Read Online A New Beginning by Michael Phillips - Free Book Online Page B

of the package that makes up the man called Christopher Braxton.”
    He stopped again and breathed in deeply, then began his story in earnest.
    â€œMy father was married twice,” Christopher said. “I was a son of his second marriage. By his first marriage he had a number of children, but then his wife was killed in an accident. Some time later he married my mother, who was seventeen years younger than he. My father was a great deal older than me, and thus I never knew him well.
    â€œMy father was of Hutterite German, or Anabaptist descent. He spoke a form of the German language known as high German. The name Braxton, of course, is not German. Originally we were known by the name Brandeis, but my grandfather changed it when he emigrated to the United States. My mother was of north German extraction and spoke a dialect known as low German. But the difference between my father’s people and my mother’s was more than that of language. The closest parallel I can make in our own country of this distinction would be the social and prejudicial division between black and white.
    â€œWe lived in a mostly Hutterite community, where my mother was considered an outsider—almost like a Negro living in an all-white community. The Hutterites looked down on the ‘low’ Germans in exactly the same way many whites look down on Negroes or Indians, and my father rarely visited with our relatives on my mother’s side of the family because—at least so it seemed to me as a young boy—they were viewed as inferior. My father only wanted us to visit with his Hutterite relatives. Why he married my mother in the first place is a bit of a puzzle in my mind. But he did marry her, and this was the situation when my earliest memories begin to gather themselves in the distant regions of my brain.
    â€œBut it was really no advantage to visit our relatives on my father’s side of the family either. When we saw them, all the relatives treated myself and my four brothers and sisters like dirt. We were a family, as it were, caught between the two worlds of high and low —outcasts really, not accepted by either, and looked down upon by both. Throughout my early years I continually heard things like ‘You’re no good, Chrissy.’ Therefore I grew up with that feeling that I was worth nothing as a human being. I knew I was a second- or even a third-class citizen.
    â€œThe one bright spot in my life was school. I didn’t necessarily get treated any better there because we lived in a Hutterite community. But I loved learning. Books and stories were like treasures to me. They offered me a way to escape my pain.
    â€œIf anyone had said to me in those days, ‘Someday you will be the pastor of a church . . . there will be people you will speak to . . . you will teach and help them . . . you will counsel and marry them . . . you will stand in front of large groups of men and women,’ I would have laughed at the impossibility of the very idea. The thought that I might someday do something— anything! —worthwhile was incredible to me. What could I—little Chrissy Braxton—possibly be but a complete failure?”
    Even though I had heard the story before, it was still difficult for me to imagine Christopher as feeling worthless. From the moment I met him, he had seemed so inwardly strong and so sure of himself. If it hadn’t been for him, I would not even be alive right now. The thought of our first meeting sent my mind back to those first days when I’d awakened on Mrs. Timms’ farm in Virginia after my injury. Even now I could see, in my mind, that strong yet tender face looking down at me—the same face I saw now behind the pulpit of my church.
    â€œMy father was in his late sixties by the time I entered my teen years,” Christopher was now saying. “He had been a good man early in life, even a godly man whom