3 Miracles, Part 2

Being a part of something big is actually happening to you every single day. Our lives are connected and led to each other with bigger purposes happening behind the scenes, and sometimes, if you’re watching for it, those backstage events come into view, front and center. 

This miracle is something I just got to witness and be present for. When I think of the billions of people in the world and the mere minutes that could have stolen this moment, I am in awe. 

A few years ago, my mom traveled to England where we were living and we had the funnest time! Her great-grandmother had emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands and so we had made plans, just she and I, to go see where she had lived and maybe learn more about her family. 

Something you have to know about my mom. She is a keeper. A family historian. She always has been. I remember being along for the ride as a young girl as she would travel long distances to interview and record on cassette tapes her conversations with aging relatives. She has a passion and drive for recording life, stories, pictures and keepsakes and connecting us to our ancestry. It is actually fascinating and really has contributed to my personal and family identity. 

She has worked tirelessing on the entire extended family line of this particular Dutch ancestor and often sends and receives emails to share information or ask questions from other distant relatives working on the same lines. 

Many years prior to our trip, she started corresponding with an elderly Dutch man named Hedzer for this reason. He would write in Dutch and she used google translate to communicate back to him. 

When we began to plan our trip, she reached out to him hoping for a bit of advice, travel tips and info to help us in our searching and time there, but she never heard back from him. She worried maybe he had passed away. 

The Netherlands feels like home to me! The flowers, the canal houses, the farmhouses, the countryside! It is all so beautiful, and the people are amazingly kind. The history fascinates me, too. After spending time in Amsterdam, we headed north to Donkerbroek, Friesland--the home of our ancestor, Mettje Bizeit. We were so happy to see it is still a small village with may homes that dated back to when she had been there. We hoped to find the grave of her mother who had died when she was just 11 and immediately found the old church and cemetery where it would be. We stretched our legs a bit from the long drive and decided to cross the street to eat at the cafe before starting our search. 

Finding people who spoke English was harder in the small village and we laughed trying to guess what was on the menu for lunch. It was kind of the perfect day--bluest skies, and sunshine. Lunch was quick and just as we headed back over to the cemetery surrounding the church, a car drove up with an elderly couple. They slowly got out, the one with a stack of papers, the other steadying him as they walked. 

My mom grabbed my arm and I immediately knew, “That’s Hedzer!”

I had to catch my breath. My mom was unsure but I knew, I just knew. We introduced ourselves and were just so happy to meet him and say thank you for his help and friendship over the years.  

He lived 2-3 hours north of where we were that day. They shared with us that he had been very ill, but felt it urgent to go to Donkerbroek that day to find the grave of another ancestor he had been researching, unrelated to us. They had driven all that way, and had arrived just at that time. 

I still have to catch my breath thinking about all of this! Had my mom and I searched the cemetery first and then gone to lunch, we would have missed him entirely. Even reflecting on our drive to Donkerbroek, we had stopped at another city just to look around, taking our time on the way there. There were just so many variables to us all missing each other! And while we didn’t find any astounding information meeting there the way we did, it was the sweetest coming together orchestrated and arranged by a loving God, just for us to feel His care and involvement in the details. 

“There are no coincidences in the process of conversion.” This was a part of mine I will never forget. 

xoxo

Dayna