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The Anabaptist Voice
10/02/2008

Dear friends in Christ,

       We pray that you are well with the love of our Heavenly Father. We are well. Praise God. Last Friday, our son Jim arrived from Vancouver, BC, to go with Don to Minnesota to visit Don’s brother Joe who was to have open-heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic on Sept 30^th and then to visit the Elmendorf Hutterite colony. They came back on Wednesday.
       It rained a little in that afternoon before they left and we saw a beautiful, double rainbow. The rain itself is special gift from God here in desert and the beautiful rainbow was a sign from God to us of His love. Here is a picture of it taken from our back yard.
       Michi and Naomi went to Linda Dowdle’s house for the weekly Monday morning ladies worship meeting. Michi felt the love of our Lord so strongly there. While Don and Jim were gone, Michi and Naomi played a game each night after the supper. Our friend Nancy Garlock, who has moved away to New York, had introduced the game to us. We think of her every time we play this game and we miss her.
       Our son Patrick recently called from the James Valley Hutterite colony in Manitoba and our five year old grandson Titus sang some songs for us. It is such joy to hear Titus and his two year old sister Elizabeth, especially when they sing for us. We are blessed by Patrick and his family.
       While our house was empty and lonesome, our daughter Naomi wrote a song, “Childlike Trust” about trusting in our heavenly Father:
           Just like a child that trusts his Daddy where he's leading him,
           Just like a child that trusts his Mommy what she's feeding him,
           Though I get lost in darkness, and no where to go,
           I can come back to You, and rest under Your wing. I love You, Lord.
       It is wonderful to feel the love of God. Thank you, Lord, for giving us Your peace. Thank you, Lord, for giving Naomi the gift of song writing.
       Wednesday, our friend Ricky Scruggs went to the airport to pick up Don and Jim. Thank you, Lord, thank you, Ricky. He went to see the movie FIREPROOF on Sunday and was talking about it when Kris and Tony Brown came unexpectedly. They had gone to see the movie also on Sunday. It is about fire proofing your marriage. We think it was arranged by our Heavenly Father that they could meet each other and talk about marriage. Kris and Tony had just attended a marriage seminar at church and Ricky had recently attended one at a conference.
       This past week we have seen a number of circumstances that we believe were arranged by our heavenly Father. Some unbelievers would call them just co-incidences but we know that God loves us and is all powerful, able to arrange things for those that love Him, those that are called according to His purposes.

Trip to Dresbach

Don and Jim flew up to Minneapolis and spent Saturday evening in Rochester, Minnesota, with Don’s half- brother Joe Breidenbach and his new wife Laura. Here is a photo of Joe and Laura on the left and Jim and Don on the right. On Sunday they drove to Dakota, Minnesota, to see the graves of Don’s father and grandfather. Don’s grandfather, Murtha Murphy, was born in Ireland and came to America to fight in the Civil War where he lost a leg. His father, James Murphy, had a vegetable farm and also trapped fox in the winter for income. He had ten children, Don was the seventh. He died when Don was seven years old.
After visiting the cemetery in Dakota they drove to the nearby town of Dresbach where Don was born. Most of the town was wiped out when the freeway was installed. The town is squeezed between the Mississippi River and the steep bluffs. The house where Don was born is no longer there, the freeway went over it. Joe wanted to see the area as he has heard so much about it from his half-brothers and sisters. We visited La Crescent and then had lunch across the Mississippi River in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is just a couple miles from Dresbach. We got to know Laura who works at the Blue Cross insurance company in Seattle, Washington. Joe is a lawyer in Burien, Washington.

Visit to the Elmendorf Hutterite Colony

     Don and Jim spent several days at the Elmendorf colony, which is west of Rochester, Minnesota. It was a very impressive and interesting visit. Don came away with the impression that the Elmendorf church may be the most ideal church in the United States, the one closest to that which the Lord Jesus desires, closest to the one described in Acts 2 and 4.
       There are 21 families, about 140 people, living there; mostly young folks, with only a few over the age of 50. The oldest, Grandpa Jake and wife Susie, have 16 children and 127 grandchildren. There are nine different family names, with five families headed by a non-ethnic Hutterite man, a very unusual situation among the 477 Hutterite colonies.
       Don was quite amazed at the number of chairs in the church meeting room and the dining hall. They have so many more people now than when he last came there. With so many people they have a housing shortage and need to expand, to branch out to a new location. They are looking to do that on some land a few miles north of their present location where they can place more houses. They are also thinking about sending out a family to help a bunch of ex-Hutterites in South Dakota, another family to help some people in Ohio start a community and a third family to Oklahoma to help some folks there. They already have a family in Tasmania helping to form a community there.
       They live together with all things in common like the early church did (see Acts 2:44-47 and Acts 4:32-5:11) and eat their daily meals together in a common dining hall (except for Sunday evenings when they eat in their apartments). Their meals start and end with prayer, usually by a different man each time. Their daily church services are like that also, with different men speaking each time. When they pray, they give the impression that they are seeking to please God in all that they do, showing their love for Him and for each other. They seem to have the righteousness, peace and joy of the Holy Spirit that the apostle Paul talks about in Romans 14:17 and seem to be like the people that Paul described Colossians 1:10-12. Yet they also know that they need to keep striving to improve their spiritual life, to become more like Jesus. They do not think that they are there yet so they keep looking up for more grace from the Lord God.
       Their custom is to have mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks with their families at home which they can do since they all work on the farm. Here is a photo of Pamela Lee, to her right is husband Bill, then Jim and Don.
       They are concerned about wealth, believing that seeking wealth creates a ‘monster’ that people serve, which makes it hard or impossible to ‘seek first the kingdom of God’, as Jesus said in Matthew 6:33.
       Don and Jim were welcomed and spent many interesting and enjoyable hours with various people there. Jim stayed with our old friends Bill and Pamela Lee who used to live with us at Fan Lake in Washington State. Don stayed with Willie and Miriam Wurtz who have four sons and seven daughters; the youngest is 2 years old. They just acquired a new two month old puppy that day so the children spent time getting acquainted with it.
       One of the impressive things that we noticed was the people at Elmendorf strive to be brothers and sisters, just as Jesus taught in Matthew 23 “you are all brothers”. The Hutterite churches have a minister but he is not elevated above the others, he strives to be a brother, not a boss. The men at Elmendorf meet weekly in a ‘brotherhood’ meeting to decide issues that affect them.
       Most Hutterite colonies give a small monthly allowance to their members but Elmendorf does not. They seek to be as free from the money ‘monster’ as possible. Yet, because they stress love for each other, it is not hard to buy something that they want, such as a book, they merely ask the brother in charge of the finances for the money.
       The letter to the Hebrews says, “And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were not able to enter because of unbelief.” (Heb 3:18-19) Disobedience is because of unbelief.
       Jesus said, “Whoever has My commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves Me. He who loves Me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him” (John 14:21-24)
       May the Lord bless you, dear friend, and fill you with His peace.

Your Anabaptist brother and sisters in Christ,

Don, Michi and Naomi Murphy
Tucson, AZ
www.AnabaptistChurch.org

Jesus said, "Do not resist an evil man." (Mt 5:39) He means do not resist evil with evil but respond with love, the Calvary type of love that Jesus demonstrated with His death on the cross.

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