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Fascinating story about courage and faith

Elfrieda Neufeld Schroeder

Whatever It Takes Dorothy Siebert. Asunción, Paraguay: The Enns Family Foundation, 2001. 233 pp, including photographs and glossary. $20.

From the time I picked up Whatever It Takes until I had read the last words, Dorothy Siebert’s book did not leave my hands. I asked myself what was different about this book from the other half-dozen missionary biographies I have collected in recent years. Why was this one so fascinating?

In many ways the story of Albert and Anna Enns reminded me of our own missionary career. I identified with their values and lifestyle, their struggles to adapt to each other and to a foreign culture, and their desire to be genuine at all costs. But more than that, Siebert’s skill as a storyteller captured my attention. She begins at one of the most exciting parts of the book, when Albert and Anna, two strangers who have had a romance by correspondence, meet for the first time. Siebert only refers briefly to this meeting, going back to it later in the book. She first takes the reader to Albert’s boyhood and young adulthood in Russia and Poland. I appreciated her detailed description of Mennonite life in Russia and the influence this later had on Albert’s and Anna’s decisions as adults.

Both had godly preacher fathers who were taken from their families, imprisoned and tortured, and who eventually died, leaving their families fragmented. However, both were left with mothers who upheld, against all odds, what their husbands had died for. This was a source of strength for their children who lived in entirely different circumstances. They applied this courage and commitment to their own lives and passed what they had learned on to their children. Their children in turn take up the challenges in their world, and the journey of faith continues.

Siebert’s characters are not saints but people struggling with their own flaws as they reach out to a broken world. She portrays them with compassion and sympathy without idealizing them. I look forward to more quality Christian writing from this author.

Elfrieda Neufeld Schroeder and her husband served with MBMS International in the Congo for a number of years. She is a part-time lecturer in the German department at the University of Waterloo and a member of Kitchener (Ont.) MB Church.

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Last modified August 13, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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