Deciding to Stay

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

DECIDING TO STAY

Roma Peterson died May 25 at the age of 95, 75 years after she first wanted to do it.

Helen and I have been blessed through the years with older, often retired, pastoral couples who have mentored us as much with their friendship as with their advice. Their very presence was witness that we, too, could survive the church if we were just patiently faithful.

Don and Dee Lemkau, Max and Ruth White, Harvey and Hazel Gaither—all gone to their reward.

Harvey and Hazel were part of an especially rich mentoring fellowship in the Quad Cities, when I was appointed to Orion, IL, several miles south of Moline. They were retired, but their son, the second Harvey, who went by Keith, was a close friend of mine, and Helen and I cavorted socially with Keith and Joyce. Their son, the third Harvey, is a UMC pastor in IL, as were his father and grandfather. That’s a rich heritage.

In that Quad Cities fellowship were Harold and Roma Peterson. Harold retired in 1973, the year before I was appointed to Orion, his last pastorate at Rock Island First. He died in 1993.

Harold was warm and pleasant. Roma was warm and elegant. My late and late-life friend, theologian Mary McDermott Shideler [1], said that elegance is “beauty plus organization.” Our late pastor’s-wife friend, Dianne Bass, fit that description. So did Roma Peterson.

One night in our parsonage in Orion, Roma told us this story. She and Harold had been married only a little while. He was a pastor in the Norwegian Methodist Conference in northern IL, the first pastor of his congregation to speak both Norwegian and English. She suddenly became deathly ill and was rushed to the hospital. [I can’t remember the reason or the illness.] The doctors told Harold there was no hope for her.

This was in the early 1920s. Most people didn’t have telephones or cars. That included Harold’s parents. His father was also a Norwegian Methodist pastor, perhaps a District Superintendent. It was late afternoon, and he was going home. He got to his front porch and was met there by his wife, Harold’s mother, who said that as he stepped onto the porch, he got a strange look on his face. “Harold and Roma need me,” he said. He set his briefcase down on the porch, turned around and walked to the train station, where he caught the train for Harold and Roma’s town.

He arrived at Roma’s hospital room just as she had decided to die. “It just felt so comfortable,” she said. “I knew I was safe and that I could go on to a better place. But I looked up and saw Harold staring down at me. I didn’t recognize him, but I thought, that young man looks so lost. He looks like he needs me. I’d better stay.”

JRMcF

1] Mary and I became correspondence friends when she sent me a gracious and positive note in response to an article I wrote for The Christian Century, “Prayer as an Occasional Thing.” She lived in Boulder, CO. When I was speaking at the 20th anniversary celebration of CANSURMOUNT in Denver, we stayed with Lynn Ringer, co-founder of that organization and ovarian cancer survivor. When Lynn learned that we wanted to visit Mary, and where Mary lived—way, way up the mountain—she insisted on driving us up there herself, which was a very good idea, both because we would never have made it in our rented Hyundai, and because Lynn enjoyed meeting Mary in person as much as we did. I think it was meeting Lynn that caused Mary to tell us her definition of elegance.


The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

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