My brother Larry wrote this beautiful eulogy for our father’s funeral. It is a wonderful and fitting tribute to the memory and life of a great man of God. I asked my brother if he would allow me to post it in my blog. Please read it to the praise of our Lord – the Great King whom our father served so long and well.
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I have decided to bracket this brief account of Dad’s life with a true story from his past. I have taken certain liberty in projecting this story, at the end, somewhat beyond what I know for certain as I try to imagine his passing through the vale that separates this earthly life from the heavenly.
It was cold, unusually cold for December but that was good because he wanted to get the tractor back to the village before Christmas so that it could be used to haul firewood for the winter. The cold weather would add thickness to the new ice that he would be traveling on to return the tractor the five kilometres from the garden. He pulled his parka tightly around his face and tucked the canvass tarp more tightly around his body to brace himself against the frigid wind created by the movement of the tractor through the dense winter atmosphere. The frail image of the winter solstice sun had made its appearance above the wooded hills of the lake about a half hour before, but other than adding light its oblique angle contributed no noticeable heat to the – 30 degree temperature.
The sound of the engine and tires whisking through the unbroken snow was suddenly interrupted by the sound of breaking ice and churning tires in open water. An unexpected area of thin ice had given way under the weight of the tractor. The next moments were sensations of confusion, sinking, increasing pressure, fading light, than sudden stillness and complete darkness as the tractor came to rest on the muddy bottom of the lake. He was surrounded by fifty feet of alien environment for which the human body was not made. Lungs rapidly filled with a last gasp of life sustaining oxygen were now screaming for air from that other world. Looking up he could see a glimmer of light the size of a dime, the hole through which he had entered, and the promise of the world to which his body belonged. He struggled against the thick canvas tarp wrapped around him holding his body in this watery grave.
The human body can only go so long without oxygen. He had already been in the water for more than five minutes. Was this it, his life cut short at thirty two? There seemed to be so much more yet to do. He was ready, but if God would give him more time the rest of his life would be one hundred percent yielded to the claims of the kingdom of God. At that moment, just as it seemed his lungs must surrender to the need for oxygen, he was floating, somehow free of the canvas tarp that held him on the muddy bottom. He was moving toward the light! The next thing he knew he burst through the shards of broken ice into the other world. His lungs gasped for a breath of its life sustaining atmosphere. Looking up at the pale winter sun and the icy world around him his soul was filled with rapture. Though imperfect, this is the world to which he belonged. Thank God for a miracle!
Alvin Frey was born October the 12th, 1928. He went to be with the Lord at about twelve PM on April 18th, 2013. His siblings are an older brother Earl, who passed away two years ago, his younger brother Leonard, and younger sister Marie. He is survived by Lydian his loving wife of sixty-four years, sons Paul, Larry, Steven, and Calvin and daughter Ruthann. I won’t name all of the inlaws, grandchildren and great grandchildren, but let me assure you that he loved and was loved by them all. It would be remiss of me here to neglect to mention his spiritual family from many places who were very dear to him, and are represented by you here today.
It is difficult to know where to start and what to say about this truly remarkable man who is my father. And no matter how much I say, I know that each of you, and many others, could add your stories about how God touched your life through him. Of course this is really a celebration not of the goodness of a man, but of what God will do through a person who will dare to abandon themselves to God’s will.
Once in a conversation Dad and I talked about what epitaphs we would want on our grave stone (yes a strange conversation for father and son, and I don’t recall the background), but he said something to the effect that he hoped that his could read “Here lays a righteous man”.
As I look back on my relationship with him, Dad has been a true role model of what a Christian should be. Not perfect, but righteous; in both his position in God through the blood of Jesus, and in his actions. By allowing God’s grace to mould his character, and having a keen ear to hear God’s direction, and his willingness to obey without reservation he lived a truly exemplary Christian Life.
I think that it would be difficult to find any one here, or anywhere for that matter, who could honestly say that they were wronged by Alvin. My observation was that in every situation Dad’s primary motivation in life was to bring hope and healing from God to every need he ran into.
