Life Beside The Falls
Sermon
Gospel Subplots
Story Sermons Of God's Grace
The first storm of autumn clamped down with unseasonable cold -- lows at night in the teens -- which turned the shores of the falls in the middle of town to parallel strips of white lace. Despite the frozen ground the season's last football game would be played, swirls of snow sometimes making the players invisible from the stands. The teams warmed up on the field, stretching and shouting numbers to the rhythm of their exercises. The band members tuned their instruments, the public address announcer counted through the speakers as fans filed into the shelter of the stadium. Phil and I shouldered into the wind, Phil maneuvering the wheelchair toward the stands. Slowly he pushed and turned the chair, and Millie -- heavily robed and blanketed -- bobbed side to side with every bump.
Millie Freeman was a native of this town which had the descriptive but not very imaginative name of Falls, for the waterfall which neatly divided the town in half. She was born Mildred Dodson in 1910, the year the water-powered grist mill was finally torn down. The town had grown around the mill, then the mill stood vacant and crumbling for a generation until finally it was razed. Born into a town of 1100, by the time Millie was limited to a wheelchair Falls was a city of 63,000.
Mildred was never pretty. She would say, "But I don't have to look at me." Yet she was startling for her height and erect posture. For her generation she was tall -- six feet, one inch. Besides her height and erect carriage, her only outstanding physical feature was a nose too long for her narrow face.
A space awaited the wheelchair, but getting into the stands took us time and effort -- shifting and dragging sideways. Millie sat silently in her chair, almost expressionless. She was chilled already. When finally in her place, we left her alone. She would have it no other way. The game began and although we stood to yell or slapped our gloved hands to stay warm, Millie sat motionless, head bent forward.
Mildred had always wanted children, desired children more than she desired marriage. The happiest moment in her life was not when she married Harold Freeman -- dear man that he was -- but when she gave birth to her first child, Henry. Then her happiest moment was when she birthed Marshall, and so also with Leona and Martha. Mildred said, "Parents are allowed multiple most happiest moments."
Mildred's most happiest moments all had to do with her children. That's how I met Mildred -- through her youngest daughter, Martha. Martha Freeman and I, Margaret Fest, were best friends from thirteen until we graduated from high school and left for separate colleges. Mildred and Harold's other three children called Martha and me the "Nutty M & M's."
For all the time I spent at the Freemans' home, it took a year or so to get used to Mildred. Mildred said, "I'm not a milk-and-cookies mother." She seemed stern when she made clear what I could and could not do while visiting or when she sent word it was time for me to leave or for Martha to come home. And Mildred was so tall; but I grew comfortable with Mrs. Freeman because I could ask anything and get a straight answer. Mildred's yeses were always pleasing and it proved painless when she said, "No."
Since Mildred's life goal was to be a mother, she helped at school and attended her children's every play, concert, academic presentation, and athletic contest. Her children would bring home the announcement of another school event and Mildred would say, "I'll be there." Being a mother was the most important activity of her life. That's why her quandary when Martha, her last child, started school. "What will I do all day if I don't have a child around the house?" Harold encouraged her not to get a job so she could be home when the children returned from school. She began her hunt for a hobby. All that autumn she fiddled, trying to crochet, then cross-stitch, then embroider. It was not a pleasant fall for the rest of the family as they would come home to find Mildred angrily trying to be creative. Finally after one day of knitting she informed her family at supper she was going to write, every day, from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon.
Harold asked, "Write what?"
"I don't know, but I'll write."
Martha wondered, "Who you going to write to, Mommy?"
"Good question. I think I'll start by writing to me."
Martha told me that she did not understand. None of the family understood; but they were wise enough to say no more. The next day Mildred was at the table in the kitchen at 11 a.m., a can of pencils, a stack of paper, a large pink rubber eraser, and a dictionary in front of her. Mildred had done enough with her hands for years; here at the table she set out to do something with her brain, to write letters as she had to her grandparents, to write essays as she produced for the high school newspaper, to write poems as she did when she met Harold.
The first night Harold and the kids walked into the kitchen and looked at the table. They could not see much sign of writing. A week passed with little discussion of the daily project, then a month; however, Mildred did not say a lot about what she did for two hours in the middle of every day. The children told their friends at school and the practice seemed quite strange to us all. But Mildred wrote, wrote letters to friends, wrote poems and prayers and stories, started a drama. To her greatest liking was the essay. She wrote seven months until she decided she wanted to direct her thought through essays; because there she could ask questions and come up with answers. She said, "Meaning has to be sought and struggled for." Thus in essays she reflected upon what happened in the family, neighborhood, or town and discovered what it meant in the larger scheme of life. Through essays she investigated life, probed past the obvious, asked questions, and found out why.
