A STONE OF REMEMBRANCE - In honor of Hilda Kohl

Often on Sunday mornings, while we’re having our coffee before getting ready for church, Jim and I watch Day of Discovery which airs at 7:30 AM on Cablevision, channel 3.  For the last several weeks we’ve been watching a very interesting and inspiring series of interviews with Ed Dobson.  Ed Dobson had been the pastor of a 1000 plus congregation when he was diagnosed with ALS.  To us Americans, ALS is better known as Lou Gherig’s disease, named after the baseball player whose diagnosis with ALS brought the disease into the limelight.

ALS’s medical name is Amiotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.  Wikipedia describes it as a debilitating, rapidly progressing weakness that includes muscle atrophy which leads to difficulty speaking, swallowing, and breathing and eventually leads to death. 

Amazingly, by the grace of God, Ed Dobson has lived 11 years with the disease.  His story of coping with his diagnosis, leaving his demanding and satisfying job as pastor, and his struggle to find answers the question, What now?, is fascinating.  The effects of the disease on his body are obvious – limply hanging arms, slow gait, slow speech – but inside that body is a man with a good mind who loves and serves Jesus with ALS in whole new ways.

Watching the series brought back memories of my dear friend Hilda Kohl, a “senior” member of our church who lost her life to the ravages of ALS some years ago now.

Hilda had been active in our church long before Jim and I got there.  I knew of her, but didn’t really know her until we began going to Wednesday night prayer meetings.  Hilda was what we in Christian circles call a prayer warrior. 

Prayer, conversation with God, is something we take seriously and all of us engage in it.  When Hilda prayed, it was evident that her prayers took her into the very presence of God.  We who listened were transported into His presence as well.  Hilda’s intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus came through in the way she prayed, in the worship displayed in her prayers, in the passion with which she prayed, and in the confidence she had that the Lord heard and would answer. 

It was in those prayer meetings that I also discovered Hilda’s heart for missions and missionaries.  Later I would learn that she had wanted to be a missionary herself but her parents wanted her to go to university.  But she made up for the disappointment by being a support – with her finances and her prayers – to those on the mission field.  She also served on our church’s mission’s committee and as such became our link to what was going on in their lives so that we could pray more specifically for them on Wednesday nights.

I remember as well the time Hilda stood with a number of others at a commissioning service at our church, preparing to go on a mission’s trip to the Philippines.  She was the oldest member of the team.  Some years later she would share with me the profound impact that trip had on her life and serve as my inspiration for going out on my first mission’s trip at the age of 61.

I remember the first Sunday that I noticed that something was wrong with Hilda. She was not her usual joyful self.  She explained that she was having difficulty with weakness in her arm and was going for tests.  If I remember correctly, there is no specific test to diagnose ALS.  Rather, the diagnosis is arrived at by process of elimination.  They test for everything it could possibly be and if all the results are negative, then the symptoms must indicate ALS.  It was months before Hilda knew what it was she was dealing with.

For some time after her diagnosis she still came to the weekly women’s study and prayer meeting at church. But there came a time when she could no longer manage the stairs.  She continued coming to church, walking at first, and then coming in a wheelchair.  But eventually, even that was too much and we no longer saw her there. 

It was after my mom’s death in 2007 that I came home with this thought, inspired I know by the Lord: “I think what I will do now is regularly visit Hilda”.  My experience caring for my mom in the weeks before her death had been such a blessing to me that I wanted to be able to provide some comfort and encouragement to Hilda as I had done with Mom.  And so began one of the highlights of my life, and truly one of those times when we set out to be a blessing and find that we are blessed.  I began a weekly visit with Hilda.  And that visit, every single week, took me right into the presence of the Lord, for He was surely there with us.

When I first began visiting, our visits were shorter.  I’d come, we’d chat.  Mostly we talked about her life: her childhood in Austria, her youthful desire to be a missionary, her time at university earning a doctorate in chemistry (!), her marriage and her children and grandchildren.  I loved learning all those things about her.  However, it was when Hilda talked about the Lord, her mission’s trip to the Philippines, and the missionary “family” she supported with regular correspondence and prayer that she became the most animated.  These were passions of her life of faith.  What an inspiration she was to me.