Sometimes this even included dogs. Something that I recall vividly from my childhood was Dad making his rounds through the community on cold winter days feeding starving dogs. The sled dogs that were used for transportation were left tied up and starving when many of the people of the community were gone for some reason. Dad could not overlook this suffering, so until the owners returned, my brothers and I helped him as he made daily rounds of the community feeding these starving dogs with some concoction that he had cooked up.
Another time when the community was hit with a rash of impetigo infection he personally made sure that every child was bathed in disinfectant. When the root cause was identified as a lack of hygiene he set up a central laundry facility in the community, carrying the water himself by hand from the lake to be heated for washing clothes.
He was known to walk up to complete strangers and say that he felt that God wanted him to pray for them. To my knowledge he was never turned down.
How did this all begin? Let me tell you a little about his story – I’ll try to keep it fairly brief:
Alvin was born to Eli and Magdalene Frey on October the 12th 1928. Like most Old Order Mennonite children of that era he was born at home. At the time his parents owned a farm near the small eastern Ontario village of Wallenstein. To my knowledge there was nothing exceptional about his arrival into the world except for the fact that he was one of only four of nine Frey children to live to adulthood. Due to the lack of medical knowledge of the time my grandparents would bury five of their children in their infancy.
I remember Dad telling me that as a fairly young child he had a keen sense of the call of God in his life. This in spite of the fact that the Old Order Mennonite Church did not teach the concept of a personal relationship with Christ. He said that he would sometimes weep as he communed with God as he walked the three miles back and forth to the little country school house.
Unfortunately not only did he not find encouragement in the church, but he experienced considerable confusion by the uproar caused when his parents decided to leave the Old Order Church because his Dad needed a car to get to work. This was not well accepted by his maternal grandfather who was a bishop there. I believe this created a wound in Dad’s life, and certainly lead to a time of confusion and searching in his teenage years at which time he ran away from home heading west to Alberta. My grandmother would spend so much time on her knees praying for her wayward son that Grandpa would have to physically pick her up and put her to bed because she was unable to get up herself.
Then on a trip back home something of great significance happened. He met and fell in love with a beautiful Mennonite girl by the name of Lydian Martin. They married on March 26th 1949.
Their first home was a chicken house on my grandparent’s place that Dad converted into a living quarter. My grandmother used the downstairs as a shop where she would weave rugs which she sold at the local market. I think that they lived there when both Paul and I were born, and possibly even Steven. (Dad’s gift of improvisation would come in handy many times in his years in the north).
After four or five years they bought a little home just around the corner from my grandparents. I can still feel the warm earth on my bare feet as I raced across the garden to visit Grandma Frey.
During this time Dad went into a business venture with his older brother Earl. They bought a trenching machine to put drainage tile in farmer’s fields. Because this was seasonal work he started working for A.W. Hoffer making baby shoes in the winter. He was very well liked by Mr. Hoffer, and was offered a partnership in the company. This is where he worked until he felt God’s call to the ministry. We sometimes noted that, whereas the apostle Peter was called by Jesus from being a fisher of fish to becoming a fisher of men, Dad was called from working with soles to working with souls.
At this time my parents were thoroughly enjoying raising their young family of three boys, and fellowshipping in the Hawksville Mennonite Church. Dad had made his peace with God and his family. I don’t suppose that they expected that this comfortable life would ever change, until one day the church brought in an evangelist to have a week of special meetings. During one of the evening services the speaker, Harold Fly, pointed toward my parents and said that God had a special purpose for their lives.
Harold, who had a prophetic gift, said later that he saw, or sensed, an actual hand pointing down on them. They were completely shocked as this was the first time that they had experienced a prophetic ministry. From this time on their comfortable life was turned upside down. Within a short time, and much to the consternation of many of their friends and family, they sold their house and moved to the fringes of civilization in north western Ontario. They began working as missionaries to the small native community of Deer Lake under Northern Light Gospel Mission.
Here, for twenty years, they poured out their lives for the kingdom of God. Through the trials and successes of this experience they developed a keen dependency and deepening relationship with God. They were blessed with a family of three boys so they decided to adopt a little girl. And that is how Ruthann became part of the family. Than several years later, and as I understand it, to their considerable surprise, Calvin showed up.
