I was born the year after the 1929 stock market crash. My father had brought my mother from Kansas to Agassiz, British Columbia, Canada, where his parents and brothers and sisters had recently moved after years of trying to make ends meet raising grain crops on rock-filled fields in northern Saskatchewan. I was born in what became a chicken coop once Dad had built a small house. I was enlisted as a three-year-old to help Dad prepare soil for a vegetable crop when he put me on a horse pulling a plow. I remember falling from it—and being placed right back on it. Dad caught catfish in a creek up the street, which I carried to my mother to prepare for supper—chickens were needed to lay eggs.

In spring I accompanied my dad on his wagon—adapted from the Model T Ford my father and mother drove from Kansas to British Columbia—selling winter-grown cabbages to neighbors. That wagon served us until I was 14, when Dad could finally afford a well-used Model A Ford. I learned to drive it on our large yard.

My first exposure to foreign mission work came when an uncle arrived from California to report on his family’s mission work in South China. I  was chasing our cat and got close enough to grab her tail—and was mortified to see I had stripped the fur off her tail just as my uncle drove on the yard. She regrew it.

Events shaping my future

Two other events as a five-year-old reshaped my future—and eventually created opportunities God could use to prepare me for my future vocation. First, scarlet fever invaded our family, causing my eyes to cross. Seven years of social ostracism followed—and I became a book worm to hide from vocal and physical abuse in school. Despite my farm chores and homework I usually read three church library books a week and two from our school library. Then my mother heard of a chiropractor who had straightened his daughter’s eyes. He gladly made the same neck adjustments and performed the same massages on me—and voila! my vision became normal. I never lost my reading habits—great preparation for what God had in mind for me.

Also when I was five the Fraser River rose dramatically from snow melt in the mountains, breaking through the muskrat-weakened dikes along the river near us. I was awakened one night by Dad sloshing through at least a foot of water in my bedroom, picking me up and carrying me to an unfinished second story. There our family of six lived in extremely primitive conditions for two weeks. That convinced my father to follow his family’s move into a rented home in Abbotsford, more than 50 files away from Agassiz and on high ground.

Our mother sold inherited property in Henderson, Nebraska, and with the proceeds Dad bought 20 acres that had been logged off ten years earlier. The bonus was that it was a quarter mile from my grandparents and farms by a brother and sister. By the time we bought our property the bushes and trees had grown up to 20 feet among the tree stumps left by loggers, with most of the stumps around six feet in diameter. With me at one end and Dad at the other, we sawed stove-length segments from logs left behind. Using a steel wedge and sledgehammer I could split these large rings small enough to further split the pieces into fuel for Mom’s kitchen stove and pot-bellied heater.

The first winter in our rented house the temperature dropped to six below and snow fell several feet deep, though it warmed quickly up enough to melt the snow. Late January I was taken to my grandparents nearby. I was brought back in the evening and introduced to a new baby brother, Elmer, born at home. That spring I was also sent to Saturday German language lessons at our church. I learned to read in what was still our everyday language in our home. Because of my crossed eyes my parents kept me home until I was seven. Yet because I could read German I quickly picked up English and was reading grade two level English books by Christmas of Grade One. At that point my parents, who had taught school in the U.S., decided to switch to English in our home, preventing younger brothers and sisters from having the embarrassing experiences I had entering first grade not knowing any English.

Gaining a financial foothold

Before he even built a house Dad began clearing an acre, having heard raspberries were a profitable crop. First he blew apart the stumps with stumping powder. As an eight-year-old l carried brush for fires that over a week burned each stump to its roots. Then we dug around the roots, exposing them until we could chop them off below plow level. That fall Dad planted raspberries over two-thirds of a plowed acre. The third year’s crop was 10,000 pounds and the income from that crop helped get us out of poverty. Eventually we cleared enough land for two acres of raspberries and two acres of strawberries. The income from those crops supplemented the milk shipments from a growing herd of cows.

Carpenter brothers helped Dad put up a shell of a two-story house—depression circumstances meant interior wallboard was not applied for years. Then he scavenged lumber and tin sheets from a bridge-building project, split cedar roof shingles from blocks sawed from leftover cedar logs, and used tree trunks to frame a barn that could provide shelter for a horse and four cows. I was milking the cows by the time I was 12.

My grandparents and Dad and his brothers and sisters were active in founding and building the initially German-speaking Mennonite Brethren Church. At age six I rode a horse with Dad guiding a scoop that helped dig a basement for a church building less than half a mile from our house. Dad was treasurer for years, Uncle Abe directed the youth choir. In time Uncle John became the pastor while still a farmer with a large family. The rest of the Stobbe family sang in the choir, participated in youth ministry and in other ways. I sang in the Junior Choir, became active as teacher in the Sunday school held in English.

I cannot overlook all the summers we spent in primitive cabins sleeping on straw at hopyards about 20 miles from our house. The picking season typically began in August and might run into mid-September. All five of us missed two weeks of school, but the income generated was also vital to gain stability financially. We had to build a barn equipped to ship milk into the Vancouver market, acquire enough cows to make the dairy financially feasible, acquire electric milking machines, bring in alfalfa hay from B.C.’s interior while we cleared land for pasture. All five of us children graduated from the Mennonite Educational Institute.

Gaining independence

The summer I reached 16 I was already six feet tall and nearly 200 pounds of muscle. My parents sent me home each evening of the hop season to milk the cows. At 5:00 p.m. I boarded a two-ton truck equipped with benches on the enclosed back. I was dropped off half a mile from home. After I walked home I rounded up the cows from the pasture, milked them, maybe pumped water, made some supper. Every morning I was up at 4:00 a.m. to find the cows out in the pasture, bring them into the barn, milk them, and send them back to pasture. Then I’d grab a bite and head for the corner to climb aboard the truck for the trip to the hopyard. I picked hops all day, except for a half-hour nap after lunch. That routine lasted for five weeks,

To speed up land-clearing Dad bought two shares in a bulldozer co-op. On reasonably dry days he prepared six stumps for blasting. I’d come home from school and help tamp the stumping powder into a hole slanted under the stump, with a fuse running to the surface from a blasting cap. Each of us would light fuses at three stumps and then run out of range as the explosion split the stump into sizes the bulldozer could push into long rows. Then my job was to keep a fire burning along the stump windrows. It took several months of such effort to prepare three acres for a plow pulled by horses, later a tractor, so we could add to the cow pasture or raise silage corn.

Our mother was a stickler for evening devotions, including reading from the Bible, usually also from Hurlbutt’s Bible Stories for the younger ones, and prayer, were regular until we got into our teens. Then evening chores in the barn and homework filled our time in the evening.

During the time Dad and I worked together land clearing, planted and hoed corn, hoed weeds in the raspberry and strawberry rows, Dad shared his life experiences and challenges. He illustrated how important hard work, planning ahead, and following Jesus was to being successful in life. There were many God moments that motivated me to be a committed Christ-follower.