Mother Hospitalized

On July 18th, 1965 was an inbetween Sunday at our Turkey Farm in Missouri. The boys had been invited somewhere with the young folks , at one place for dinner and another place in the evening. Along in the afternoon my mother started having severe stomach pains where she'd groan out loud. In retrospect, mother had not been well all summer but we weren't alarmed or at least I can't remember that I was. Anyway that afternoon Dad sent us out with a white bed sheet to wave in the air out by the buggy shop in hopes the boys would see it as they passed on the road half a mile away. Sure enough, Rudy and Truman saw it and leaving the lineof buggies they came home . I don't remember clearly but I think Dad sent Rudy to call the Doctor , Dr. Hull, and he came to the house , examined mother and said he'd take her to the hospital as she was seriously ill. We children, all ten of us from 18 yr old Rudy to 3 yr old Mary stood in a row and shook mother's hand as she told us good-bye and went with Dad and the doctor. Nine days later she died in the hospital. They did exploratory surgery and found her stomach so full of cancer that they just closed her up and said there was no hope of a cure.
The last time I saw her alive she was delirious and kept saying,"Where are the girls? I want to see the girls."
Dad would line us along the bedside and tell us to touch her hand, then he'd tell her the girls were all here but she didn't recognize us.
I prayed for my mother to be healed, surely God would answer my desperate prayers.And when my mother died I concluded that my prayers were useless and quit praying, but only for a little while because as sure as I didn't pray at night before I went to sleep I would have terrible nightmares. So I started praying again that God would send an angel to watch over me while I slept and it always worked.
Now in January of that year my best friend Mary's mother had died very suddenly of a blood clot in her head, if I got it r ight and my mother died in July , then in December my friend Barbara's mother died at childbirth. So there in that little church of possibly 20 families there were three families with each 10 children who were motherless. Thirty motherless children in one church. Now that was a wake up call and material for many an Amish sermon.

Baptism

July 15th, 1972 - At the age of 17 I was baptised on the confession of my faith by a godly elderly patriarch, Christian M Borntreger, by name . He was widely known in Amish circles as , "Der Alt Christ". Let it suffice to say that this day I was officially initiated into the intrinsic essence of the Amish religion. My life was never the same after that day. Of course there were myriad things leading up to this day but this was a day I could put my finger on and say from this day forward I could no longer hide behind my Dad and be protected from the long fingers of the --------- Ordnung (?) or mechanisms of the Amish church.

That July morning the sun rose as usual on our Wisconsin Dairy Farm. We got up at five, got in the 30+ cows, fed and milked them plus feeding the calves, horses, pigs and chickens and got back to the house for a 7 o'clock breakfast of eggs, bacon and cooked mush followed by Wheaties and milk. After breakfast there was the usual rush of washing dishes, hitching the horses to the buggy and getting changed into our church clothes which for me this special morning was a new black dress and a new starched white cape and apron. I don't remember my cap being new but I'm sure it was freshly washed and pressed with sugar and vinegar.

One out of the ordinary thing happened that morning when Dad wrote a letter and flagged the Bishop down as he passed to give it to him as he wanted to explain some things that he didn't care for all the other preachers to know and the bishop was so hard of hearing he couldn't talk to him privately in public.

The 12 mile drive with horses and buggy was uneventful but soothing to have the whole family together with Dad at the lines. Once at the place where church was held at Joe A. Borntregers the family went to their proper positions in the Amish church and I felt very vulnerable.

I remember filing in at the proper time behind Lizzie, the other girl who was being baptised, and sitting in the living room on the long benches waiting for the men to come in. As we sat there I noticed the curtains at the windows twisted back and up in an unnatural way and attributed it to the fact that it must have been the boys because they had no older girls to do such things.

That day I got baptised and our family got our "zeugniss" or church letter to move to Bronson 'Mi . ;Which was the reason Lizzie and I only had church instruction for five Sundays instead of the usual seven. I could write a book about all the things that happened that day and the things leading up to and following that day in the history of my life but I will leave that for another time.

But after all these years I still believe my baptism fulfilled all the requirements of a Biblical baptism.