I had just become a friend of Martha's when the long trauma began over football. Henry wanted to go out for the high school football team, but Mildred refused. Harold disagreed with her, but not in front of the children. "Millie, when Hank says other boys get to play football, he's right. He's a strong boy. I think he should get to play."
"No, I can't allow our children to risk an injury that could disable them. I know it's hard for Hank and everybody, but I can't bear to have my child in a game that could ruin his health for life."
It was difficult for Harold, as well as for Henry, but knowing how Mildred loved the children, Harold agreed and held out against Henry. The more difficult problem followed next year with Marshall. Henry was an average athlete, but Marshall was a star at every sport. He knew his abilities, and all the coaches in high school had been waiting for him. Yet Mildred stuck to the same conclusion for the same reasons. Neither temper nor tears availed, and Marshall's high school years, and his relationship with his mother, were darkened by the confrontations.
A year after she began her daily discipline of writing, she approached the newspaper editor for a weekly column, but he refused. So Mildred went back to her desk and continued writing essays and articles, and when she submitted them to newspapers elsewhere her copy was often accepted. When a new editor arrived in town she showed up in his office with a stack of her clippings and he agreed to try her out. By the time of the football controversies Mildred was writing her weekly column, "Life Beside the Falls." She commented upon some thought or occurrence, a happening in town, visitors, the weather, accidents, awards, the seasons. "It's all grist for the mill," she said, quoting her father. Under her careful eye the small happenings in town gained greater significance, as she asked what this event meant and why that happened, and then made her decision and gave an opinion from her philosophy or faith. For decades she never missed a deadline, not even when Harold died at 74, though his death noticeably changed the mood of her writing. At the end of each column she signed off as though she had just written a personal letter to everyone in town:
"Until next week,
Mildred Dodson Freeman."
Her eightieth birthday became the day to submit her last column. The newspaper, along with the downtown merchants, had a party for her. She had written her way through four and a half editors and was their newspaper's oldest employee -- in age and seniority. I drove Mildred to the party. Mildred and I had met together every Thursday (deadline was Wednesday) since I moved back to town with my husband, Phillip Frazer, our son, Robbie, and daughter, Jessica. Six months before Harold died I had shown up at the Freeman's door -- the first people I visited upon returning. My parents had moved away years before; now, 25 years after leaving for college, I returned to the town where I graduated from high school.
Thirteen months after Mildred retired from the paper, Phillip and I helped her move from her house to an apartment. Then late the next summer on a Thursday I knocked on Mildred's door. When she answered, the room was full of smoke and she was shaking, "I put a pan on the burner and forgot it."
"Here, Millie, I'll help you clean up. It's okay." I put my arm around her. "Just settle down; it could happen to anyone."
Millie was trying to stop shaking, "It's the third time I've done it this week -- or a week or two. And yesterday I found a stack of bills I haven't paid, some are past due. I'm forgetting things all the time, important things. I have to move to assisted living."
"No, Millie, you'll move in with us."
Millie looked seriously into my face, "I couldn't do that, Maggie. You've got your family."
"No, Millie, you'll move in with Phil and me and the kids."
"I have the money to pay for a place. There's no reason for me ..."
"No, Millie, you'll move in with us."
She wiped a tear from her narrow face, "All right, but I'll bother you as little as possible. I'll help all I can, and I'll pay you."
"That's fine."
So began an unexpected adventure between the generations, because Millie moved into Robbie's room and he had to take the smaller room that had been his father's office. Jessica got to keep her room. A month later Robbie, a freshman in high school, began the daily doubles of football practice. To Robbie, Millie came into the home famous for her resistance to football. So Robbie and Millie didn't say much to one another. Phil and I waited and watched. Robbie made the Varsity, and the night arrived for his first home game. It was my place to bring up the subject, "Millie, we're going to Robbie's football game. We'll be leaving around seven; be home after nine."
"I'll go with you."
Thus it went for four years. Only when asked did Millie complain, "It's a game I neither understand nor enjoy." But every home game she slowly made her way into the stands. For two seasons she was able to make it with a cane, then she had to use a walker, and finally, in Robbie's senior year she was confined to a wheelchair; but she went without discussion.
