With my retirement from Grace now only a little over six months away, I’m facing this transition with sober excitement and a fair amount of grateful sadness! These twenty-two wonderful years on the staff team here have been the longest I have ever lived and served anywhere in my life, and I am so thankful to the Lord for his goodness to me through you, my church family!
As I think about it, I’m also realizing that transition has been part of my life since my earliest years.
Allow me to share a few stories from my formative years.
Three days after I was born in Hillsboro, Kansas on September 10, 1950, my dad entrusted my mom, my two-year-old sister, Marilyn, and newly-born me into the care of his in-laws and rushed off to Berkeley, California to begin a semester of Japanese language studies. The rest of us followed by train six weeks later, and we survived several apartment moves until, after finishing the semester, my parents spent the year-end living with relatives and preparing for their departure to Japan as missionaries. They were slated to leave from San Francisco for Yokohama in early March of 1951 on board the freighter, Andrea Luckenbach.
Around a week before they were due to depart, my parents received notification from the shipping company that their reservations on the Andrea Luckenbach had been canceled for some unexplained reason, and that they were being assigned to a sister ship, the William Luckenbach, which was setting sail in a matter of days. Rushing to finish stuffing countless barrels of supplies for a six year term in a new country, my family sailed from San Francisco on what was to be a testy and stormy voyage.
A week or so into the Pacific crossing, our ship received an SOS from the Andrea Luckenbach which had left San Francisco after us. Following an unexpected stop in Honolulu to get emergency medical treatment for her illness-stricken captain, the Andrea had struck a reef off of Kauai and had its hull ripped open from stem to stern. Thankfully, no lives were lost and my parents praised God for his protection and mercy in sparing them this trauma. Though the Lord’s hand was on them, there would be other tests, as life in post-war Japan was no cake-walk.
As they began settling into a home in Osaka and adjusting to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and experiences of their new lives, in May my mother became pregnant with their third child. Two months later we received news of her father’s death, something which unsettled my mother’s heart and complicated her pregnancy.
My younger brother, Billy, named after my mother’s diseased father, William Brenner, was born prematurely on December 16. His birth was a traumatic one due to a complication which resulted in a massive amount of blood loss for my mother. Sadly, my brother died two hours after being born. Fighting for her life, and hospitalized for several difficult weeks over our first Christmas in Japan, my mother eventually received God’s gracious healing, but she never saw her son, who is buried in the Ikeda city cemetery near where I grew up. I lost a grandpa whom I never knew and a brother whom I never saw.
Transition, trauma, change, and loss have been family “friends” and part of my story since my earliest years. I am so thankful for my parents’ tested and refined faith in Jesus that helped them weather the trials of their lives and gave them grace to serve for forty-two years on the mission field. I’m grateful that they passed along the gospel through words and deeds to me, and that the Lord gave me a heart of faith to receive Jesus Christ as my Savior at the early age of seven.
There’s much more to tell, but my testimony is this: Jesus Christ shepherded my heart to him and gave me a secure attachment that would help me weather all of the other transitions and tests which would be part of his story in my life.
I know that Jesus will care for his own to the very end and to that most magnificent day when we transition into his presence.
“Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen” (Jude 24)
See you Sunday!
Pastor Steve