Mom's Example In Retrospect
RICH KRUISWYK
My life came to a fork in the road when I was 43 years old. I was raised in the Catholic faith by my mom who brought me and my siblings to service every Sunday while we were home. I was a believer, but as I grew into my teens I found the Catholic service boring and I drifted away from any active relationship with God for a long, long time. When I was 43 I attended (grudgingly) a Great Banquet 3-day weekend. This is similar to other Christian 3-day weekend retreats like Cursillo, Walk to Emmaus, and others. For the first time I had close personal encounters with groups of people who were different than most people I knew, people who, by all appearances, had truly been changed by their faith. While I had never stopped believing in God, that weekend I recommitted to being in relationship with Him.
When I got back from that weekend, I started devouring Christian literature voraciously, trying to figure out what my ‘new’ walk with Christ would mean, what it would be like. There were two authors who guided me through the ‘wilderness’ and helped establish the broad strokes of my faith which remain to this day. The first was John Eldredge. His description of a man’s faith journey as a bold adventure, full of battles and noble deeds, was like water in the desert to me, a man whose early Christian life was spent in the rote rituals of suburban Chicago Catholicism. My first worry, literally, when I recommitted to Christ at that Great Banquet weekend was that I would have to become like Ned Flanders (Simpsons reference, if you don’t know). So Eldredge’s books were a relief and a joy for me. I still go back and reread “Journey of Desire” again and again.
The next author and book that shaped my faith was David Platt’s “Radical”. This was a modern-day version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “The Cost of Discipleship”. Platt railed against much of modern American Christianity, often an ‘easy’ Christianity that demands nothing from its adherents other than a declaration of faith and showing up at church for an hour a week. From “Radical” I came to the belief that one can’t really have deep faith in God without putting oneself in a position where deep faith is required. Platt’s message rang true for me; part of the reason I believe I drifted from God earlier in my life is that most of the people I knew who were Christian seemed little different than anyone else. Weren’t Christians supposed to be transformed? Different? What was the point? From “Radical” I came to understand that the point was to show Christ to the world, but that doing so required surrendering your life and being willing to say yes to hard things. Admittedly, “Radical” didn’t make me feel nearly as good as the Eldredge books, but I came to see them as two sides of the same coin, for how can you have adventure and battles and noble deeds without risk and danger?
As I grew in my re-established faith, I came to know many Christians personally who inspired me. And I came to see some Christians I had known before in a new light. Growing up, I didn’t see my mother going into “battles” and performing “noble deeds”, but she steadfastly brought all her children to service weekly, even while my agnostic father stayed home, unable to share in raising us in the faith. She regularly gave money to charities, even though we had 5 children in our family and were decidedly lower middle class, unable to afford simple luxuries like eating out or taking regular family vacations. When my oldest brother was born with some severe mental handicaps, she brought him home and raised him even though it was common at the time to put children of similar limitations into institutions. She remained married to my father until the day he died, even though he struggled with anger and depression over his own lost dreams and the difficulties of trying to do life without God. She was endlessly unselfish. She willingly went down the hard paths God laid before her. She fought the battles He put in front of her. She could not have lived the life she did without the strength of Christ. Everything I learned from Eldredge and Platt, she had modeled in things big and small. It just took me time to realize it.
Rich and his wife Ginger live in Dunlap Illinois with usually 4-6 of their 8 children, depending on the time of year, and their 2 dogs and 3 cats. They came to Imago just as the pandemic was starting, and are now happy to finally be able to attend in person regularly.