John 6:27-40; 2 Corinthians 4:7-18; Lamentations 3:22-33
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Child of God, devoted husband, loving father and grandfather, hard worker, farmer, country boy, veteran, hero – there are many words that describe Donald William Bahe; these are but only a few.
Don grew up on the family farm east of Waverly. He was baptized and confirmed at St. Paul Lutheran Church, Artesian where he also attended country school. Don didn’t go to high school because his father broke his back and he had to help the family on the farm. Hard work was in his blood. Don wasn’t into sports, neither playing nor watching them. He would say, “Why like sports? You can spend all that energy on something productive.” In short, what did Don love? Don loved WORK! There was always work to be done on the farm. Inevitably, the cattle feeders were always empty when the family needed to be somewhere. “This won’t take long,” Don would say, but there was time, and then there was Don Bahe’s time.
Apart from the family farm, Don also worked at the Waverly Sales Barn, the Artesian Creamery, Armour Fertilizer Plant, and the Jens Olesen Construction Co (which later became Prairie Construction) for forty-three years as a heavy equipment and crane operator. As a crane operator, Don was instrumental in several major projects in the Cedar Valley including Covenant Hospital in Waterloo, the UNI Dome in Cedar Falls, and Wartburg College in Waverly. His dream was to operate a tower crane, and he got to do it on the Covenant Hospital job. Once again, Don was a hard worker and he poured everything he had into his work. Don became known as the best crane operator in Waterloo. Job, farm, family – that is what was important to Don, and in that order. One year the harvest needed to be finished on the farm, but Don said, “Nope, I gotta work.” Work always came first. That was just the kind of man Don was – Dependable, loyal, honest, good. Job came before farm and family sometimes because of his integrity; He had made a promise to do a job, to do it right, and to get it done, and the worst thing Don could do was fail to keep that promise. Still, he loved raising and selling cattle with help from Charlene and his sons. Don found the time to do it all.
Work even came before Don’s personal health and safety. Don once broke his leg changing the tire on a crane in icy weather. He put his leg up on the crane for leverage, slipped, and broke his leg. Another time he was operating a tractor with a hand clutch, with his broken leg in a cast. The hand clutch kept rubbing again the cast and eventually put a hole in it. When he went for his checkup, the doctor asked if Don had been protecting his leg, but he knew from the condition of the cast that Don had been working. Then on another day the workman’s comp inspector came to visit Don, who had to scramble to hide the fact that he was operating the tractor putting a roof on a shed. And, of course, Don was such a blessing to his church when they built the new addition and the new bell tower. To save the church money, Don brought his crane over. However, Don’s muscular disease at the time had progressed to the extent that he couldn’t climb up into the cab. Kenny Fischer offered to use his backhoe to lift Don up to the cab. Up Don went in the bucket and into the cab and he finished the project for his beloved church.
Though he was extremely talented, Don was a very humble man. He never boasted about his hard work, skills, and abilities, but he let other people do the talking for him. Don was an ingenious inventor of useful things. The family wouldn’t have survived on the farm without Don’s inventiveness to create useful things. He was always picking up miscellaneous parts and making new things out of them. Don built a bridge over a creek on the farm using hog panels and support beams taken from the old UNI Dome scoreboard. When it was finished, he put it in place over the creek with his crane. However, the bridge was too short. “Not a problem,” said Don, “we’ll just move the dirt closer!” And he did! He bulldozed the dirt on either side of the creek and created new standings for the bridge. Don also refurbished an old cement mixer and used to it to pour cement for numerous jobs. Son Dwayne is a PE teacher. One time he was telling Dad how his school needed some PE equipment but there wasn’t a budget for it. He showed Don the equipment in a catalog and Don said, “I’ll make it for you.” Don crafted a hula-hoop holder, a jump rope cart, and other things Dwayne needed for his instruction.
Don did slow down occasionally, sort of. Don and Charlene enjoyed wintering in South Texas. Eighteen years they traveled to Texas to enjoy the sun and the company of good friends. But even there Don had to keep busy. There was still work to do. There’s a photo of Don riding a scooter pulling a large piece of a shed down the lanes of the Palm Shadows RV Park. Where there’s a will, and a genius mind for ingenuity, there’s always a way.
