Saturday, December 9, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Al was my mentor
The Lord will be gracious when you cry out; as soon as he hears he will answer you. The Lord will give you the bread you need and the water for which you thirst. No longer will your Teacher hide himself, but with your own eyes you shall see your Teacher.
Al Schmidt was born about 30 years before I was on a farm near Lincoln, Illinois. In his late teens, in the middle of the World’s Great Depression, he grew restless. One day he set out alone, hitchhiking toward the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains in northern Idaho.
He had heard about gold. His family farmed good land in poor times, and they would like to have some gold.
From behind a voice shall sound in your ears: “This is the way! Walk in it.”
Al didn’t just hitchhike; he rode boxcars too. He lived the life of a 1930’s hobo, and I guess that’s just what he was. He told me stories that I will never forget, about the boxcars and other men he met riding in them, about families along the way while he hitchhiked, a few of which turned him away but many who welcomed him in for a meal and occasionally a night of bedrest.
Upon every high mountain and lofty hill there will be streams of running water. The light of the moon will be like that of the sun and the light of the sun will be seven times greater like the light of seven days.
Al learned the art of making coffee over a fire, and he would have taught me if he’d had a chance. That was the best coffee, he said, he’d ever tasted. Just coffee grounds and hot water.
Al Schmidt did not open a bank with the gold he brought back, but he did find a few nuggets. His family was happy to see him again at the end of that summer of 1939 (I think). He spent a few semesters in college learning the art of accounting, and went on back to the family farm.
He will give rain for the seed, and the wheat will be rich and abundant. Your flock will be given pasture. Your lambs will graze in spacious meadows. The oxen that till the ground will eat silage tossed to them with shovel and pitchfork.
I met Al in 1979, after I spent a weekend at a Kogudus renewal retreat with Dad. Early on Saturday mornings we Kogudistas met at Faith Lutheran Church for an hour of singing, memories and Bible study. We hit it off, Al and I. His quiet intelligence and sharp eyes opened a space between us that I was excited to enter.
Soon I discovered that his wife Lucille (I think) had many axes to grind, and she often sharpened them on him. She got shingles, and of course it was awful. It was awfuller for her because she couldn’t help but add her complains about the pain to everything else she had already been complaining about before she got sick.
Al helped her around the house. Al listened to her negative words. Al prayed with her and for her. He took her to church. Al became my hero, as I watched him suffer his wife to come to him in all that loud, lousy pain and the sadness just barely beneath the anger, and receive her in it.
On the day the Lord binds up the wounds of his people, he will heal the bruises left by his blows.
I guess he wasn’t perfect, but he seemed to be to me. Later he asked me to type his journals and prayers for him, and I did. Of course I cried often as I typed. His words, shared with no one except God, expressed his own pain, sadness, anger and fear. And as in the psalms of David, once the bad was out, he could return to the plaintive cry to God for help. Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light.
I would like to share more stories, and I will, about the man who became my mentor, Al Schmidt.
Blessed are all who wait for the Lord. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Great is our Lord and mighty in power.
(Isaiah 30, Psalm 147, Isaiah 33, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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