One night In the early 1950s, inside his home in the Netherlands, the Reverend Walter Teeuwissen knelt by his bedside in prayer. He was a big man and a man of even bigger faith. But the vision that came that night still gave him pause.
He saw a small church with a white steeple rising above the treetops of a quaint village, but the streets were wide and the cars huge, immense, nothing like in Holland. Go to America. It was more a feeling than a voice, but there was an urgency to it that he couldn’t ignore.
God needed him to leave the only country he’d ever known. Where, exactly, he was meant to go he wasn’t sure. And why was an even greater mystery.
Reverend Teeuwissen prayed for guidance through the night. By morning any last doubts were gone. He told his wife they were moving to the United States, where the Lord would lead them to a church.
They booked passage on the next boat from Rotterdam—transatlantic airfare being beyond the means of a simple preacher back then—and arrived in New York City after a week’s voyage.
Reverend Teeuwissen called right away on a minister he knew and told him he was looking for a small-town church in need of a pastor.
“The only place I can think of is in Michigan,” his friend said. “But it’s very tiny. It’s probably not what you’re looking for.”
Days later Reverend Teeuwissen and his wife drove down the hill that led into Hesperia, a village in western Michigan of only a few hundred people. Wide streets, big cars, small houses set back from the road.
And rising above the trees was the white steeple of the First Presbyterian Church, exactly as he had seen in his midnight vision.
The parishioners were surprised by the arrival of this tall, bespectacled, white-haired minister. Their former pastor had recently left for a position with a new congregation and a search committee had not yet been formed.
And here, suddenly, was this peculiar man with his ruddy complexion, his thick Dutch accent and his old-world clothes. Not exactly who they’d had in mind.
For one thing, he towered over people, a powerful, almost intimidating presence. And then there was the bicycle he rode all over town. But there was also a kindness, a gentleness to him.
The small congregation voted to accept Reverend Teeuwissen as its new minister. He was grateful for the offer and agreed, yet he still wondered why he’d been brought there. He spoke broken English and struggled, especially in his sermons, to be understood.
“Vaht?” he would say. And “zis” and “zank you.” People would nod and smile at him, but did they understand?
There was one couple, Wanda and James Kolbe, whose family, he noticed, never left the church’s prayer list. Their oldest daughter had contracted polio as an infant, her little body fitted with a back brace, furthered weakened by meningitis and pneumonia.
She wasn’t yet four years old and already she had been hospitalized 35 times, mostly for respiratory illnesses. She could barely breathe without an oxygen tank. Nothing, it seemed, could help her. Reverend Teeuwissen took extra pains to pray for the ailing girl and her family.
Then one day that summer of 1954, the little girl was again rushed to the hospital, her condition extremely critical. The doctor told her parents she was near death, her fever spiking dangerously. Friends and family crowded into her hospital room, crying, hoping, praying.
Wanda, her mother, peered through the oxygen tent at her daughter’s exhausted body. The doctors had put large ice packs under her, desperately trying to lower her body temperature. Her skin was ghostly pale, drained of color. Drained of life, Wanda feared.
The doctor reached into the tent and placed his hand on the girl’s neck. Then sadly shook his head. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “She’s not responding to our treatment. It’s out of our hands now. I’ll leave you to say your goodbyes.”
The whoosh of oxygen being pumped into the tent was all that could be heard.
From outside the doorway there was a rustling. A loud voice. “Vaht is that you are saying?” Wanda looked back to see the imposing figure of Reverend Teeuwissen. He walked straight to the oxygen tent and, reaching inside it, took the little girl’s hand in his.
“Dear God,” the minister prayed, his face lifted toward heaven, “I ask you to give life to zis girl, to give her strength…”
Tears streamed down Reverend Teeuwissen’s cheeks, but there was an aura, a glow that enveloped him. “I know zis is why you have brought me here.”
He looked down at the girl and then, suddenly, he beckoned the girl’s mother. “Vanda, Vanda!” he exclaimed. “Come!”
Color, a beautiful rosy pink, slowly spread across her daughter’s face and down her arms and legs, like dawn itself. Her eyes fluttered and opened. “Mama,” the little girl said, “I want a drink of water.”
The room erupted. Everyone was shouting and hugging with joy and disbelief. And rising above the din was the voice of Reverend Teeuwissen: “Zank you, Lord. Zank you!”
It took years of spinal surgeries, braces and corrective shoes before the girl was free of the worst effects of the polio. But her mother never let her forget the minister’s visit.
Shortly after the girl’s recovery, Reverend Teeuwissen returned to the Netherlands, saying goodbye to the wide streets, the big cars and the little Presbyterian church with the tall steeple.
The townspeople missed seeing the old-fashioned, slightly out-of-place figure bicycling about town, but his work there was finished, his calling as a healer was done, something I’ve come to understand deep in my heart.
You see, I was that little girl. Today I have daughters and grandchildren of my own. Like Reverend Teeuwissen I’ve made trips to faraway places, Vietnam, Kenya and the Philippines, praying for people who are suffering.
I would never have met any of them but for a Dutch minister who traveled across the world to answer God’s call.
Not long ago among my mother’s things I found a photo of Reverend Teeuwissen riding his bicycle in his jacket, vest, tie and hat. In an accompanying note he wrote that he kept a picture of me on his desk and had ridden across the Netherlands sharing my story.
All these miraculous years later it gives me great joy to share it here with you.
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