Given Don’s love for work, solving problems, inventing solutions, and generally just doing all the time, and doing it himself, you can imagine how extremely difficult it was for Don to have all that stripped away from him little by little once the symptoms of Inclusion Body Myositis began to manifest. Don was diagnosed in 2008, but the symptoms were already manifesting at least a couple years earlier. One of the early symptoms Don experienced was the loss of strength in his hands and arms. There were some men in their eighties carrying five-gallon pails of oranges in each hand with no problem, but Don, much younger, struggled mightily to do the same. That was not normal. Something was very wrong. IBM is an inflammatory muscular disease that weakens the muscles over time, particularly in the hands and legs and feet such that common, everyday activities like turning a doorknob or zipping a zipper become impossible. Slowly, over time, the man who did everything for himself and for everyone he loved couldn’t do much of anything for himself, and worse, for anyone else. The man who had his own time, Don Bahe’s time, to work and get things done now had nothing but time and could do precious little but watch the world go by slowly and painfully.
Understandably, Don suffered from bouts of depression the result of his condition. The disease didn’t merely steal Don’s ability to work and do things, it stole his identity, and it made him feel worthless and a useless burden at times. Now, of course, he was none of those things, but Don was still a child of God, devoted husband, loving father and grandfather, hard worker, farmer, country boy, veteran, and hero, but he didn’t feel like it, and now he needed more love, care, and support from those he cared for all those years than he was able to give in return. And you gave it. You adjusted your lives to accommodate Don’s needs. You modified your home, your vehicle, your activities, and you kept Don going – still going to church, to fish fries, to Texas in the Winter, still going.
It was during the worst of those years for Don that I got to know him and visit with him. I knew that Don was struggling with several difficult questions like, “Why would God let this happen to me?” and “Why doesn’t God do something?” I shared with Don a biblical perspective I learned from Martin Luther known as The Theology of the Cross. In short, the Theology of the Cross is this: God hides Himself in weakness. St. Paul writes of this in his First Epistle to the Corinthians saying, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” It’s the idea that what men most prize and value and covet in this life and world is foolishness before God, and what is wise in God’s eyes is often rejected as foolishness by men. Of course, Jesus Christ is the greatest example of this. Jesus was rejected by men as merely a humble carpenter from the backwater country village of Nazareth. For a time, some believed Him to be their king and Messiah, but He got Himself arrested, tried as a criminal, and executed by the Romans. In the eyes of men, Jesus’ crucifixion and death was sad, pathetic, weak, and a failure, but in the eyes of God it was, and it is, victory over sin, death, and Satan and the fullness of the glory of God. Jesus taught, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” We are all given crosses to bear. And we don’t get to choose our crosses, but our God and Father places them upon us to bear in faith, hope, and trust in Him that we will endure and persevere. There is no way around the cross, but Christ has borne the cross for us all, and He accompanies us as we bear our crosses through the valley of the shadow of death that is our life in this world. And He has traversed that valley for us already, and He has defeated death that would have kept us in our graves, turning it into an open door into His Father’s house where He has prepared a place for Don, and for you, and for all who trust in Him.
The past year Don’s disease forced him to spend some time at Bartels for rehabilitation. The staff there believed that he should remain there long-term. But Charlene knew that wouldn’t be good for Don. Don was a country boy. He wasn’t going to stay at Bartels and look at the tops of trees. At home, Don could look out his big picture window and he could see the highway, watch the crops grow, watch the clouds roll in and out. So, Don came home to the family farm. There was no place he’d rather be. Such loving care was involved in selecting Don’s final resting place as well. Don had written in some notes that he thought maybe Harlington Cemetery in town would be fine. However, the family just didn’t feel that was the right choice. Don was a country boy. “I just don’t see him there,” it was said, “in town, in the city. It’s just not him.” And so, Don will be laid to rest in a rural cemetery not far from the family farm and fields and open sky he knew and loved all his life. I think you made a good choice. That’s just Don.
Child of God, devoted husband, loving father and grandfather, hard worker, farmer, country boy, veteran, hero – there are many words that describe Donald William Bahe; these are but only a few. Perhaps hero is one that we should take a moment to consider. When Don died on Monday, Dwayne sobbed bitterly and said, “What am I going to do now? He was my hero.” Yes, Don was a hero. His hard work, determination, ingenuity, and sacrificial service to others was heroic. His battle with a terrible debilitating disease was heroic. His faith and trust in God despite it all was heroic. His thankfulness and gratitude, even through suffering, was heroic. Let us all honor Don by emulating his heroism in our own lives. And let us honor his faith in God and his Savior Jesus to whom be praise and glory in all things.
In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment