesus. Every difficult thing now falls into goodness.
To make the school work, all of the education students, except the first year, also taught at least one course in either grade school or high school. Since I had taught successfully at Bowens Mill, I had my own eighth grade English class right from the start. We used Sister Delores’s classroom. My students that year were Amos Deardorff, Howard Wallace, David Mailman, Deborah Austen, and Martha Katerburg who lived at Evergreen and came over to Blueberry every day with other students and teachers who also lived at Evergreen. I taught these five, with Rachel Martin who would come the next year, every year for five years. And I was part of the graduation of all six.
Finally, I must talk about some of the girls in the college who were my fellow students, three in particular, Monica Rotundi, Lena Pacey, and Laura Weitz. All three were a few years younger than I. Monica and Laura started college this same year, but Lena had started the year before with Kathy Lewis, Jennifer Hanna, and Lois Mack. Monica was from Graham River, and I had worked with her dad and brother and visited in their home a number of times. She was quiet and small, but she came to me often through all four years of college to get help with her work. The terrible thing is (I say that with a smile) that she graduated with a higher GPA than I and would have been valedictorian.
Lena Pacey and Laura Weitz, on the other hand, though quite different from each other, were outgoing, talkative, and friendly. Both of them zeroed in on me, almost as their “ministry” one might say, to coax me, step-by-faltering step, with cheerful friendliness, out from my autistic shell. As I realize it now, I owe quite a lot to these two, and Monica as well. Thank you for helping me to know how to relate with girls and to be much freer in my expression than I could have been if I had not known you. The truth is, they gave me the gift of being able to become friends with Maureen.
At the end of the first semester, Brother Joe McCord, one of the apostolic ministries in the move, who lived at the Lubbock, Texas community, taught a week-long course titled “Current Events in the Light of Daniel and Revelation.” Brother Joe was the watchman on the wall for the move fellowship. In his teaching, he expounded on the role of the Rothschild’s and international banking. Nonetheless, his vision was the revelation of Jesus Christ through us, His church. During this teaching, I sensed in Brother Joe an anointing approaching that which I had known through Brother Sam Fife. The only other ministry I would see that level of anointing upon would be Sister Jane Miller.
Trying to Understand Myself
As a mildly autistic man, I carry inside myself all the griefs and all the joys of my life. Things that happened thirty years ago are still here, when I consider them, as if they happened just a few days ago. Thus I have had to learn how to place and hold all the noise of my life in the midst of the present goodness of Christ.
This is not a quality to be “delivered from”; it is the quality from which I draw all good things to share with you. I share nothing that does not come out from grief and joy together. How else could we know the Heart of a God who carries all, in all His grief and joy as well as theirs, close inside Himself?
Now, I reference myself as Asperger’s, yet at the time, I knew nothing about such a thing, nor did anyone else. But I didn’t know a whole lot about people, either. When I wrote above that I see into Delores Topliff’s heart for the first time, that’s an incredible thing for me. Neither did I know myself in relation to other people. I had no idea that I was smart; the idea had never before entered my mind. All I ever thought was that school was easy if I liked the subject and to be avoided if I did not.
One of my problems was that I talked TOO MUCH. In every class. That is, I had the eager answer for most every question any teacher asked the class, and I was always making connections with what was being taught, and thus often raised my hand to share. Too much, too often. By the time I got to graduate school at Lubbock Christian University, I had learned to BITE MY TONGUE nearly half the time. That was so hard, but I did my best. Only when I took graduate courses at the University of Texas, in my late fifties, was I finally at peace in responding in class only occasionally.
I was oblivious. I was in my narrow little zone of absolute fascination with whatever was being taught, and I was so eager to connect with it. I thirsted for disciplined understanding, and I made large and constant connections with nearly every topic on discussion. I can understand now why people did not know how to fit me into their normal understanding of things. As I think now, I can remember so many instances, and I can remember the great patience in which every teacher in the school bore with me.