Other games had been brutally cold, but tonight was the worst. It was the last of Robbie's senior year, and a state playoff berth hung on the results. The dry snow eddied and skimmed over the field and through the players. First downs, quarters, and scores came and went unheeded by Millie. Occasionally a snowflake landed on her face and melted slowly. Phil and I sat near. Jessica was in the student section. Millie was bowed, nose dripping, lips blue. She could not break old mental habits. She was asking herself about the game and her presence there. She questioned the night and the place. In her mind she pushed meaning into carefully crafted sentences, not for her column of the week, but for the column of her life.
Saturday, off and on, she typed in her bedroom; and Sunday morning at breakfast she gave me this piece. "A good morning gift," she said. "I want you to have this before my final deadline."
"What does it mean to be here -- an old lady swaddled like a seated mummy, at a frozen football game, in this city beside the falls? What conclusions can be drawn by a person who has lived 86 years in a town split in half by water? Are we who live in Falls better equipped to understand life than those who do not have a river falling through their village?
"Perhaps the river that divides our town is the stream the prophet Ezekiel saw flowing out from God's temple, beside the altar and into the whole land. Maybe that is the source of every river, making wholesome all the land and people through which it flows.
"It cascades through our world and community as through the two halves of our soul, to teach us we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we came from somewhere and go somewhere. Since it is God's river it instructs us that God's highest purpose for human beings is fulfilled when we grow and mature in loving one another; and it is best to err on the side of loving too much.
"It is in our daily living that our loyalties, as a river, wear away rocks. We make our mistakes and try again. We give and forgive. We make and keep promises, endure pains and sacrifices, and are forced into compromises. But this is the goal set before us as humans -- care more for others than for ourselves, no matter the cost, and trust that the great creator of all rivers shall carry us away at the right time, and life will somehow be better for our having lived here.
"Until next, ... well, just 'until,'
Mildred Dodson Freeman."
Discussion Questions
Text: Ezekiel 47:1-12
1. What immediate responses do you have to the story?
2. If you could have a conversation with one of the characters in this story which would you speak with and what would you ask or say?
3. Do you identify with any character in the story?
4. Do you have a controlling image or vision that explains life to you?
5. Where do you believe God is filling your world with life? Where is the Spirit flowing in your life? What is the river of God refreshing, renewing, or repairing right now in your life? What is greening up for you, starting or starting over?
6. In that Christ rewrites our lives, what from this story would you like to have happen in your life?
Millie Freeman was a native of this town which had the descriptive but not very imaginative name of Falls, for the waterfall which neatly divided the town in half. She was born Mildred Dodson in 1910, the year the water-powered grist mill was finally torn down. The town had grown around the mill, then the mill stood vacant and crumbling for a generation until finally it was razed. Born into a town of 1100, by the time Millie was limited to a wheelchair Falls was a city of 63,000.
Mildred was never pretty. She would say, "But I don't have to look at me." Yet she was startling for her height and erect posture. For her generation she was tall -- six feet, one inch. Besides her height and erect carriage, her only outstanding physical feature was a nose too long for her narrow face.
A space awaited the wheelchair, but getting into the stands took us time and effort -- shifting and dragging sideways. Millie sat silently in her chair, almost expressionless. She was chilled already. When finally in her place, we left her alone. She would have it no other way. The game began and although we stood to yell or slapped our gloved hands to stay warm, Millie sat motionless, head bent forward.
Mildred had always wanted children, desired children more than she desired marriage. The happiest moment in her life was not when she married Harold Freeman -- dear man that he was -- but when she gave birth to her first child, Henry. Then her happiest moment was when she birthed Marshall, and so also with Leona and Martha. Mildred said, "Parents are allowed multiple most happiest moments."
Mildred's most happiest moments all had to do with her children. That's how I met Mildred -- through her youngest daughter, Martha. Martha Freeman and I, Margaret Fest, were best friends from thirteen until we graduated from high school and left for separate colleges. Mildred and Harold's other three children called Martha and me the "Nutty M & M's."
For all the time I spent at the Freemans' home, it took a year or so to get used to Mildred. Mildred said, "I'm not a milk-and-cookies mother." She seemed stern when she made clear what I could and could not do while visiting or when she sent word it was time for me to leave or for Martha to come home. And Mildred was so tall; but I grew comfortable with Mrs. Freeman because I could ask anything and get a straight answer. Mildred's yeses were always pleasing and it proved painless when she said, "No."
