Lent Day 28: Our Russian connections

Russian roots, anyone? Today I'm giving a special shout-out to everyone reading in Russia. (1/5 of this blog's readers are in Russia, according to Google stats.) With Russia so much in the news, it's timely to write what I've thought about for months.

Did you know that our family has strong family connections to Russia?

My mom's mother and father married young (16 years old) and settled in SE Russia (now Romania). The czarina of Russia wanted the swamps drained so her family wouldn't get malaria on vacation. So she offered land to young German couples who would dry out and farm the soggy soil nearby. My great-aunt's family remains in Russia and they were educated and worked farms under communism. By the time Soviet borders got more porous, they were firmly established.

Grandma and Grandpa built up a dairy and vineyard. Grandma learned to bake delicious bread - and became a good vintner. She baked and made wine until a few years before she died. (A staunch Christian, she took Paul's injunction to Timothy "take a little wine for your stomach" as seriously as she took every other part of scripture.)

Throughout the 1900s, ethnic Germans, like other Europeans, were on the move. German families lost everything, kicked out of Eastern Europe during world wars. Anger against Germans was especially fierce when the Nazis invaded. Displaced groups traveled back to Germany or immigrated to the Americas - south and north - to find land and a place to settle. My maternal grandma's family moved to South America, back to Germany, over to Canada, and back home again. (Grandma's dad loved adventure; her mom ... not so much, so they kept going back to Germany.) Grandma was a Canadian (born in Winnipeg during their travels), so after WWII, she brought her family to Canada through Halifax.

W's mom gave us these Russian nesting dolls

Dad's side of my family has strong ties to Russia, too. Grandma (nee Brandt) pulled out a map one day, pointing to places where her family had lived all over southern Russia. Her father was a itinerant Baptist evangelist in the late 1800s/ early 1900s who shared Good News with whoever would listen. She told me how the family would settle, preach, and then they'd get run out of town. They would pack up and find a new place to minister.

Meanwhile, Grandpa's family was active in the church in Poland and Russia; we have family pictures of Dahers who were church leaders. Many were musical; an uncle was trumpeter to the Czar, a forerunner of my brother's mad trumpeting skills. Grandpa was somewhat feisty all his life. (For example, he worked as a bouncer in Russian clubs as a young man.)  After Grandpa fell in love with Grandma, an externally mild but strong-willed beauty, they married and immigrated. They landed in Winnipeg, Canada, in the 1930s, sponsoring and sheltering many families who arrived after WWII. In contrast, Grandpa's siblings came through Ellis Island and settled in the States. An American immigration officer renamed our American family on their immigration papers: he apparently couldn't spell "Daher." (That wasn't unusual; renaming by misspelling was frequent at Ellis.)

W's grandfather, Theodor Maksymowicz, sits between
AG missions leaders (JP Hogan, seated on L) in 1965

W's family has Russian roots as well. He's proudly Polish, but Poland, like much of Europe, has been overrun by various tribes and shifted borders over and over. His dad had German roots. His mom's family was more connected to the Russian side. W's grandpa (Theodor Maksymowicz: article here) led Polish Pentecostalism in the 1950s and 60s. I remember him preaching at our Winnipeg church in 1965. His huge bald head, and smart, compelling preaching made him one of few visiting speakers I remember from childhood. Currently, W's cousin spends months each year in Russia, fluent in language and culture.

We've never been to Russia but here's my love and hello to those in Russia today. Hi also to readers in China, the UK, the Dominican Republic, France, India, and Malaysia... and everywhere else where you might be reading this.

Don't you love that God speaks Russian, Indonesian, Chinese, German, and English - and every other language?  He knows us. He "gets" our backgrounds. He understands what it means to be polite and rude where you live. What your gestures and glances mean to insiders around you.

Jesus lived and died for every ethnic group, every skin color, and people within every political boundary. Every day, that makes me very happy - and relieved. (What if he had loved every family on earth except ours?)

We're especially grateful because W and I are willing wanderers. W purchased tickets yesterday to move across the ocean and N/S hemisphere. We leave on July 1. We can't wait to meet new friends, learn the language, manners, and hospitality, and eat new foods.

I'd love to hear from readers in Russia or readers with Russian roots at rosemee at hotmail dot com.

Read more:
*If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock--the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. Deuteronomy 28:1-6 NIV [Don't you love a God who makes such promises and is big enough to make them come true!?]

