today I wanted to share an exerpt from a book that my mama was featured in
(yes, a real published book). Since I sure that a majority of you, don’t own
this book, I’m typing it out for you. I love this story because in a way, it’s
the story of how I began my journey. After all, if it wasn’t for my mama, I wouldn’t
be me. If it wasn't for my parents love for each other & Jesus Christ, I wouldn't be who I am.
-1982 CRC Family Portrait-
Bev Den Bleyker:
Growing up in Graafschap
if you are driving south on M-31 out of Holland, all you’ll see of Graafschap
is the church steeple poling out of the elms, like some sleepy memory of an
old, precious way of life. But if nostalgia pulls at you like gravity, and you
turn back and take a couple winding roads, before you know it you’ll be right
in
the middle of Graafschap, a sweet, old one-church town.
It’s a blessing to stand in front of the old white church, to stand there and
think that one only beam spanning the entire church was set in place more than
120 years ago by Dutch and German hands, hands of people in whose ancestral shadow
we live and worship. You can almost hear them setting it yet; and , if you
listen closely, you can heart the old psalms, and you can see the black hats,
the beards, and the horse barns over there beyond the sanctuary, In a sense, we
were all born in towns like Graafschap.
Bev Den
Bleyker lives in Graafschap. She was baptized in the old white church with the
historic beam, and she and her husband, Vern, were married there. For much of
her life, and she has lived on the same block, in the old family home near the
softball field. Vern grew up next door. He used to give her rides on his big
blue and white Cushman scooter. They dated throughout high school, the girl and
the boy next door. “It seems like I knew him his whole life,” she says.
They grew up together, up together, not a ground-rule double from the church,
and they rode the same bus to Holland Christian School-the bus Vern’s dad always
drove.
You’re never alone in a small town, a
one-church town like Graafschap. There are always aunts and grandpas, and neighborw
who are probably more “family” than the renegade uncle who up and moved to East
Lansing. Small towns make growing up as easy as growing up can be. Small towns
smile when their own kids date each other: they cry when the same kids kneel at
the front of church, when the first wedded kiss lingers a couple heartbeats too
long.
Tradition is like an interstate highway, all its entrances and exits clearly
marked by the overhead signs with arrows that point your way to a specified
destination. Traveling is easy on an interstate, sometimes too easy. Maybe
that’s why Vern and Bev’s courtship moved along on obscure country roads for
five, almost six years. “I always knew I would marry him.” She says, “But there
were times I couldn’t live without him and I couldn’t live with him.” On again,
off again, through summers of softball games. When Vern would see the same guys
car too often next door at Bev’s, he’d start it up again and spend some time
over there himself. Off and on. Graafschap watched.
in October 1965, just back from basic training with a local reserve unit, Vern
made big plans; he and Bev talked of marriage, she just two years out of
Holland Christian High. But then in December, he panicked, “I’m not ready,” he
told Bev one night while parked in her driveway. “I was hurt,” she says. “We
had been going together for five years.”
Off and on. Off and on. Engaged in February 1966, broken off again in March of
the same year. This time it was Bev who broke it off, more sure of her own devotion
than she was of his. She went to Denver, moved away from the boy next door. “I kept
seeing him,” she says, “because he lived right there.” She left directions that
no address be given. But she left her address somewhere in Graafschaap, and
there are not many secrets in small towns.
Ah, but love will out! Vern found Bev’s address and called her landlord. Bev
had no phone; she didn’t want to be reached by the boy next door. But he called
her at midnight, said he wanted her back. “He was persuasive,” she admits with
a glorious, small-town smile. “But I told him I would have to pray about it.”
Long into the night Bev and her roommate talked. And later, when she couldn’t
sleep, she knelt at her bedside. It was near morning. The doorbell rang while
she was on her knees, and from her bedroom window she saw him standing outside
the door in a yellow shirt and tan pants. (Some images one never forgets.)
“Ja, ja,” the old men of Graafschaap would say, “the Lords works in mysterious
ways.” And sometimes He uses jet travel. It’s a good Graafschaap story; you can
bet it was told over coffee, even after church.