Since Mildred's life goal was to be a mother, she helped at school and attended her children's every play, concert, academic presentation, and athletic contest. Her children would bring home the announcement of another school event and Mildred would say, "I'll be there." Being a mother was the most important activity of her life. That's why her quandary when Martha, her last child, started school. "What will I do all day if I don't have a child around the house?" Harold encouraged her not to get a job so she could be home when the children returned from school. She began her hunt for a hobby. All that autumn she fiddled, trying to crochet, then cross-stitch, then embroider. It was not a pleasant fall for the rest of the family as they would come home to find Mildred angrily trying to be creative. Finally after one day of knitting she informed her family at supper she was going to write, every day, from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon.
Harold asked, "Write what?"
"I don't know, but I'll write."
Martha wondered, "Who you going to write to, Mommy?"
"Good question. I think I'll start by writing to me."
Martha told me that she did not understand. None of the family understood; but they were wise enough to say no more. The next day Mildred was at the table in the kitchen at 11 a.m., a can of pencils, a stack of paper, a large pink rubber eraser, and a dictionary in front of her. Mildred had done enough with her hands for years; here at the table she set out to do something with her brain, to write letters as she had to her grandparents, to write essays as she produced for the high school newspaper, to write poems as she did when she met Harold.
The first night Harold and the kids walked into the kitchen and looked at the table. They could not see much sign of writing. A week passed with little discussion of the daily project, then a month; however, Mildred did not say a lot about what she did for two hours in the middle of every day. The children told their friends at school and the practice seemed quite strange to us all. But Mildred wrote, wrote letters to friends, wrote poems and prayers and stories, started a drama. To her greatest liking was the essay. She wrote seven months until she decided she wanted to direct her thought through essays; because there she could ask questions and come up with answers. She said, "Meaning has to be sought and struggled for." Thus in essays she reflected upon what happened in the family, neighborhood, or town and discovered what it meant in the larger scheme of life. Through essays she investigated life, probed past the obvious, asked questions, and found out why.
I had just become a friend of Martha's when the long trauma began over football. Henry wanted to go out for the high school football team, but Mildred refused. Harold disagreed with her, but not in front of the children. "Millie, when Hank says other boys get to play football, he's right. He's a strong boy. I think he should get to play."
"No, I can't allow our children to risk an injury that could disable them. I know it's hard for Hank and everybody, but I can't bear to have my child in a game that could ruin his health for life."
It was difficult for Harold, as well as for Henry, but knowing how Mildred loved the children, Harold agreed and held out against Henry. The more difficult problem followed next year with Marshall. Henry was an average athlete, but Marshall was a star at every sport. He knew his abilities, and all the coaches in high school had been waiting for him. Yet Mildred stuck to the same conclusion for the same reasons. Neither temper nor tears availed, and Marshall's high school years, and his relationship with his mother, were darkened by the confrontations.
A year after she began her daily discipline of writing, she approached the newspaper editor for a weekly column, but he refused. So Mildred went back to her desk and continued writing essays and articles, and when she submitted them to newspapers elsewhere her copy was often accepted. When a new editor arrived in town she showed up in his office with a stack of her clippings and he agreed to try her out. By the time of the football controversies Mildred was writing her weekly column, "Life Beside the Falls." She commented upon some thought or occurrence, a happening in town, visitors, the weather, accidents, awards, the seasons. "It's all grist for the mill," she said, quoting her father. Under her careful eye the small happenings in town gained greater significance, as she asked what this event meant and why that happened, and then made her decision and gave an opinion from her philosophy or faith. For decades she never missed a deadline, not even when Harold died at 74, though his death noticeably changed the mood of her writing. At the end of each column she signed off as though she had just written a personal letter to everyone in town:
"Until next week,
Mildred Dodson Freeman."
Her eightieth birthday became the day to submit her last column. The newspaper, along with the downtown merchants, had a party for her. She had written her way through four and a half editors and was their newspaper's oldest employee -- in age and seniority. I drove Mildred to the party. Mildred and I had met together every Thursday (deadline was Wednesday) since I moved back to town with my husband, Phillip Frazer, our son, Robbie, and daughter, Jessica. Six months before Harold died I had shown up at the Freeman's door -- the first people I visited upon returning. My parents had moved away years before; now, 25 years after leaving for college, I returned to the town where I graduated from high school.
