Testimony: Laura Wilhelm; Sunday, January 24, 2016

St. Luke's member Laura Wilhelm offered this testimony during worship on Sunday, January 24, 2016 as the 2nd in a 3-part series of testimonies for the season of Time after Epiphany organized around the theme "Immigrants and Refugees, Strangers and Aliens" during which we have been sharing stories about times when we have been "strangers in a strange land" and God's presence (or light) has met us far from home.My parents both immigrated to the United States from Latvia in 1949. Both had spent the previous five years in an interim status, in flux, away from home, not sure what was going to happen to them next. My mother was in a displaced persons camp in Wurzburg, Germany. She and her sister and my grandfather had ended up there in 1944 after they and the rest of their family decided to immediately flee their home one night after being warned that the Russians were, once again, going to occupy their country. My mother and her sister were in their mid-20s and my grandfather was 70. They left, two young women with their 70 year old father, with what they could carry and made their way west to Germany, mostly walking, sometimes pushing my grandfather in a wheel barrow, sometimes hitching rides from American soldiers. Google says that the distance from where they started to their final destination was a little over 1,000 miles.My father was a soldier, first with the Latvian army, then the Russian Army and then the German Army, then the Russians again -- all depending on whom happened to be occupying Latvia at the time. Finally my father ended up in a military group called the International Forces. This was a group of soldiers from occupied countries that the Allies organized at the end of the war when these soldiers had no homes to return to.Nothing was easy about their experiences. In fact, when Pastor Erik and I first talked about this presentation, I wasn’t sure I could find a spot of light within these experiences that I could share with you. Being an immigrant, refugee, stranger or alien is so often very hard and full of complexities and misunderstandings. What could I say that could evoke a bit of Epiphany light?But as I thought about this, I realized that there was indeed a light that shined through and that this light was the church. My parents were both Lutherans in Latvia and were able to come to the United States through the support of refugee services through the Lutheran World Federation. Displaced Persons could not enter the US without a sponsor and the Lutheran Resettlement Services of LWF found and arranged for US sponsors for immigrants. My mother was sponsored by a family in North Carolina – she worked for them as their nanny for a year until she moved to Pittsburgh to be closer to other family members. My father was sponsored by a Quaker couple in Ohio who owned a farm and needed a farm hand. He and my mother met at a Latvian Lutheran church service in Pittsburgh. After they married, they lived on the farm until I was five years old. Then they moved into town and my father went to work in a steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio.Back in those days, steel workers seemed to go on strike frequently. During one strike period that seemed endless and caused quite a bit of desperation in our home, leaders of the local Lutheran church that we belonged to, aware of our need, came to visit my parents and to offer them the job of custodians at the church. My parents gratefully accepted and served in that position long after the strike ended – for more than twenty years. Because of their work as the custodians, I literally grew up in that church. It was a mainstay of my life. And until he died, my father got up early every Sunday morning to head over to the church to make sure everything was ready for worship and he ended the morning by flanking the front door of the church – opposite the pastor – always with candy in his pockets to hand to the kids as they headed out the door.So often the presence of Christ in our lives is revealed to us only in hindsight, when we have the opportunity to look back and reflect. Certainly my parents’ lives – and mine – would have been very different without the community of believers who took risks and reached out to help people that they had never met.