Please forgive me, I had no idea of anything beyond my blinders. Now, when I read the experiences of others who are Asperger’s, I see that we are similar.
And those who are Asperger’s share the same story, that others see only the outward shell, but we see only our passion and intent inside our shell, with no idea at all of either the existence of the shell or of those “others” out there. It is completely untrue that Asperger’s do not feel care about people; our problem is that we, having felt too much, have disassociated from some of that in order to maneuver through all the “noise” coming at us. We care as deeply as any, we just don’t always connect with it in normal ways.
All my years in community, I poured myself out for others because that is what I was. All my effort came out of one thought only, the desire to meet the needs of the family. I chose against myself and for others all the time and carried those needs of the community that fell within my sphere as my own personal responsibility. But I had zero idea of an outer shell that other people saw, a shell that appeared to be something I was not.
I do not say this as any excuse for anything I did or said that might have hurt other people. If I did, I was wrong, and I ask you to forgive me.
Inside this line of thinking, then, I want to share two experiences that happened in my first year of college. Sister Charity and Brother Victor asked me to sit down with them as they wanted to share some things with me. Sister Charity started talking and soon she said, in regards to my construction work on the Tabernacle, “You know that you do not submit.”
All I could do was blink, like a deer caught in the headlights. I had no idea of her words. I had chosen against myself in that job to submit to John Austen who was covering my work. I had done two things on my own, however. I had been asked to close in the outer porch entry in a very temporary manner. Knowing that there is no such thing as temporary in move community construction, I had made it slightly more permanent. And I had designed the back stairway to be safe, whereas the former stairs had been incredibly unsafe. I had done both for one reason – my love for the people who would use these things.
Then Brother Victor said, “You have sequestered yourself in the school, you should be more involved in the work of the community so that you can relate more with other people.”
His words were simply the opposite of my reality. When I worked in the community, it was always and only with the same couple of men. I had almost no interaction with anyone else. Inside the school, it was the opposite. There, I was in continual relationship with all kinds of different people of both genders. In the school, I knew community; in the construction work, I knew mostly loneliness.
But I respected people too much to give answer or to defend myself. Defending myself in such a place is not in the design by which God made me. I gave no answer to either, for I could not understand them. Nonetheless, I highly regarded everything said to me, though I did not know what to do with it.
Then, sometime during the first semester, I was messing with the photocopier in Cherri’s office and it stopped working. Ashamedly, I gathered my stuff and went to class. We were sitting in Sister’s Delores’s literature class, when Sister Charity came wheeling in (Sister Charity was crippled by arthritis and always in a wheelchair), having made her rounds elsewhere, and announced, “Somebody has messed with the photocopier. No one is allowed to make any changes on the photocopier.”
When I had the chance, I went to her in her office to apologize. The moment I did, she stopped me and said, “Oh, Daniel, please forgive me. I did not know that it was you, if I had I would not have done that.”
Her words were like a healing spear going all through me, for I had lived for years under the idea that no elder ever apologizes. More than that, as I think about it now, I have never known anyone in any context of my life, who was “over me,” to apologize personally for a thoughtless word or action. Anyone, that is, except five different Blueberry elders over the years, Sister Charity, Gary Rehmeier, Dave Smilie, Nathel Clarke, and John Clarke.
And so right from the start I was caught in a great contradiction, my great respect for some of the wisest, most anointed, and kindest people I have known and the confusion coming to me through some of what they said. Both of these things would grow and grow, respect and honor inside of confusion and confusion inside of respect and honor until that moment, in October of 1996, when the clash between the two had become so overwhelming that all I could do was pack my family into our little car and drive away in complete and utter failure.
The Blueberry Family
The Blueberry Family was the most wonderful group of people I have known. I will share names and families more specifically, however, at the start of the next chapter.
