my gram....

my gram....

last Tuesday morning, in one breath, my gram stepped from her clouded mind into a CLEAR and unspeakable beauty of Heaven. oh what her eyes must be seeing. 

as happy as I am for her, it was one of the saddest days of my life.

I knew her hours were numbered and yet, just hearing that she was gone, broke me.

I have loved this woman with all of my heart and laying her in the ground, on Friday, was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

we just returned from an amazing week in Michigan with family.

Such a Bittersweet week. SO many tears cried but for as much crying as we did, we did twice as much laughing together. 

If Grams watching from Heaven, I hope she's applauding. 

I believe She taught us to love each other well.

We miss your laugh Gram.

a few weeks back, I wrote a letter to her. my aunt jan was able to read it to her the day before she died. I doubt that she heard any of it but I'm so relived that it was read to her, just the same. 

Tim read part of it at her funeral. I think most of us grandkids, shared a lot of my same thoughts. 

she was an amazing, God fearing lady. 

until we meet again.....

my dear gram- 

my heart aches as i write this because in writing this, it's a reminder to me that your time on earth is short. i have been meaning to drop you a note for a very long time now, to let you know how much you are loved. how much you have taught me. how much you have meant to me. 

i will probably never get the chance, on this side of Heaven to share my heart with you face to face so i'll spill it on paper. 

even as a little girl, hanging out with you was FUN. 

some of my best childhood memories were of visiting you at JCPenny. i always thought that you must've been VERY important to have such a cool office space. :) 

up & down the stairs and elevator 100x's in one single visit would've made most people crazy (and maybe it did make you crazy!) but what i remember is you laughing.  you never seemed to be embarrassed, you never seemed irritated, i never remember you 'hushing' us, i only remember you smiling. funny how 40+ years after roaming that building, i can still see you, standing in the doorway of the basement,  looking at us kids like you were so proud of us. i don't know why that was but i thank you for leaving that particular feeling in my memory. 

 

you have brought so much Joy into my world gram. i remember one evening, that you & i decided to make microwave popcorn before we sat down to watch tv. 

i vividly remember, being deep in conversation, when the smoke started coming out of the microwave & the smell of burnt food was overpowering!!! i'll never forget how we laughed when we realized that neither of us knew that we had to take the plastic wrap off BEFORE putting it in to cook!  (duh)

oh how we laughed. and laughed. AND laughed. 

years later, anytime we talked about it, we'd start the giggling all over again. i still remember thinking that 'my grandma is so fun'. 

i loved your laugh. i loved how the littlest things in life could make you smile. 

thank you for the brown candy box, with the painted on flowers that was NEVER, EVER empty. i know that everyone of us grandkids, thanks you for that. mom & dad, as good mom's and dad's do, put the kaboosh on the candy intake, but when we went to gram & gramps, the rules were very different. 

for that, we are grateful. :) 

you have always been close to my heart but i think we really became kindred spirits was back in the early 1990's when you & gramp took me in. my family was all the way across the country & you put me up in your cozy basement on 30th street. you had such an amazing way of making me feel like your home was my home.( i know that Lori shares the same sentiments that I do on this.) thank you for the way that you would knock (as unnecessary as it was) before coming into 'my space'.  even as a late teenagers,  we remember thinking how much we appreciated you allowing us to have my own little 'apartment'. 

you were always so quick to offer me a seat at your dinner table, a cup of coffee in the morning, free dibbs on the goods in the OVERFLOWING pantry. (oh, how gramp loved getting those deals on soup....after all, you never know when you'll be in the need for 42 cans of soup. ;)). 

even the little things like switching out and folding my laundry while i was gone, spoke volumes to me about your gift of hospitality. 

when i was dealing with heartbreak over the lost of a special boyfriend, you would stop what you were doing, just to listen. 

there were many times, you would drop what you were doing, just so i could cry on your shoulder. you never judged me, you never told me to "just get over it". 

you always made me feel like what i had going on in my life was as important to you, as it was to me.  

you made me feel special. always made me feel like i was everything to you. 

if i had to come up with ONE word to describe you, it would be KIND. 

you were always SO kind. 

no matter who walked in the door, you were always, always KIND. people always felt like they were treated WELL by you. 

i truly appreciated the way you spoke KINDLY of gramp. although i know, that it wasn't always so easy but you were always respectful. 

from a young girls perspective, looking for a spouse at the time, your kindness spoke volumes. you taught me, unknowingly perhaps, that honoring him was always one of the best way to make a marriage work. you loved and honored him until his very last breath.

i know that he thought the world of you. 