We always ended our visits with prayer.  I would pray and Hilda would pray.  Those were the sweetest times – Hilda, me and the Lord – fellowshipping together, sometimes with tears, in her little living room.

As Hilda’s disease progressed she could no longer feed herself or write letters to her many missionary friends.  Our visits became longer.  We would have lunch and I would help her with that.  And then I would write letters to all those missionaries as she dictated them.  It was an incredibly sad day when she dictated her final good-bye letters to each one.  I’ve wondered since whether anyone else would write to and pray for those missionaries as faithfully as Hilda did.  How they must miss her letters.

As time progressed our time together became longer and included more of the reading of God’s Word as well as the book, 90 Minutes in Heaven, which tells the true story of a man who was seriously injured and declared dead in a car accident.  The man’s glimpse into the splendors of heaven, as well as his story of recovery from his injuries, encouraged both our hearts and led to conversations about the joy that awaited us in the presence of the Lord.  Hilda knew her time was near.

That December Jim and I went to Florida for a week.  While I was there I worried about Hilda because her disease had progressed so far that breathing was becoming difficult.  Her daughter Veronika, with whom Hilda lived, had begun working from home so that she could be near her mom and care for her. 

When we got back home Jim and I found ourselves caught up in all the preparations for Christmas and so I didn’t visit Hilda again.  She died on Christmas Eve.

Sometime later Veronika asked me if I’d come up to the house and help her go through her mother’s things so that she could decide what to keep and what to give away.  Among Hilda’s things was a considerable collection of rocks.  I asked Veronika about them and she said Hilda had picked them up from all over, anywhere she had traveled.  We both lamented that we wished she had marked them in some way to identify where she collected them and what the places meant to her. 

I thought right away of the Israelites and wondered if Hilda had been thinking of them too.  In so many places in the Old Testament the people of Israel used their collected stones to identify places of remembrance where they had seen God at work.  For example, in Genesis 28:18 Jacob dreams about a stairway leading to heaven and he hears God’s voice confirming to him the promises given to his grandfather Abraham. Jacob commemorates the significance of the place where he met God by setting up the rock he used as his pillow as a pillar, pouring oil on it and calling it Bethel, meaning house of God.

We see this again in Joshua 4.  After the people of Israel cross the Jordan River on dry ground the Lord gives instructions for a representative of each of the 12 tribes to take a stone from the middle of the river bed.  When they had carried them over to the other side they were to set them there in the place where the priests who had carried the Ark of the Covenant had stood. They served as a memorial to remind the people that the Lord God had done to the Jordan what He had done to the Red Sea when He divided the water so the people could cross as they left Egypt.  Joshua said, “(The LORD) did this so that all the people of the earth might know that the hand of the LORD is powerful and so that you might always fear the LORD your God.”

I don’t know what Hilda’s stones meant to her, but her keeping them inspired me to begin my own rock collection .  Since the day Veronika and I discovered them I have been collecting my own stones of remembrance for those times in my life when the Lord revealed Himself in a powerful way to me personally.  I have rocks from retreats in Pennsylvania, and New York State, and a small bag of lovely coral colored stones used in making cement that I brought back from a mission’s trip to the Bahamas.  On each I have recorded the date and some reminder of how the Lord spoke to me or blessed me in that spot.  I hope they’ll inspire my daughters and granddaughter to do the same when they are going through my things after I have gone home to be with the Lord.

As I wrote this I discovered that today would have been Hilda’s 79^th birthday.  How fitting to think of her especially on this day.  

This blog is my stone of remembrance for my dear friend Hilda whose life was a picture of the grace and mercy of God.  May all who read it know how powerful the hand of the LORD was on Hilda’s life, in her death, and in the lives of those, like me, whom she touched.

 I know I’ve written before this quote attributed to Dwight L. Moody: “One day you will read in the newspaper that I have died.  Don’t you believe it!  At that moment I will be more alive than I have ever been.”

Hilda suffered through the ravages of ALS faithfully loving, serving and worshiping the Lord, and then one day she died.  But, Hilda is more alive now than she ever was before – looking into the face of the Lord Jesus whom she loved and served all her life.

Today, Hilda, I remember you with gratitude for a life well lived in glory to God.