This is a drawing of the Tabernacle. This was our family center, the place of mighty deliverances and wonderfully anointed services, the place of laughter and the joy of sharing one another’s lives, the place of eating our meals together, the place where Maureen and I were married. This was a good, good place.
I loved the fellowship around the tables as we ate together, and the wondrously anointed services in that same room, the same as I did at Graham River. I loved the laughter, the honesty, the sharing together, the cheerfulness, the sobriety. I loved the worship together, the intensity of poured out praise towards God. There is a quality of reality that comes out from dedication and commitment to God and to one another that is simply not known in any other setting.
I want to share two experiences that showcase family life in community, things that meant a lot to me. Then I want to comment about a quality of Church life that most Christians do not know and do not believe.
Near the end of December, between school semesters, in temperatures way below zero Fahrenheit, most of the older young people of the community, students and non-students alike, planned to have a sleepout in the empty greenhouses. There were around twenty of us gathered there that evening, sitting on the bare growing beds, all bundled up for the cold. I’m sure we had a heater of some sort going, so it wasn’t too bad. No elders had joined us, something that should have been more common, but was not. Someone suggested that a fun thing to do would be to go around the group, one at a time, having each who wished to share fun stories about that person.
Elizabeth Roes was the second one chosen. Elizabeth is funny, from a family who laughed and made dry jokes all the time. She was a beloved sister to everyone. And so some began to share funny stories about Elizabeth.
Then it was Brian Dwyer’s turn to share about Elizabeth. Brian, a few years younger than I, factors large in my life through all these years, but I will share more of him later. Brian loved Elizabeth as a brother loves a sister in the purity of Church life. As he began to share, something changed. Brian talked about what Elizabeth meant to him, how she had befriended him when he first came to Blueberry, how she had helped him to know how to live and to love.
When he had finished, we all knew that something holy, something purely of God had come upon us. We continued around the circle, from one to the next, with each one speaking of the good things of Christ they knew in whomever we were speaking to. It was such a strengthening, such an honor of one another, such deepest of joys. We continued until after midnight. When we were done, most of us abandoned the thought of spending the night in the cold except for Richard and a couple of others. We walked to our cabins in a hushed sense of God among us.
This was community as I knew community must be.
Then, two or three times, Cherri Kidd invited me of an evening to her home next door, in the upstairs above the Rehmeier cabin. Rachel Roes lived with her as well as Chris, who was in sixth grade, and not yet in my own classroom. Elizabeth was there as well as Richard Hernandez and Brian Dwyer. We played Pictionary together; I think at least three times, maybe more. I have never had so much fun in outward expression in the laughing together over a silly game. I had never been involved in this fun way with people my age in community before. Sadly, these kinds of times did not continue; I do not have an explanation why.
Elizabeth was not a student in the college, and so I did not have much more involvement with her, except that she was close friends with Richard, whom I counted as my best friend. Their story of walking out a year I will hold until the next chapter.
I want to define a quality of life inside of committed Christian community inside the Spirit of God, and that is of brother-sister love and regard for one another. There is much to be said for submitting to a godly order of walking together under the covering of an eldership and inside of the fear of God and the earnest desire to know Him. And so, young people, growing up in the community knew ONLY a brother-sister relationship. Any kind of “romance” or physical touching (except for welcoming hugs) was simply not allowed, not even when two were walking out a year. We were not teenagers, but in our twenties. Each one of us had chosen this way of life as our own.
When I say that I loved Freda Raja or Monica Rotundi as sisters, or that Brian loved Elizabeth as a sister, that is not a “platonic” love, nor anything remotely connected to romantic thoughts and as far away from anything “sexual” as one can get. I am speaking of true Christian regard for one another out from the Jesus of our hearts. That doesn’t mean that there were not sexual indiscretions in the history of the move; it means that those things were rare and isolated and not a part of our lives.