thank you for the way you loved your family. you raised your children to love and fear the Lord. 

 as a mother now, i now know that nothing else in this world matters more than that. 

you modeled that to me.  

thank you for the way that you SHOWED me, by example, that reading the Bible EVERY SINGLE DAY was the MOST important thing!! i witnessed, first hand, how that Good book shaped and molded who YOU are.  you taught me that there is NO better read out there. i vividly remember, standing in your kitchen, on a morning when you & gramp were heading to Florida for the winter and you saying to me, in a tone i will never forget, "traci, if it's the Lords will, we will see you again soon".  

in one little sentence you spoke volumes about where your faith was. it was always HIS WILL. not yours. i have never forgotten that. you have taught me the importance of putting my faith in HIM, in ALL things. 

gram, what i wouldn't give for just one more day with you. one more day to laugh with you, one more day to run the halls of jcpenny, one more day to make a 'quick run' to Younkers to buy you a new sweater, one more day to take a walk down to Donutville with you, one more day to sit at your table, one more day to hold your sweet, arthritic hand, one more day to tell you all the things that i never seemed to have the 'right' words to say. one more day to walk into a room and see you sitting at your sewing machine. one more day to see you, in your recliner, with your bible on your lap. one more day to properly made a bag of popcorn with you.  one more day of seeing you in conversation with gramp. 

i want just one more day. 

it has been one of my greatest honor to be called your grand-daughter. what a gift, that God, in all HIS wisdom, chose ME to get to call you my GRAM.  

for that i am eternally grateful. 

the words of  2 Timothy 4:7 rings in my ears today : 'I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith'.

gram, you have fought the good fight. you have finished your course and i know that when you meet Jesus face to face, His first words to you will be 'Well done my good and faithful servant'. 

with all of my being, i love you sweet gram. what a comfort to know, i will see your sweet face again.

traci :) 

-no shadow of death can overshadow the goodness and mercy that shadows the child of God.-

my advice to me....

Advice to me & all u other sometimes discouraged mamas….. 


#1...love on your babies (pre-teens, teenagers) lots. You'll blink and they'll be grown. 
 
 

#2...they don't care if your house is dirty and truth be told, no one else does either. Don't let housework come before time spent with boys. I had to learn that the hard way. :( 



3....pick your battles. Nuff said. ;) 



4...don't beat yourself up for not living up to the mom expectations you have in your mind. You'll never meet them all. Another one that I struggle with every day. 



5...you're a great mom. You've totally got this. God choose YOU to be their mom. No one else. Just you. Wear that title proudly. 



6...most important: pray your kids thru life. Pray that they'll be Men of God. In the big scheme of life, not much else matters much

the boy and girl next door......

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

Happy New Beginnings.....

thanking the Lord tonight that HE has brought us through ANOTHER year.
we are healthy.
we are employed.
we are happy.
we are warm in our home.
our cars run.

our children attend an amazing school.

we are part of a phenomenal community.
we have a church family.
our blessings abound.
really, really ABOUND!!

more often, I catch myself wondering: why me?
why have I been blessed with THIS life?
it was NOTHING I have done. NOTHING I deserve.
it's grace,
sheer grace.
this year, my 'resolutions' are no different than they are EVERY. OTHER. YEAR.
so, instead of writing it all down, I'm copying and pasting from January 2011.
Happy New Year Friends.....
be aware of YOUR good, GRACE blessings this year!

****************************************************

 

once again i will talk about resolutions that i will never keep.
we all do it.
we all have great intentions.
so this year, i've resolved to NOT make any resolutions.
wait, is that a resolution to NOT make a resolution??
since i'm resolving to NOT do something, isn't that the same thing as resolving to do something and then doing something different?
whatever, i'm so confused.

what i'm saying is that EVERY year i make a promise, to myself to DO something.
lose weight.
be more patient.
read more.
read the bible more.
keep my car cleaner. (i've never actually resolved to do that but....IF i were going to resolve to do something, that would probably be on the 'list'.)
blah. blah.
for the list of a million things i have, i'm sure you could add a million more.
instead of resolutions, which sounds so daunting, i'm going to call it 'attempting/striving' to do better.
so, that being said...i'm going to 'attempt' to....
blog more.
exercise more.
be more of a 'yes' mom.
talk less.
listen more.
blog more faithfully.
take more pictures.
send out birthday cards to everyone on my calendar.
and to the IMPORTANT things....
pray more, MUCH more.
listen for God more.
look for Him more.
let others SEE  more of Jesus in my life.
dig into the WORD more.

what are some things you're 'attempting' to change in your life this year?