Joshua means God is salvation

Elisha means God is my salvation

“Elisha left Jericho and went up to Bethel.  As he was walking along the road, a group of boys from the town began mocking and making fun of him.  “Go away, baldy!” they chanted.  “Go away, baldy!”  Elisha turned around and looked at them, and he cursed them in the name of the Lord.  Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them.  From there Elisha went to Mount Carmel and finally returned to Samaria.”  2 Kings 2:23-25

Oofta, as my beloved Grandma Loftness would oft say.  Oofta, I can’t be so trite, so tawdry.  Oh, but it did dawn on my crabbit mind, so I must.  Oh really?  Well, here goes:

Moorhead.  See, that’s the town where Joshua Paul Vold later Lamken was born.  September 19, 1969.  And now look at him.  Look at all that scalp.  How can you help but call him “more head”.  “You sure do have more head there, Joshua.  Is that where you were born?  Is that why you were born in Moorhead?  Huh?  Huh?”

Who would have imagined that precious little baby would someday have brain cancer and permanently lose his hair?  His parents, Joe and Marilyn, all they could do was delight in having a third son – and this one had blond hair, not like the previous two redheads!  They named him “God saves little one – Joshua Paul”.  And announced to the world: The country parson and his wife have added to the fold!

In fact, according to the oncologist at Lutheran General Hospital in 1990, the cancer was there all along.  While Joshua was In the womb, gonad cells had moved up his body.  In many who have this type of cancer it is found in the sternum area.  But far rarer, Joshua’s cancer cells continued moving up into the cranium, finally landing next to the pituitary gland.  Twenty years after his birth, he chose not to have surgery, but opted for much chemotherapy and radiation.  And the cancer was put down.  Praise God!

But back to the banks of the Buffalo River.  Joe was called to serve the parish of Concordia-Scandia Lutheran Church when he graduated from Luther Seminary in 1968.  It wasn’t just a call out of the blind.  Obert and Lydia Grover were staunch members of Concordia, and Lydia was a first cousin of Berenice Loftness Elstad, my mother and Josh’s grandmother.  It wasn’t so unusual to be at family get-togethers in the Moorhead area, as Berenice’s sister Viola O’Day lived there.  It could have been an Easter gathering at Vi and Hank’s, and Obert realized Joe was about to become a pastor and Concordia was without a pastor.  Voila! 

Joseph and Marilyn, Jonathan and Daniel moved to the rural parsonage in the summertime.  They had an open house to share the joy of being amidst a family – not just Lydia and Obert, but Obert’s sister Alice and Ed Studlien, plus a host of other Norwegians who soon became dear to us.  Aunt Vi helped us get ready for the open house.  She had us pick armfuls of wild blue gentians in the fields near their Pelican Lake cottage.  Blue gentians were on the “do not pick” lists, but guess Vi overlooked that, or was ignorant of it.  Which is surprising – she loved nature, and was always teaching us about trees and birds and flowers.  It was good to have the O’Days so close to our new home, and we shared many happy hours meals and visits.

Joe and Marilyn started getting together monthly with other couples: Harold and Sally Horpedahl, Gordon and Sue Kassenborg, Allan and Helen Kassenborg, Dick and Mavis Wang, Lowell and Lorraine Erickson – well, actually, the men started bowling together and the wives decided to “surprise” them one night with refreshments, and that started a trend.  Good friends.  When the Volds found they were expecting a child, they asked nurse Helen Kassenborg for advice on a doctor and all other matters pertaining to healthy pregnancy, and when Joshua was born, they asked Helen and Allan to be his baptismal sponsors.

Josh, Jon and Dan had a big yard to play in.  Trees bordered the lawn, and separated the lot from the cultivated fields on either side.  The lot ran deep, all the way to the Buffalo River in the back, but we never made it down to the river that way because the underbrush was just too thick.  Jon planted a garden for a 4H project at the back of the lawn, and even that was difficult to maintain because of the huge weeds that wanted to overtake it.  And we weren’t farmers, with the right equipment.

