Knapsack 5-20

Notes From My Knapsack 5-20-10

Jeff Gill

 

Enduring Grace & Lasting Values

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This week, I'm happy to celebrate, is the 25^th time the Lovely Wife and I remember our wedding day back at University Church, across the street from the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. It was and is an ecumenical campus ministry, and we met there at a church committee meeting (yes, you can flirt at a committee meeting, it just takes a little more couth and caution).

 

Historically speaking, 25 years isn't all that much, though today it's a little more remarkable. I think about James & Euphemia Reeder, now gracing the Avery-Downer House in a pair of Amzi Godden portraits I've already mentioned, married in 1801, together 51 years until his death in 1852.

 

Jonathan & Margaret Benjamin, early pioneers (Lillie Jones was their daughter) were married for 76 years until Margaret's passing in 1835, with ten children, 77 grandchildren, and at least one great-great-grandchild to hold before they died.

 

76 years. Whoa.

 

From page 602 of Hill's 1881 "History of Licking County," about the Benjamins: "Having passed through the French and Indian wars, and through the war of the Revolution, and having suffered much and long by Indian depredations, both in the loss of friends and property, the finer feelings of his nature had be come blunted to such an extent that lie seemed to have lost most of his sympathy for his fellow man. Still he was a man of religious habits, and of good morals, but was generally considered to be a man that was naturally morose and unsociable, and was not known through life to leave expressed his forgiveness of the Indian race. He was not a reading man, hence what time he gave to social intercourse with his neighbors, was given to the relation of personal experience or to business matters. He was a soldier, or frontiersman, most his life. It was not until he was about eighty years old that he consented to settle himself for the balance of his life. He bought in the woods and cleared up his last farm after he was seventy-eight years old. Notwithstanding this life of hardships, the iron constitution of himself and his excellent wife sustained them to a great age. Mrs. Benjamin possessed social qualities that in a great measure compensated for the lack of them in her husband. They lived together as man and wife nearly eighty years…"

 

They became part of the new Methodist class meeting formed in Granville in 1810 by William & Sarah Gavit, themselves married more than 50 years before her passing. James B. Finley, himself married to Hannah for 56 years until his death, was an early Ohio preacher who supported the fledgling congregation of Gavits, Benjamins, and Montgomerys when he passed through as the assigned "circuit rider."

 

James Quinn followed Finley, and it's to celebrate the Centenary 200^th anniversary that he will return to preach this weekend – a neat trick given that he died in 1847. Not much stopped those olde circuit riding preachers, though, and with the help of Rev. David Maze of today's West Ohio Conference, we will hear from Brother Quinn at 8:00, 9:20, and 11:00 am this "Heritage Sunday."

 

Come hear about some enduring grace and lasting values this Sunday!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's aiming for that "almost 80 years together" mark. Tell him about what's enduring to you at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.