*Not one of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass. Joshua 21:45 NEV

*O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! Psalm 95:6 NEV *The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him. Acts 2:39 NEV Moravian Prayer: Congregations of the living God, arise! Proclaim the promise that the Almighty has given us: the Lord is our God and we are God's people! Thank you, Lord, for your steadfast promise. May Christ's name be praised, today! Amen.

Soiling our own nest

Bird cleaning its nest

"Vögel scheißen nicht ins eigene Nest." Growing up, I heard that German saying many times. Roughly translated, "Birds don't soil their own nest."

Sparrows roost above the front entry light at my parents' place. First, you see the head of the mama or papa bird as they guard and turn the eggs. In a few weeks, there is faint cheeping which swells to a daily hunger protest. Soon little heads peek over the sides, pulled back to safety with passersby. Before long, the chicks feather out and fly off.

The nest is constantly cleared, cleaned, and made welcome for the healthy development of the young ones.

Bedouin home

We saw similar cultural habits among the Bedouins who settled in Israel. Their yards may be full of the plastic bags and junk they toss out their windows, but we were told that the inside of the home is spotless. Generations of Bedouins tossed biodegradable items beyond the tent flap, keeping the interiors clean. In the morning, the desert sand and scavengers had taken care of the leftovers. Sadly, the routines remain and the non-biodegradable trash flies around the countryside, captured by fences and shrubs.

The tendency to clean our own nest, not to despoil our surroundings, is cross-cultural. But the longer I live here, the more I learn about our adopted country's counter-intuitive acts. We monitor others but turn a blind eye to ourselves.

Please read this article (click here) and share with fellow readers what feelings this reality stirs up in you. Patriotism? Pride in America? Surprise? Shock? Dismay? Or ? Personalize Anna with your name ... if you were Anna, if Anna were your cousin or your neighbor, would you feel the same, reading this?

View of foreigners by C19 Japanese

It's easy to police other countries. We were horrified by the Holocaust Museum in Israel, where we saw the results of systematic brainwashing: "Jews are subhuman and don't deserve to live or own property in this land. They are leaches who feed off the hard-working people around them." It's so convenient to shake our heads at the Nazis who tried to eliminate an ethnic group. Who among us would act so brutally today, so inhumanely?

I can finally whisper a question to myself, a few weeks after viewing the ungodly hell inflicted by "my people," my ancestors' government. No, my family didn't know what was going on. But how could they and their communities have missed it? I saw judgment in the eyes of students when they found out Waldemar was Polish and I was German. "Our people" had dared to do this to the Jews. It's true. "We" did it, to our eternal shame. But how are my actions different today from my tribe's actions two generations ago?

Today I'm asking the difficult question of you the reader, too. How is the American immigration propaganda and policing different for those desperate ones who came here to raise their kids, eat decent food, and live in safety? We're not just deporting people from the USA. We're letting our government––paid by our taxes––kill them ... while we look away. Read the statistics in this article.  We can justify it any way we like - and know we're not the first in the USA or elsewhere to do so. (Kosovo. Sudan. Nigeria. Uganda. Vietnam: a short list in a longer ongoing travesty.)

We're all from elsewhere else. Some came on land-bridges or boats thousands of years ago and others on ships as recently as 500 years ago. (Buildings are considered young in many countries at that age.) Some of our ancestors found a haven in the United States: they became citizens so we enjoy that privilege, too. Others of us arrived more recently, with Green Cards or citizenship applications in hand.

Ellis Island, NY

Still others would love to integrate. They live desperately "under the radar," working hard, trying to make a go of it because starvation or death are their only options if they remain in their birthplace.

Once again, the Jewish people––through their memorial of our propensity to do nothing, eating and drinking in safety while others perish–– become our conscience and a goad to serve God as fully human as possible. It cost "my people" death to stand up for Jews two generations ago. Am I willing to risk any comforts to help others in similar circumstance?

How can we prove God's love to those seeking refuge near us this week? This month? In our lifetime?

Read more:

*The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him. Exodus 15:2

*Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. Exodus 22:21

*But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.

He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word. 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17 NIV

*Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. 1 Peter 2:10-12

Prayer: Loving Father, thank you for your kindness to us, strangers and aliens in this world. Call us, O God, to demonstrate your mercy and care for others. Let us love the foreigner among us, for you have set us in a strange land and will call us home when we have finished our sojourn here on earth. Amen.