Precisely the Prophetic, Part 5

Chapter Two, Called from My Mother’s Womb

Russ:

When I was born, I came quite early and consequently was a very tiny baby. Things in 1960 were not like they are today in terms of premature infant survivability. The 1960 mortality rate for infants was double what it is today. To complicate things, my mother Ruth Walden was significantly diminished in her health, having suffered from severe chronic respiratory problems that had left her hospitalized or in a tubercular asylum for a large portion of her childhood and young adult years. When I was born, I was so tiny I could lay in the nurse’s hand with the tops of her fingers showing above my head and my ankles dangling off her palm. To increase my chance of survival, the doctors at Kansas City Memorial Hospital put me in an iron lung for the first three months of my life.

I was the third and last of the children born to my parents, and Mom was looking forward to cuddling me. However, because of the time I spent in the iron lung, she would be disappointed. When she left me in my crib alone, I would rest quietly. When she picked me up; however, I would become fussy until she laid me back down by myself. She remarked that when she picked me up, I cried, and when returning me to my crib, she would cry, her young mother’s heart longing to snuggle me and pour affection upon me.

This type of severe isolation in my earliest days would have a long-term effect. Often I find that I crave solitude in the same way others desire food. I was quite shy and suffered much at the hands of bullies and school mates. I would seldom make eye contact and avoided having to stand up in front of my class at all costs with one exception. When I moved from elementary school to the seventh grade, the English teacher gave the class writing assignments. Something stirred in me as I wrote creatively for the first time. An inborn drive to write surfaced in me that did not go unnoticed by my teacher. She fanned those embers, and the coals became an veritable flame. To make room for my writing, she told me not to worry about any of the regular assignments in the class. She gave me permission and encouragement to write short stories, developing them all week and then on Friday’s she would suspend the regular lesson plan to read what I wrote to the entire class.

These weekly story times were highpoints in my young life. I would use my classmates as characters in my stories, casting them in various adventures in the storylines that I would craft for their entertainment. Looking back on this time in the light of my great shyness I was surprised at how disclosing I was of my thoughts about my classmates and other aspects of my personal life that these short stories revealed about myself. The teacher met with my parents and encouraged them to seek out tutors and special programs to foster my writing ability. It was not to be. Mom and Dad loved me, but there were priorities other than my academic development, and they couldn’t see their way through toward me doing anything more than the same mundane schoolwork of the rest of my classes. In time, as teenage years commenced, my passion for writing faded until much later in my adult life.

My family background was one of natural impoverishment but spiritual riches beyond measure. The Walden family was generationally disadvantaged, and Mom and Dad struggled to lift us above the poverty line and into the middle class. They owned several successful businesses, including being one of the top painting contractors in Kansas City with a very elite clientele. Opportunities for advancement and increasing the family’s wealth were frequent in coming to my father. In one instance he was offered the contract for the interior of the newly constructed Waikiki Hilton, with a lifetime position in Hawaii after the job was complete. He turned it down. Being a devout full gospel believer with a call to preach, he was confident that Jesus would come back soon and that compelling fact would not allow him to pursue such worldly goals. There was a lost and dying humanity all around him, and he longed to fulfill the mantle of ministry that lay on his life.

Dad was raised by John and Opal Walden in Henry County, Missouri, during the depression years. My grandfather made his living as a bare-knuckles fist fighter and calling barn dances and square dances in the cities of Butler and Clinton, Missouri. For several generations going back to great, great, great grandfather William, who was a civil war veteran, there was no faith life in evidence in this branch of the Walden clan. Life was hard, and Dad and his siblings grew up under the rigors and burden of the Depression-era. They lived in tar paper shacks out by the railroad tracks with barely enough food to keep them going. Grandpa John was a hard man with strict ways, not looking any further than his hardened fists to beat men senseless in prizefighting for making his living. Then one day, God sent someone his way that changed all that.

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