A Pink Wedding – My Mom and Dad

It was 1941. The war was on in Europe. Who knew what the future would bring. Mom was in love with Dad. He was the youngest son in a respected church going family. He played hockey and ball on local teams. He completed grade eleven before beginning work at various jobs in the community. Then he owned and operated a gas station, well the one and only gas station in Hepburn. His brother Harry owned the local hardware store. His father was the town Reeve. Dad, Edward by name and known as Eddie, was a debonair man, prematurely bald, with a manicured pencil mustache. He whistled everywhere he walked. Church was not on his priority list. For that reason, when Mom fell for him, the counsel she received was cautious.

Mom had worked ever since she was a teenager. Compelled to work for the sake of the family she had to end school after grade 9. She always regretted this and bore a sense of educational inferiority through her adult years. It was against the general will of the Christian community for her as a committed Christian to marry someone who had not yet settled eternal matters with God as far as anyone knew. Dad and Mom loved each other. He was 26 years of age and Mom was 22. So on June 12, 1941 Edward Unruh and Tina (Doerksen) Willems exchanged wedding vows. Mom couldn’t afford a traditional wedding dress, white and clearly sanctified. She wore pink and she wore a hat. They honeymooned in Saskatoon. They were very happy.

Ed and Tina wasted little time in beginning a family which began with me, firstborn, on Sunday, September 13, 1942. WWII was raging and Hepburn’s inhabitants were primarily Mennonite people with a pacifist position with regard to conflict. They would be exempt as conscientious objectors. Dad was not bound by such religious strictures. My father had already made up his mind that he was a Canadian and he bore responsibility for the nation into which he was born and into which his child was born. Against the predictable community behaviour he and a handful of young townsmen enlisted. Dad joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and Mom became a war bride who would spend much of the next years on her own. Dad was never shipped overseas. When he was sent to Gananoque, Ontario, Mom was able to accompany him. When he was sent to White Horse for an extended time, she felt his absence. They would remain in love and together for 66 years.

Photos:
• Mom in her wedding dress and hat June 12, 1941
• Mom and me in the Hepburn Central Office and residence where mom and dad operated the switchboard.

Hepburn’s Elevator #901 and Me

Hepburn was my home for the first five years of my life.

As it was in 1942 it is still a small farming and bible college town located 40 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon. A rail line was constructed and was operating in 1909. After a local farmer named Rowitt Hepburn applied for a post office permit on his farm, Hepburn became a recognized village in 1919. Within ten years the town population reached 800 people. Located beside the rail line was Saskatchewan’s Grain Elevator No. 901, which was built in 1928. It served the grain farming community for decades until the great depression and the drought years of the thirties when the population dropped to less than 300. Today there are 500 residents. The rail line was shut down by the province in 1989 and subsequently most provincial elevators were torn down. Hepburn’s elevator No. 901 survived because of enthusiastic local plans to turn it into the Museum of Wheat.

At the age of three, a friend and I ventured where small children do not belong. We peddled our tricycles to the yawning open doors of the elevator, walked inside, found a large platform that moved up and down with the flip of a large brass handle fixed to the wall, and we took turns riding it until a large man confronted us. No doubt he was terrified that two children were so close to danger and he rapidly terrified us as he told us the perils of falling into a bin of grain. I have not set foot inside an elevator since that moment. I would love to visit Hepburn’s museum one day.

I have written and illustrated children’s stories based on my childhood experiences and in fact printed a simple copy as a Christmas gift for my grandchildren.The Wheat Museum Page

REVIVAL BEGINS WITH PRAYER

A NEW LEARNING
In the late 1960’s Bill McLeod pastored a church of two hundred people in Saskatoon that caught a spirit of prayer. Prayer became the most important activity of their church life. They poured out their hearts to God to send revival to them and their city. In 1971 God sent revival. It went on for months and involved countless other churches and moved to ever large venues to accommodate people night after night. In the years that followed the revival movement moved to every province and every US state having similar life changing results. Families were reconciled. Destructive habits were abandoned. But it all began with concerted prayer because praying people take God seriously.

I believe many in evangelicalism have concluded that to see crowded churches in North America we have to redesign, reorganize, renovate, restructure, rebuild, retrofit, and reshuffle. So we spend money on capital items when we should be spending time in prayer so that God will send revival and people will crowd into any kind of facility where God is busy. Over the decades as we modernized and contemporized our church programming I noticed that we became satisfied with less and less corporate prayer. Then along came the testimony of one pastor Jim Cymbala and the Brooklyn Tabernacle and his first books and videos that inspired thousands of Christian leaders as though Cymbala had stumbled on something revolutionary. Jim was a brand new pastor at his first church in Brooklyn which had only twenty members until one day there was standing room only at prayer meeting and until today when it is deemed a mega church. In his book called Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire Cymbala provides a one-word answer: prayer. He tells how passionate, persistent prayer transforms individuals, revives churches and revitalizes communities.

Instead of losing hope we need to go back to the biblical basics.
Communication with God through prayer is one of the foundational and unchanging essentials of a life with God.

See Bill McLeod's website
See Brooklyn Tabernacle site