Thirteen months after Mildred retired from the paper, Phillip and I helped her move from her house to an apartment. Then late the next summer on a Thursday I knocked on Mildred's door. When she answered, the room was full of smoke and she was shaking, "I put a pan on the burner and forgot it."
"Here, Millie, I'll help you clean up. It's okay." I put my arm around her. "Just settle down; it could happen to anyone."
Millie was trying to stop shaking, "It's the third time I've done it this week -- or a week or two. And yesterday I found a stack of bills I haven't paid, some are past due. I'm forgetting things all the time, important things. I have to move to assisted living."
"No, Millie, you'll move in with us."
Millie looked seriously into my face, "I couldn't do that, Maggie. You've got your family."
"No, Millie, you'll move in with Phil and me and the kids."
"I have the money to pay for a place. There's no reason for me ..."
"No, Millie, you'll move in with us."
She wiped a tear from her narrow face, "All right, but I'll bother you as little as possible. I'll help all I can, and I'll pay you."
"That's fine."
So began an unexpected adventure between the generations, because Millie moved into Robbie's room and he had to take the smaller room that had been his father's office. Jessica got to keep her room. A month later Robbie, a freshman in high school, began the daily doubles of football practice. To Robbie, Millie came into the home famous for her resistance to football. So Robbie and Millie didn't say much to one another. Phil and I waited and watched. Robbie made the Varsity, and the night arrived for his first home game. It was my place to bring up the subject, "Millie, we're going to Robbie's football game. We'll be leaving around seven; be home after nine."
"I'll go with you."
Thus it went for four years. Only when asked did Millie complain, "It's a game I neither understand nor enjoy." But every home game she slowly made her way into the stands. For two seasons she was able to make it with a cane, then she had to use a walker, and finally, in Robbie's senior year she was confined to a wheelchair; but she went without discussion.
Other games had been brutally cold, but tonight was the worst. It was the last of Robbie's senior year, and a state playoff berth hung on the results. The dry snow eddied and skimmed over the field and through the players. First downs, quarters, and scores came and went unheeded by Millie. Occasionally a snowflake landed on her face and melted slowly. Phil and I sat near. Jessica was in the student section. Millie was bowed, nose dripping, lips blue. She could not break old mental habits. She was asking herself about the game and her presence there. She questioned the night and the place. In her mind she pushed meaning into carefully crafted sentences, not for her column of the week, but for the column of her life.
Saturday, off and on, she typed in her bedroom; and Sunday morning at breakfast she gave me this piece. "A good morning gift," she said. "I want you to have this before my final deadline."
"What does it mean to be here -- an old lady swaddled like a seated mummy, at a frozen football game, in this city beside the falls? What conclusions can be drawn by a person who has lived 86 years in a town split in half by water? Are we who live in Falls better equipped to understand life than those who do not have a river falling through their village?
"Perhaps the river that divides our town is the stream the prophet Ezekiel saw flowing out from God's temple, beside the altar and into the whole land. Maybe that is the source of every river, making wholesome all the land and people through which it flows.
"It cascades through our world and community as through the two halves of our soul, to teach us we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we came from somewhere and go somewhere. Since it is God's river it instructs us that God's highest purpose for human beings is fulfilled when we grow and mature in loving one another; and it is best to err on the side of loving too much.
"It is in our daily living that our loyalties, as a river, wear away rocks. We make our mistakes and try again. We give and forgive. We make and keep promises, endure pains and sacrifices, and are forced into compromises. But this is the goal set before us as humans -- care more for others than for ourselves, no matter the cost, and trust that the great creator of all rivers shall carry us away at the right time, and life will somehow be better for our having lived here.
"Until next, ... well, just 'until,'
Mildred Dodson Freeman."
Discussion Questions
Text: Ezekiel 47:1-12
1. What immediate responses do you have to the story?
2. If you could have a conversation with one of the characters in this story which would you speak with and what would you ask or say?
3. Do you identify with any character in the story?
4. Do you have a controlling image or vision that explains life to you?
5. Where do you believe God is filling your world with life? Where is the Spirit flowing in your life? What is the river of God refreshing, renewing, or repairing right now in your life? What is greening up for you, starting or starting over?
6. In that Christ rewrites our lives, what from this story would you like to have happen in your life?
