Even fathers repent

We all model our lives on stories we’ve heard and the people who exist in those stories. There are, of course, the biblical accounts of God’s people and Jesus. But there are also stories closer to home. The stories of our parents, grandparents, or people we hear about often make a profound impact on who we are and what we work at becoming.

This series looks at some of those stories as told by people within our Canadian Mennonite Brethren church family.

Peter Neufeldt

Irma Epp, nee Neufeldt, has never forgotten her father’s letter. She was in grade five or six, and living in Yarrow, B.C. Her father Peter was director of the West Coast Children’s Mission and frequently travelled.

As the oldest of four children, Irma was expected to help around the house when she came home from school. Alas, books were too exciting. Irma was a bookworm. Time after time she would get lost in her reading and forget her tasks in the kitchen.

One evening, absorbed with a book, Irma forgot to stir the pot on the stove. It ran over and the supper was burned. Her mother was very frustrated with her, and then her dad came home. He sensed the frustration of mother with daughter, and though he rarely punished, this time Irma had gone beyond the limit.

Irma received a spanking and then spent the evening in her room, totally chagrined over what she had done and that her father, with whom she was very close, had given her a spanking.

A few years later, while she was in senior high, Mr. Neufeldt left home to study theology at Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg. He often wrote to the family. But one day there was a letter from him just for Irma.

He talked a bit about his studies and then said he’d been moved, after one of his classes, to write her. He asked if she remembered the spanking he’d given her a few years earlier for burning the supper.

Did she remember? She hadn’t forgotten; she would never forget. She admired her father, loved him dearly, and still felt badly she’d made him so angry he would spank her.

Her father went on to say that what she’d done was an offence, repeated too frequently. It had caused her mother frustration when she needed help. Actions had consequences. But, he continued, he too had been wrong. He had spanked her out of anger, and that wasn’t how punishment should be administered. He asked her for forgiveness.

Irma related to young people for much of her subsequent life, as a house parent of missionary children in a boarding school in the Democratic Republic of Congo and as a teacher in Canada and abroad. She often thought of her father’s letter.

Anger and harsh punishment, she says, are not the way to react to frustrating family situations or young people in a classroom. By asking forgiveness, her father demonstrated his love and guided her responses throughout her life.

The Neufeldt family. Irma is in the back row, left. Photos courtesy of the Centre for MB Studies, Winnipeg