Alongside the garden was an old chicken coop.  We tried to clean it up so it could be a playhouse, and it was of sorts, but the barn-ness was still pretty vivid.  One summer we had a gala Vold reunion.  All seven of the Vold brothers and sisters and all their families were there: Harold and Eunice, Connie and Del, Lois and Waino, Paul, Grace and Willard, Dave and Elaine.  They all stayed in the parsonage or camped on the lawn.  We graciously set up air mattresses and sleeping bags for the five of us in the chicken coop.  All was well, until shortly after midnight, when the mice started exploring.  We hightailed it into the house and spent the rest of the night on the living room floor.  So much for grace.  After a few hours of sleep, we all had pancakes for breakfast.

It was  a memorable party.  Hogstad aunts and uncles came from South Dakota, and Concordia Church was bursting at the seams that Sunday.  Lois, Joe and Marilyn sang a trio for the occasion.  Never again were all the Volds together in one place.  Their parents, John and Bernice, died relatively young; middle child Paul was mentally and physically challenged and in nursing homes, and Joe died in 1989.

Joshua was too little to even be a tagalong for his brothers’ forays in the neighborhood.  Dan and Jon would kittycorner across the field to the west to go over to Ericksons and play with Wayne and Dean.  One day the field was muddier than usual, and Dan lost his shoes.  Did we ever find them?  Can’t remember!

Another favorite trip of the big brothers was down the long driveway across the road from us to visit Lawrence and Julia Olson.  Lawrence was in a wheelchair but he loved having the kids visit, and always had candy for them, and stories.  And Julia was a great cookie-cook.

But Josh had adventures too, which he does not let me ever forget.  One day I put him on the carrier seat over the back fender of the bicycle, and off we headed to the Horpedahls, about a mile away.  Unfortunately, Josh’s heel got caught in the spokes on one sharp turn.  Josh will claim I just kept merrily biking along, but of course we stopped immediately – but not before there was an injury requiring days of soaking in a pan of water.  Josh, now tell me, are the scars still there?  He was a patient trouper, that two-year-old.

Every day I had to hike down to the Buffalo River, unlock a tiny house that held geological survey measuring equipment, and record and call in the height of the river.  That river separated the parsonage from the church.  It was pretty and twisty.  The Buffalo had its source north of Detroit Lakes, wound around through an area with palisades south and a little east of us which was Buffalo River State Park.  Then it headed north, and in our back yard started flowing northwest toward the mighty Red River of the North.  Marilyn and Joe had been involved quite actively in a few political ventures.  One of them was fighting the Army Corps of Engineers.  They wanted to straighten the Buffalo River, dam it to form a large lake near Lake Park, and supposedly have better flood control.  Straighten that beautiful stream?  No way.  And whether it was our letters or what, the campaign worked, and the Buffalo stayed crooked.

And did it flood!  The year Jon was in second grade in Glyndon, the river crept up to our yard.  To get to school a neighbor had to come with a boat so Jon could meet the school bus on the other side.  And I was quoted on the front page of the Fargo Forum citing the above-flood stage of the Buffalo River which would feed into the above-flood stage of the Red River within hours.  The rich, rich Red River Valley where we lived, was not without peril, but it also was enriched by the silt and topsoil created over aeons of floods – to say nothing of the Ice Age that formed Lake Agassiz thousands of years before we migrated there.

But let me digress.  We didn’t migrate to the Red River Valley.  I was born there!  Yes, 140 miles to the north, almost right on the Red River, was my birthplace, Hallock, Minnesota, right south of the Manitoba Canada border.  We loved ice skating on the south branch of the Twos River which flowed into the Red.  Big occasions for the first eight years of my life were trips to Moorhead to visit the O’Days.  Mom had gone to Concordia College in Moorhead, so it wasn’t too surprising that I also chose Concordia for my college.  And it is where Joe and I met and fell in love.  I remember one very cold winter day, strolling hand in hand with him in the middle of the frozen Red River between Fargo and Moorhead.  Oh yes, the Red River and its tributaries played prominently in our life!

This was Joshua’s first home.  Joshua the theologian.  Let me close with what just happened to be my devotional reading for today.  It included Jeremiah 17:7-8.  Is this right riverbank on, or what??

“But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.  They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water.  Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months or drought.  Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.”

Marilyn Jaeger