Life's Changes...

When I was a child, one of the chores on our dairy farm that needed to be done each day during the summer months was to "get the cows."   This chore meant a person had to hike into our woods to find where the cows were eating or resting and get them to head "home".  In other words get them to walk back to the barnyard so they could be let into the barn for milking in the evening.  As soon as the cows were found, roused and standing they knew where to go and how to get there.  Sometimes we had a dog that helped with the round up of the cattle and sometimes we had our horse, Patches, to ride for this purpose.  This was frequently my job.  Especially during the beautiful autumn days, I loved to do this task.  Our woods had  lots of maple and oak trees whose leaves turned brilliant golden, crimson, russet and amber each fall.  We had hickory nut trees that bore immense crops of nuts that carpeted the ground below their branches.   There were wild apple trees with juicy, fragrant fruit that provided a delicious snack for the interested child following a herd of cows home.   And when this was my privilege, I would occasionally pick a few apples and sit leaning against the trunk of a hickory nut tree and dream about my future.  I felt my surroundings were gorgeous.  I must have been an adolescent just beginning to imagine that some day I would meet a Prince Charming and when that happened I wanted to bring him to my beautiful spot where we would dream together about an exciting and meaningful future.  In the future I imagined, we would not live on a farm.  My Prince Charming would be a tall, dark and handsome Pastor or missionary who would serve in a church or another country far from the United States.  I had already decided that I wanted to some day be a Pastor's wife.  At that time I thought a Pastor's family got to host missionaries when they returned from the mission field and came to speak about and present their work to a church congregation.  I loved to attend those services at our church and I imagined how wonderful it would be to get to know those people better which I assumed was a privilege of a Pastor and his family.  I definitely wanted to be a mother so I imagined having a family and having the joy of all that brings with it.  This is how I imagined my life would unfold.  Is this what happened?

I grew up on a 200 acre dairy farm in Wisconsin which my parents owned and operated.  There were 120 acres of tillable land and 80 acres of wooded pasture land on that farm.  My Dad milked an average of 26 cows twice daily until he retired at age 65.  He then sold the farm and retired with my mother to a home on an acre of land where he could have a garden but no cows, pigs or chickens.  My Dad had been raised on a dairy farm so grew up doing farm work year round.  He took on full-time farming after he completed high school and a one year Normal school course to become a teacher.  He must have had a challenging  experience while student teaching because he decided after that to return to the career he had grown to love which was dairy farming.  He and his younger brother, Hubert, had been farming their Grandmother’s farm following the death of their Grandfather so he continued with that opportunity.  His brother decided to pursue education to become a pastor about the time my parents met and married.  My parents continued living on that farm until they decided to leave the tobacco raising area of Wisconsin for another dairy farm they bought 75 miles away from my Great-Grandmother’s farm.  In her advancing years she was moving in with one of her daughters for six months of the year and a second daughter for the other six months of a year so she sold the farm.    My parents had four of us children when we moved to the dairy farm near Fountain City, WI.  Another sister joined the family after the move.All five of us Groves kids grew up working inside and outside doing the year round work on our dairy farm.  At age 4, I started steering a tractor while Dad picked ears of corn to feed the pigs.  I guided a team of horses while loads of hay were unloaded in our haymow at age 6.  I did field work with a tractor during summers until I got married at age 21.  We got up very early in the morning to help with milking year round and with shocking grain, baling hay, cultivating corn, weeding the garden, picking wild blackberries, helping can tomatoes, green beans, pickles, apple sauce etc. etc. during the summer months.  During Christmas break we helped saw wood for our wood burning furnace.

All of my siblings and I enjoyed school and learning.  We excelled in our classes and planned for college which all of us attended.  I don’t think any of us even considered staying on the farm.  I determined as a child I would NOT marry a dairy farmer.  I’m quite sure I decided there were other careers I would much rather have for myself and whomever I would marry.  I knew for sure that I wanted to be a mother some day.  But first I wanted a college education.
 