I am not a fighting man, and I typically do nothing more than delete words that are spoken against me. But when words are spoken in mockery against the reality of Christian love inside of committed Church life, I am not myself. I will fight the one who mocks God in such a way; I will silence their contempt.
Jesus is real, and He really does live in the hearts and lives of those who are committed to His revelation through His Church.
The Second Semester
Through my second semester at Covenant Life College in the spring of 1987, two courses were being offered for the “upper level” students, “Child Growth & Development” and “Reading in the Content Area.” I could not stomach not being involved in anything on offer, so I persuaded Sister Charity to allow me to enroll in those courses. Thus I had Charity Titus as my teacher for “Child Growth & Development,” and “Philosophy of Christian Education.” I have sat under many teachers in eight years of college and graduate school, the two best teachers in every way were Charity Titus and Dr. Hannel at Lubbock Christian. I counted it as one of the great privileges of my life to sit in her classes and learn from her clarity and wisdom.
Moselle Clarke taught “Reading in the Content Area,” which, with her other course later, were the two courses typically found in graduate school. It was from Moselle that I began to find answers to my big question when I taught at Bowens Mill – “How do you get kids to think?”
I had only one course with Sister Delores this semester, the second half of Western Literature. In that course, we were assigned a research paper on literature. – Let me explain something about the grading at CLC. By rule, a perfect paper, or a larger assignment, was a 97. That means that a 98 to a 100 meant that you not only did a paper that fulfilled all of the objectives, but that you went way beyond requirements. Needless to say, I went enthusiastically “way beyond” on most larger assignments. This semester, I did a huge paper for Sister Moselle, which I still have and value, and I did a way-beyond presentation of my analysis of literature.
The premise of my literature paper boiled down to this – that humans are wicked by nature and that all literature, except that which is clearly Christian, is “of the devil.” Mike and I even argued with Sister Charity over C.S. Lewis, whose works she loved. I am very grateful that we did not win that argument.
While there were many valuable discussions of literature in my paper, I now reject its premise. You see, we did not know that we defined God and man by John Calvin, out from the arguments and definitions of the serpent in the garden. We did not know that all are sustained by the good speaking of Jesus every moment, nor that all creation groans with eagerness towards knowing the God out from whom all things come.
That does not mean that the evil one is not involved in every area of human expression, especially in modern culture. It means that man is the image of God, regardless, and that knowing God and knowing the human are something that only happen together.
Of course, you can see the irony of God towards me, as I swung on the pendulum from the extreme of trying to bring a thousand such books to Blueberry all the way over to calling all of it by the devil. Nonetheless, God was doing something important inside of me through all these questions and issues. I will keep that until the next chapter, however.
Juliann Ingram
When I left Bowens Mill, I closed myself utterly to the idea that Maureen would be my wife. I had hurt so much, I had become so angry against God, that I had to reject and even become hard against that hope, even though I knew it was still what God had spoken.
It wasn’t long, then, in the first semester of classes at Blueberry that I noticed a beautiful, smart, and friendly blonde-headed girl in my classes by the name of Juliann Ingram, even while I saw the she was noticing me. We soon became good friends. I liked Juliann, a lot. I was able to visit with her. Juliann was from Wisconsin; this was her second year at Blueberry.
By springtime, Brother Victor was urging me to go to the elders and ask them and her parents (whom I had met when they came to the February convention) about walking out a year together. Actually, he counseled me in that direction several times, “She’s quite a prize,” he said.
I went to Sister Charity and shared with her what God had spoken to me about Maureen and where all that had seemed to end. Sister Charity assured me that such was not any “requirement” of God upon me, that I was free of that. She expressed her favor towards a further step in relationship with Juliann.
Except I could not. I wanted to, but the witness inside that this was not the Lord for me eventually brought an end to our relationship. Juliann returned home that summer, not planning to return. Sister Charity actually took my side and believed that Juliann was in the wrong. She spoke wonderful consolation into me.
