September 28, 2012
Dear Rev. Johnson,
This week I came across several
very old Christmas letters from the Fellows family, Pete and Marlene, who were
part of the congregation who started Christ UMC, I believe. More than thirty years ago, when my husband
and I were in our mid-twenties, IBM moved us to Roswell from Burlington,
Ontario, in Canada. While we lived in
Roswell on Charles Place, our neighbours and the congregation of the old North
Fulton UMC were our family, and that was very important to us.
During our three years at North
Fulton, we added two children to our family, Nathan and Elizabeth, whom Nathan
called E.J. because at the age of two her name would come out ‘Didibif’. While we were attending there, I sang in the
choir with Pete and Marlene Fellows, which is how we got to know them. Both the choir and the support of the other
moms in the congregation is how John and I learned what we needed to raise two
very small children so far from our own family supports. Nathan was baptized by Rev. Larry Rary, if
there are some who still remember him, and it was the predecessor to your
congregation who cared for our son in his first years in the nursery.
When Nathan was still a baby, the
choir learned an anthem that has been out of print for a long time; it is
called ‘Teach Me Lord to Wait’. I felt
at the time that its message was very valuable, and that I would have future
need of it, so I made a point of memorizing the lyrics. Sometimes I used to sing this anthem to baby
Nathan on long car rides, when he was tired and fussing for his bed while still
stuck in his car seat longer than he wanted to be. This past February, that song came back to me
and held me together through two grueling weeks of anxiety and emotional
pain.
One clear, mild February day in
2012, a week before Nathan’s birthday, I arrived home from choir practice, only
to have my phone ring as soon as I walked into the kitchen. It was my daughter’s number, with my
son-in-law’s voice on the line. Nathan
had been riding his bicycle on this clear, bright and, for Canada, relatively
mild day in Ottawa, hundreds of miles north-east of where we live on Lake Ontario. An impaired driver had hit him from behind
and the hospital and my family had been trying to reach me for hours. After two hours of phone calls and planning
how and when to leave for Ottawa, ‘They that wait upon the Lord …’ came back
into my head, for the second time that day.
The first time had been at choir practice.
For no reason that I could
explain at the time, we had come to the end of choir practice that Thursday
evening, and I had thought what a shame it was that ‘Teach Me Lord to Wait’ was
no longer in print. I had enquired about
it seven or eight years ago and discovered that I would not be able to offer it
to any of my choir directors for a Canadian congregation to hear or to
sing. On my way out of the sanctuary
that Thursday, I told one of the sopranos about this little gospel song that I
had learned in Georgia, and the entire lyric and melody just flowed back from
memory, and I sang it for her.
From the time I got off the phone
at midnight on Thursday, through a week of Nathan being in a drug induced coma,
through his 32nd birthday and the following week, while we hoped and
prayed that the brain damage might still permit him to recover, I sang those
words from Isaiah 40:31.
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew
their strength,
They shall mount up
with wings as eagles.
They shall run and
not be weary;
They shall walk and
not faint.
Teach me Lord,
teach me Lord to wait.
Back and forth to the hospital
I.C.U. every day, most of the night because I couldn’t sleep, I sang to myself
and kept my composure to deal with what had to be done.
In the end, Nathan never woke up
again. His pupils were hardly even
responding to light, and the brain scans showed signs of bleeding in multiple
places. On the third Friday, two weeks
after he was struck down, the doctors gave us the final prognosis. That night I switched songs because the
waiting was over. We had been given our
answer and we were going to have to let Nathan return to God who gave him to
us. During his last hours, I sang to him
the lullabies that I had sung to him when he was very small, while we lived in
the bungalow in Roswell. He had always
been soothed by my singing to him, so I had sung to him a lot when he was
small.
For the last few days we had in
Ottawa, I had been recalling another piece of church music, one that I had
learned under my current director -
- Do-o-na, no-o-bis, pa-a-cem,
pa-cem.
I would like to thank those from
the former congregation of North Fulton, and its choir, which is now Christ
United Methodist Church, for everything they shared with us and for everything
I learned as a young mother and choir member during our years in Roswell. It has occurred to me to wonder if your choir
still has the music from the old church.
There may be a very significant little gospel song in there that has
helped me over the years, but never more so than the February that I lost my
first born.
I am trusting that you won’t mind
my sharing my story of North Fulton and its music ministry with you. Please share it with Christ UMC, even if
there are only a few people left who might remember the young Canadians who
brought their 3 week old to church for the first time in 1980 when there was
enough snow that the service was cancelled.
Blessings upon you all always,
Joanna Anderson
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