When I began college, I wasn’t sure what my major should be.  I thought of being a speech major but did not think that was a career that a person could use on a mission field if God called me to work somewhere overseas.   I eventually decided  that I would major in Elementary Education.  I thought that would prepare me to educate my own children if God called me and a future spouse to a remote mission field where there wasn't a nearby school for children to attend.

I was active in the campus Inter-Varsity group so was meeting other students interested in Christian activities and pursuits.  One student that I met only a few days after I arrived on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI.  was a 6' 3" tall fellow named John Worden.  He introduced himself to me at a "Freshman Picnic" which the Inter-Varsity Badger Christian Fellowship was hosting.   He seemed rather arrogant in that initial encounter but a few days later another chance meeting began to change my impression of him.  I was heading to my first day of classes.  I had graduated from Cochrane-Fountain City high school in a class of 43 students.  I was now at UW-M with 5,000 freshman and a student body of 25,000!  I was walking up Bascom hill to a class with hundreds of students pouring out of buildings and coming toward me as I climbed that hill.  I could not see a single person that I knew but I had the thought, "There must be at least one person in this mass of students that I know!"  Almost immediately following that thought, I heard someone coming down the hill toward me who called out, "Hi, Linda!"  I looked up to see that fellow I had met at the BCF picnic but I couldn't remember for sure what his name was.  I knew it was a common boys name like "Bob" but I didn't dare say, "Hi, Bob" because I wasn't positive that was the right name.  Instead I just said, "Hi" and we both went on.  Inside my head, however, I thought maybe this guy isn't as arrogant as I originally thought.

We had a developing friendship by the end of the year.  We were dating more regularly during my sophomore year and I was occasionally invited to his family home in Madison where he lived.  On one of those occasions, we were having a conversation probably about career and future plans when John asked me what I really wanted to be.  My answer was clear and blunt.  I replied, "What I really want to be, is a Pastor's wife."  His short response was, "What I want to be is a Pastor."  Inside me, my heart leapt for joy though that conversation did not continue at that time.  It would be another year before John proposed and we married.  But our goals were followed.  He had finished his undergrad degree and taught high school speech for two years at Badger High School in Lake Geneva, WI while I finished my undergrad degree in Elementary Education with a minor in Library Science at Whitewater University.  With that completion, I was hired as an Elementary Librarian at Jefferson School in Racine, WI and John began his seminary education at Trinity Divinity School in Deerfield, IL.  He commuted to that school from Racine until he graduated.  

We had agreed to wait to start a family until both of us were finished with our career education goals.  Shortly before our 5th wedding anniversary, our first son was born.

Upon John's graduation from seminary, we received a call to the pastorate in Loomis, NE.  We moved there and began ministry in September 1972.  A year later we had the birth of our second son.

                         The Loomis Church in 1972-1976.

We would live in Loomis - population 320 - for three years.  

Our next pastorate was in Brooklyn, NY. - population 1,320,000 - where we lived for four years.

       First Evangelical Free Church  AKA the 66th Street Church

We moved from there to a church in Delafield, WI that was just calling its first pastor.  We lived there for 14 months when the church held a "member's only" meeting without us of sixteen attendees and voted to terminate John from his position as Pastor.  He was given two more services to conduct and three more months of pay.  The reason for termination was never made clear.  It was "nothing moral, nothing ethical or nothing spiritual" I was told by one of the three men who led the church to this decision.  

Up until this decision was made by this small congregation, it may have seemed as though my life was turning out just as I had envisioned as my dream future.  I had met and married a tall, dark and handsome godly man who was planning to become a pastor.  He became a pastor, I became a teacher, we married and had three children so I had become the mother I wanted to be.