Something over four years later, Mr. and Mrs. Vern Den Bleyker had a quiverful-threee
kids. “People ask me how I put up with it-three little ones in such a short
time,” she remembers. “Sometimes I felt that I couldn’t.”
She wouldn’t have admitted it, of course. Generally, small towns have very
clear standards for motherhood.
“I was
physically and emotionally drained,” she says. But no one knew because, while
there are no secrets in small towns, some things re much better left unsaid. “I
guess at the time I felt that all I had was God; He gave me the strength I needed.
It was something that happened inside of me.”
A long tradition, a close family, the Christian school, an old white church
with an ancient beam-these things can guide us efficiently, but there comes a
time when one needs to live on something other than borrowed breath. For Bev
and Vern Den Bleyker, personal commitment had been somehow neglected. She knew
this when God pulled her out of her depression. In a small town full of Christian
Reformed people, in a culture brimming with ethno-religious traditions, Vern
and Bev discovered that the covenant God of the Old Graafschaap church was also
the sovereign Lord of their own lives, their kids, their hurts, their joys.
Some would even call what they felt a ‘conversion. “
Their devotions became more personal as their commitment grew. Then, five years
of growth later, a friend challenged them. He had been to Alaska, to a Christian
training school of Indians and Eskimos. When he told them about the place, they
began to wonder about the direction of their own lives. “Maybe you ought to thinking
about going,” the friend told them. “Pray about it,” But they lived in the family
house in Graafschap, Vern had recently bought his own business, the kids were
all enrolled in Christian school, and every Sunday they walked to the old white
church. They were living a comfortable Graafschap life.
They prayed
together as a family. They applied and were accepted for a position at the Alaskan
school. “It’s amazing how things seemed important-the business, for
example-suddenly seemed unimportant,” she remembers. Vern and Ben and their four
children left the family home in town afor a wilderness boarding school in the
Alaskan Rockies, one hundred miles from a grocery store.
“if you had asked me what I thought of the church before we went to Alaska, my
answer would have been different than today, “ she admits, sitti back in the shadow
of the old church, back home in Graafschap again. Ben and Ver have abeen to the
mountain top. It took Eskimo kids, an environment stripped of the media, and a family
of believers in frontier Alaska. Today Bev says that working at the training
school gave both of them the greatest fulfillment of their lives.
It was confrontation that did it, the necessity of open, verbalized
commitment-testimonies a daily basis. “We often rely on the church and the
school to give spiritual training,” she says, “but we couldn’t do that at
Victory High School.” The Den Bleyker’s were forced into a kind of openness and
commitment that too often makes little Dutch towns and big CR churches somewhat
uneasy.
“I’m really proud of the Graafschap church, “she admits, but the Alaskan experience
changed her perspective. “We’re missing the boat sometimes, I think. Growing up
here, we learned the scriptural foundation of academic subjects. But commitment
was never pulled out of me. I was never in a situation where I had to say what
all of this meant to me personally. Even profession of faith for me was merely
a graduation from catechism. We went with maybe fifteen or twenty of us. “
Bev Genzink Den Bleyker has changed. The Spirit, she’ll tell you, is more
obviously present in the life of the family today. The God of Graafschap church
has entered their lives in a way they hadn’t experienced before. Close to forty,
Vern is enrolled at Reformed Bible College now; he plans to become a teacher.
Bev will audit some classes this term. The Alaskan experience pulled them out
of a CRC cubicle and forced them to defend the beliefs they grew up with-infant
baptism, for example. Both Bev and Vern want to know not only what they believe,
but why. That may sound odd, the DenBleyker’s both growing up in a birthplace
of the CRC.
Finally, the Alaskan experience has liberated her, enabled her to see things
she hadn’t seen before, even the old church.
“I love my heritage and my background,” she says. “I’m not sure I would
see my heritage in the same way I do today if we hadn’t gone to Alaska.”
Our Graafschap deserves honor. Tradition grants stability and roots. Tradition
shows us who we have been and points us where we might go.
But Bev DenBleyker listens to the morning church bells every Sunday, and she
knows, today, that each of our old, white Graafschap churches must be a whole
lot more than just another stop on some Tulip Time tour.
The church cannot stand on the strength of one wooden beam, no matter how
ancient or how honorable. I