During these years Dad was also on a spiritual quest. He took a year of Bible training at Transylvania Bible School, a Wesleyan Methodist Bible school near Freeport, Pennsylvania. The son of the founder of the Bible school had been paralyzed in a tractor accident. Dad took him to a Kathryn Kuhlman healing crusade. He became much more aware of the work of the Holy Spirit and began a traveling ministry representing the Northern Light Gospel Mission, and made contact with many churches throughout Canada and the United States.
When he returned to the north he felt a need to build a Bible school to disciple the new converts. Building a church and Bible school complex represented a considerable challenge in a community that was over one hundred miles from the nearest road. Dad teamed up with some Christian brothers from eastern Ontario, bought a used saw mill, and transported it on winter ice roads to Deer Lake where a beautiful chapel and Bible school facility was built. At this time Wayne Shenk, who had been teaching in the Deer Lake public school, became part of the team. This friendship was to last throughout Dad’s life. Due to the need to be more accessible to the whole north, the Bible school was later moved to Stormer Lake. This facility is still operating in a slightly different capacity.
At about this time Dad’s father was nearing the end of his life. Never one to be wedded to a program, Dad felt that he should leave the north and care for his ailing father. When grandpa died, Mom and Dad remained in eastern Ontario for a number of years pastoring a church in Atwood, and spending considerable time traveling, conducting meetings, church planting, and encouraging and relating to a network of churches that he had become involved with.
Dad and Mom always felt a connection to the northern native communities where they had developed a lot of love and respect during their twenty years of missionary service. The natives called him “Kitchy Wemitigoshi”, roughly translated “The larger than life white man”.
By this time both my grandparents had passed away. So my parents decided that to be more central to both the northern communities and the many churches that they were involved with, they would move to the center of the country. This brings Dad’s story to the lives of many of you here. I’m not sure how they chose Landmark, but of course, the rest is fairly recent history.
There is, of course, so much more that could be said of a man’s life of eighty five years; especially one as dynamic as Dad’s. But I will leave that to others.
Now let me go back to my introductory story:
It was a miracle he was saved from the deep! That was almost sixty years ago now. His physical body is worn out. Not from serving his own desires, but from fulfilling the promise made to God in that watery grave, and from the natural toll that time takes on our imperfect bodies. He was content – he could identify with the Apostle Paul when he said, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7)
In spite of having grown up in his early years in a small southern Ontario village in a horse and buggy Mennonite family, he developed a ministry that would touch many people for the Kingdom of God. He was a man of integrity. He lived what he believed. He had no regrets. He had found, particularly in his later years, a deep love and appreciation for the wife that God had given him. Knowing that each of his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren were walking in the Faith was his great joy and satisfaction. He continued to serve the Body of Christ to the end.
Where had all the years gone? But he had surpassed the “three score and ten” and had enjoyed a good and productive time in the bonus period. There was nothing that he knew of that was left undone. He probably didn’t realize it, but he was both statistically, and in reality, a member of the “greatest generation”. Would the future ever again produce men like this?
He was grateful for the loving care given by others, but as a man of action all his life, he did not like being a burden to others. We had a scare about a year ago – not sure if he would pull through – but God gave him another year, in which time he continued to serve God wholeheartedly. And that is exactly what he was doing a week ago when he collapsed while ministering to this fellowship. The end came quite quickly after that. They said that his heart was only functioning at ten to fifteen percent. Breathing was difficult because of fluid retention. His tired body just could not take this last challenge.
The hospital room, dimly lit, quiet, except for noises of various medical equipment – then whirring of tires, cracking of ice, descending, growing darkness, confusion, loved ones gathered round, canvass tarp restraining, muddy bottom. There, a light the size of a dime, the exit to this alien realm, the promise of the world to which his spirit belonged! Dimly, through the darkness, he was aware of the elements of this world, his loved ones, his body’s reluctance to let go. He struggled against the rough canvass that was holding him down. “O God if you release me I will be in Your presence forever more!” Suddenly he was floating, rising toward the light that was shimmering on the surface of the deep from the brilliance of the world above.
We see the transition. Those left behind cling to each other weeping for our loss. We envision his spirit bursting through the shards of the natural into the glorious realm of the supernatural – the true home of the redeemed human spirit. Thank God for a miracle!
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; than I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Corinthians. 13: 12)