I thought deep and long about hopping in my car and driving to Wisconsin that summer. Juliann’s mom ran a small school; they owned a lovely country property. It seemed that everything I wanted was there, waiting for me. Yet I also knew, a second time, that if I drove away from Blueberry, I would never make it to Wisconsin, that God would take me to Himself rather than allowing me to go a different way.
Summer Work
The primary construction work that I did through the summer of 1987 was to build two high pole barns, 30 feet by 80 feet for hay for the cattle. The Blueberry community had invested a lot in a cattle program as a means of income for the family. These two pole barns were up on the flat above the river valley, one just north of the family buildings up the slope. This one ran east to west. The other was to the east, in the cattle loafing area, a building that ran north to south.
Don Howat had moved to Blueberry with his family in the fall of 1986. Slowly, he would become my covering in the construction arena, but since the cattle were John Austen’s department, most of the work this summer was done under his direction. Nonetheless, in this and in other jobs, I had begun to work with Don Howat.
Don Howat would become the most important person in my life in the Blueberry context, and, with Rick Annett, the most important person to me in the move. Our walking together will unfold through the next several chapters.
We set the poles and connected them together with a cross board, maybe twenty feet up. Then we built a whole series of large trusses to my design. When everything was ready, we had a massive day (or maybe two) of putting the trusses on top of the cross boards. Brother John had rented a large crane and operator out from Fort St. John to set them for us. I stood on one side, on a lower cross board that allowed us to stand with our hold on the top cross board. Terry Miller was on the other side – and Richard was high up in the middle of the trusses, once we had the first one up and secure. Richard did not mind the heights.
The crane operator would lift the next truss up, Terry and I would grab each end, while the crane lifted the top up towards Richard with a special board I had made, a board that had nails already driven in it above and below. All Richard had to do was slam the truss up against the nail underneath, and then hammer down the nail already in place, while Terry and I nailed the bottoms. Then we were ready for the next truss. We did both roofs in one or two strenuous days.
Before we finished each set of trusses, we nailed diagonal boards as braces, I think on both slopes on both ends, to keep them upright until we could come back to install the roof boards and tin. That night a freak wind storm went all across the Peace River region, all the way to Edmonton, with small tornados appearing in places. This was an extremely rare event.
Then next morning, someone breathlessly asked me if I knew that my trusses were lying broken on the ground. I coated myself against the driving rain and trudged up the hill to see. The first pole barn, the one running east and west, was fine, the freak wind had passed through parallel to the trusses. But when I got to the pole barn next to the cattle barn, there were all the trusses, twisted and broken on the ground.
I thought through very carefully regarding our bracing, something we had done last minute at the end of a hard day’s work. My conclusion was that we had indeed braced the trusses sufficiently even for any normal winds. But this freak storm, something that had happened only once before when I was living at Graham River, with the winds hitting the trusses head on, was something no one could have planned for. I was my fiercest critic, and I had to satisfy myself that it was not a stupid mistake.
Nonetheless, we had to spend a couple more weeks rebuilding those trusses, re-hire the crane and operator, and do it all over a second time. The second time worked, and we were able to finish the tin roofs.
The next school year at Blueberry, “A Season of Deliverance,” coming up next, would be one of the most remarkable and momentous years of my life. And that season would turn into the next at the start of my third school year with the most wonderful experience that has ever happened to me.
“Father, I thank you for the goodness of Your people in Christian community, and especially the family at Blueberry. I give You thanks, regardless of anything, for the opportunity to have been a part of the lives of each one, and they a part of my life. I know that all that belongs to me of truth, will return to me in its time. I can lose nothing.
“And Father, I ask forgiveness of, and extend Your forgiveness towards each one, in all favor, as I cast my mind across their faces and their many interactions with me. I place You, Lord Jesus, upon every one of them in my seeing, and upon every moment of my time there. You have always been all that I am and all of those who are my brothers and sisters inside of You.”