But now there was a major change.  I was no longer married to a pastor.  Would there be a call to another church or would there be a call to a different career choice?  Would there be a switch in the dreams I had as a child?  Would my life turn out differently from what I had anticipated?  For the next three months my husband and I returned to our first careers and became Substitute teachers at schools in our area.  This added some income for our family which was a help.  There were a few Sunday opportunities for my husband to give the sermon in a church when the Pastor was on vacation or absent for some other reason.  But there were NO calls from any churches who were looking for a Pastor.  John sent many inquiry letters but none resulted in an interview or interest in him for a position on a church staff.

One Saturday morning, John attended a men's breakfast at the church we were now attending, Elmbrook Church in Waukesha, WI..  He "happened" to sit next to a man who was on the staff at Timber-Lee Christian Center.  This was an Evangelical Free Church Camp and Conference Center about thirty-five miles from where we lived.  The conversation that morning included John sharing that he was looking for a full-time position as a Pastor.  Mike Manke listened and then asked, "Have you ever thought about working for a camp?  Camp Timber-lee is looking for a director of Family camping and adult ministries."  John did not know that Timber-Lee had adult ministries along with their youth camp programs but this was a very interesting lead.  John soon had an interview for the camp job and just as the three months of salary from the church ended, he was offered the job at Camp Timber-lee which started as soon as we could get moved there.  We stayed where we were for another month so our children could finish the school year where they were.  The new job provided on-site housing, meals in the dining hall when camps were in session, 60 horses for the riding program, 500 acres of trails, a 60 acre lake for swimming and skating, 8 miles of groomed cross country ski trails and skis, a family camp with sites for campers with RVs or tents, summer family camp programs, year-round weekend programs, summer concerts each Saturday evening...  We moved in and the job started on June 1st of 1981.  Our house 35 miles away was rented until we sold it in 1985.

Camp Timber-Lee was a wonderful place for each member of our family.  We were also near enough to each set of Grandparents so that we could be together for holidays and other special times.  The only difficult part was the long days and hours during the summer months.  For John it was up and out by 7 AM and full time until nearly midnight most nights.  He had little time to spend with the rest of us as a family.

One day, an employee from a camp in Texas arranged a visit to Camp Timber-Lee.  John volunteered to give that man a tour of Camp Timber-Lee.  The man was an employee of the HEButt Foundation which operated a Christian Camp and Conference Center in Texas called Laity Lodge.  John had heard about the camp because his brother and his wife who lived in Austin, TX had been there for some events.  So after the tour of Camp Timber-lee, John asked some questions about the programs at the Camp in Texas.  It was a cordial visit.

Sam Fore returned to TX.  Within a month of his visit to Wisconsin, John received a phone call with a request to submit an application for a staff opening with the HEButt Foundation.  At first the offer did not fit John's spiritual gifts or interests so he declined the offer.  A few weeks later, there was another call with another offer that was much more a fit for John.  We decided to continue with the process with a December visit to Texas in 1984.  We would be offered a job and moved to TX in early 1985.  John retired 29 years later from that ministry.  It included for me many opportunities to attend adult retreats with amazing speakers and musicians during the summer months in the first years.  It also opened a part-time position for me when I stopped teaching 6th grade language arts.

A Fall view of Blue Hole on the HEButt Foundation Camp Property

So has my life turned out differently than I imagined it?  I thought I wanted to marry a tall, dark and handsome man, be a Pastor's wife, be a mother and serve God as a family.  The only change that happened for me was that the ministry my husband and I shared was through camping instead of a church.  God knew our gifting and our interests and steered us to a great place for the work He opened for us to do.  We also have been able to lead mission teams from our Texas church to the eastern European country of Moldova to work with orphans at a camp during the summer months.  

                               Our Moldova team in 2011

Though my adolescent thinking didn't foresee my future with accuracy, God knew how He had created me.  I am so grateful for the family He has given me and the opportunities He has provided so that I have been able to be His ambassador in a number of different cities, states and countries.  And now I have another assignment from God...

Psalm  78:4b - 7

...we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power and the wonders he has done.  He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children.  Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.