Faith (Second Week of Advent)

 

A FAITH-FILLED ADVENT
by Megan Burdolski, Director of Stewardship 

The second week of Advent is halfway through. As I’ve spent quite a bit of time with my father in the house where I grew up these past weeks, I’ve found myself looking through photo albums and reminiscing about my childhood. I have come across so many things that remind me of our church and the faith my father instilled in my sister and me from a very young age.

As young children, my dad read stories to us from a very thick children’s Bible every Saturday evening. We were taught several prayers of the rhyming variety which we took turns reciting before meals and at bedtime. My dad also set a quiet example as we would wake up on weekend mornings and find him sitting in his chair reading his Bible or visibly in prayer. Later on Saturday evenings, we could find him poring over his Sunday school materials preparing the lesson he was going to teach his adult “Willing Workers” class the next day.
[Side note: All of the adult classes at the Protestant church where I grew up had names: the Kumjoinus Class – yep, it was spelled like that; the Dorcas class was a group of older ladies - Dorcas is the Greek name for Tabitha in the Bible who was known for her good works & acts of charity; and so on.]

On Sunday mornings, we were given our allowances – a portion for our piggy banks and a portion which we were expected to put into the collections at Sunday school and during church services. We never missed a week of Sunday school and church service, our mom being the choir director and our dad the Sunday school superintendent. Every year, we received “perfect attendance awards” at Sunday school (yes, there was such a thing and, to qualify, one couldn’t miss more than two Sundays during the year.) We had to be very sick to stay home from church and, on vacation, dad always found a church for us to attend on Sunday morning! Repetition was key to my father in instilling a sense of faith so hearing Bible stories repeatedly, memorizing Bible verses in Sunday School and singing the same tried & true hymns and Sunday school songs over and over made me ever aware that God loved me and was watching over me and I had only to believe in Him.

As I got older, though, some of the Bible stories and memorized Bible verses (although I still know a couple of Psalms from the KJV of the Bible by rote) faded into the background and my father’s example of service moved into the forefront. My dad’s life focused on two things – and two things only – his family and his God. When my father was not working as a machinist to provide for our family or completing projects at home, he was serving his church. Dad served on the church council probably a dozen different times – holding at least four different terms as President during his life. He was a Sunday school teacher for decades and the superintendent of the Sunday school numerous times, leading the opening prayer services for adult Sunday school each week. He sang in the church choir, which my mom directed, and played in the handbell choir. He was the one who assembled the large artificial tree in our church every year. Even the flowers he grew in his garden were often cut by my aunt (Dad’s sister) for altar arrangements on weeks when no member of the church donated flowers, but, strangely, were never cut for a vase in our home.

In the years before better technology, my father worked with another member of our church to publish the ZionNews, our church’s newsletter. She compiled the articles and typed them up on stencils, then my father ran off the copies on the mimeograph machine and stapled them together. I would help “stamp” them with names & addresses. We had this contraption – I think it was called an addressograph or something like that. It had a plate/slide with each church family’s name & address. Dad would line up each copy of the newsletter in the contraption which would ink the “plate” and there was a pull-down lever that would imprint the name/address on the newsletter for mailing. I vividly remember what it looked like and how much I LOVED assisting Dad with that project every single month knowing that I was helping him help our church.

On Black Friday this year, I was staying with my father while my sister was working. The hospice chaplain came by to visit. He was asking the questions a hospice chaplain would ask to ascertain a patient’s spiritual status, so to speak. It brought tears to my eyes when my dad told the chaplain that he “missed church.” Especially, because I know he misses it two different ways. He misses that he isn’t physically able to go – he’s been a “shut-in” for 6-7 years now. But, he also misses its existence. At the end of July 2018, Zion Church closed. My father had been a member of that church for his entire life. Dad was just a few weeks shy of his 94^th birthday when my sister and I took him to attend the final service at Zion. It makes me particularly sad that we will not be able to have his funeral in the only church he knew and that he loved with every fiber of his being.

But, it brought a smile to my face when the chaplain (an exuberant, African-American man with the voice of a PREACHER!!!) told my dad that “he is right with God.” That Dad is a man whose faith is obvious and that he (the chaplain) knows that Dad is ready to meet God in heaven when he is called home. Dad seemed so pleased that day to listen to the chaplain read scripture and pray over him. I know that he does miss church but I also know that his faith is the same as its been every day of his life. Dad is still living for two things – his family and his God. And his God will call him home when the time is right.

So, once again, I’m here in my father’s house with a smile on my face. Knowing that my faith, instilled in so many ways by my father, tells me that God is in charge. And that brings me such security and peace. I hope your faith provides you the same sense of comfort and consolation this Advent.