Thank you, Lord, that you are constantly working behind the scenes and that your image in humanity reveals itself in thousands of unrecognized and soon-to-be-forgotten acts of kindness and loving self-sacrifice every day. These are good gifts to us from you, our Father.

This morning, I recognize that you make use of all these things in our lives to weave them together with the prayers of the faithful few in the power of your Spirit to work your good and perfect will into our lives.

The gift of faith arises within, and out of, the fabric of our lives…

Lord, I am one of your children today whom you are calling to be willing to be unseen and unrecognized in service to you alone. And this morning, I realize that faith arises out of a foundation created by great-great-great grandparents who served you faithfully in the midst of great trial and prayed for their offspring to believe. I’m deeply grateful, Lord, that you have called me out of the world into your kingdom by your magnificent gifts woven into the lives and faithfulness of your people over hundreds of years. And though I am nothing like my Great-grandpa Cornelius in personality, I have inherited his faith.

Cornelius helped lead a group of Mennonite immigrants from Heinrichsdorf in Russian territory (Ukraine-Poland border), to Antwerp, across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, and on to Yankton in the Dakota territory in the 1870s. He was the first of those very poor settlers to build a home for himself in the Avon area (in the area known as the Loretta settlement) and two other families out of mud on the prairies, but perhaps, most importantly, he donated the land and led the labor in building one of the very first, if not the first, church buildings in the Dakota territory. That church building nurtured my grandpa and my dad in faith and led to my knowing God by way of their faithfulness to his word.

Evidence of our family’s long-standing strong and sometimes imperfect or incomplete faith is woven into our history.

My great-great-great grandpa and grandma, William Abraham Ewert and Elizabeth Schroder, lived in Montau, Schwetz (West Prussia). Their son, Johann Ewert, who was born in 1809 in Volhynia, Ukraine, married Anna Unruh and went on to serve as a minister in the Mennonite community. Johann and Anna were part of the leadership God raised up in those days to continue leading that people group on, a faith group that had been migrating over a period of 300 years in search of religious freedom. 

Johann and Anna’s son, Cornelius married Maria Schmidt and became an ordained minister, his brother David who died at the age of 24 was a minister, and his son-in-law, David Schultz was a minister. It was his son-in-law and his cousin, Henry Schmidt, who eventually became the ministers of that church that Cornelius built and nurtured the faith of my Grandpa Henry and his son Frank, my dad, until the end of World War II. (I am named after these two Davids in our family line.) My dad and mom, Frank and Lillie (Richert), then went to Grace Bible institute in Omaha, Nebraska, and after the war and took a pastorate at a Mennonite Church in Wolf point, Montana, where I was born.

Something happened in the transmission of family genes between my Grandpa Henry and my dad. Perhaps it was simply the passage of time and the increase in technological benefits to our lives but neither my dad nor myself seem to have the same measure of entrepreneurial spirit that our ancestors showed. We are more like my Grandma Emma Dirks Ewert who was a Lancaster, Pennsylvania Dutch woman who became the bride of Henry. She was a quiet, humble woman who changed my life by kneeling in her garden every morning to pray, with tears. I don’t know what she might have prayed for me in the garden, but that picture of a daily act of faith, that gave her the courage to endure the hard life of a wife to a hard-driven and brilliant farmer husband, has sustained my own effort to remain faithful to God and learn to rely on Him wholly and completely for whatever He would do in me and through me.

Thank God for my family – a grand weaving of God’s miraculous grace!

My faith in God has been shaped by prayers and faithfulness far beyond anything I know today. How magnificent is his ability to weave together the events of our lives with thousands of other moments behind, and yes, before us.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. [29] For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. [30] And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Romans 8:28-30 ESV

Poem image: Eastridge Daily Devotion