LETTERS: Church will be missed
To the Editor:
Thanks to the editor for the good words some weeks ago which included the Youngtown United Methodist Church people and their church closing. This community is one place of my roots. The church where my dad and his siblings attended in earlier years. The old school was part of their education for the first eight grades. As a kid growing up in the 40s and 50s, I vaguely remember the school still operating. I definitely remember many times being at the church for major family events. At least a couple of my brothers, Chuck and Bing, were born while Dad and Mom lived just down the road after their marriage in the early 20s. They were on the "cradle roll" listing which still existed at the church not too long ago.
The grief attached to an ending such as the Youngtown church closing is significant. For the people who still were an active part of the daily and weekly life of that congregation, community life won't ever be quite the same. For some of us absentees, a significant number of us, a predictable connecting point with our past is now gone. Like many others of this absent group, I will miss the anticipation of gatherings there. Like so many institutions of past generations which have closed, then disappeared altogether from the landscape of Marion County, Youngtown United Methodist Church closing is part of the inevitable change which life in these changing plains has always experienced.
As I pondered the losses adding up in all this, I realize there are some powerful intangibles which I must value as I move on from this happening. The power of the personal witness of the people who I have known whose lives were somehow shaped by the Youngtown community. My family: parents, brothers, sister, Uncle Walt and Dorothy Hayen and their kids. These people have played a part in sharing with me the importance of the special strength which Youngtown community modeled for all of them. Those people of this old community modeled a strength based in family and community, a faith in God in all times in life, which is part of me now. I see this as a good part, a strong part, of what makes my view of life and this world have more meaning. I would, somehow, be less as a human being, had I missed this touch.
As I think about all this, I realize Youngtown is just one example of how these Plains communities shape those of us who have been blessed to live some significant time in this place. The truth is, even after the doors close on the buildings, the power of life learned in these places goes on and on, with us. Indeed. Thanks be to God!
Jan Hayen, Parsons
