Most of my great great grandparents and one or two of my great grandparents moved from the Netherlands, or nearby, to Holland, Michigan, or nearby, mostly in the 1840s and 1850s. Most of my great grandparents and all my grandparents and parents were born and raised in or near Holland, Michigan. None of my grandparents finished high school. My parents were married on June 5, 1958 and my sisters, Michelle and Camilla, were born on April 18, 1959 and May 16, 1960. In 1961 my father graduated from Western Theological Seminary and he was called to serve as pastor of the Danforth Reformed Church in Danforth, Illinois. My family moved to Danforth in the fall of 1961 and I was born that December 9 in Watseka, Illinois because Danforth was too small to have a hospital. Here's a picture of me with my sisters. I was the first baby my father baptized.
We moved three miles north of Aplington, Iowa when I was 5 years old. I attended Aplington Community School from kindergarten through 11th grades. When I was about 7 years old my parents chaperoned a group of singers, The Shalom Chorale, on a road trip to Colorado. On that trip I asked God to forgive my sins and trusted Jesus to save me. My mom started teaching 5th grade when I started 4th. In 1979 we moved to Greenleafton, Minnesota and I attended Preston/Fountain High School my senior year because Greenleafton was too small to have a school. My favorite part of high school was being in the school plays and playing on the computer terminal that Aplington HS rented or borrowed from the University of Northern Iowa for one month out of the year. Preston/Fountain HS didn't have access to computers when I was there. One night in 1979 I walked from the parsonage across the parking lot to the church where a consistory meeting was in progress. That night and a Sunday soon after I made profession of my faith and became a communicate member of the Reformed Church in America.
I attended Central College in Pella, Iowa from 1980 to 1984 and graduated with a B.A. in mathematics/computer science. For my first computer science course I was given the use of an account with a 25 kilobyte memory quota. Now in the summer of 1995, I'm typing on a Power Mac with a 500 megabyte disk. Now in the summer of 2002, I'm typing on a PC with a 20 gigabyte disk. Now in 2020 I have a phone with a 64 gigabyte memory. I attended the University of Minnesota from 1984 to 1987 and earned an M.S. in computer science. My master's project was a low level image segmentation knowledge based system written in Lisp.
In September of 1987 I started my first job (not counting picking apples, mowing cemeteries, walking beans, detasseling corn, being a farm hand, putting together plastic toys on an assembly line, programming computers for Central College, Sperry, and Honeywell, and teaching Programming I at the University of Minnesota), teaching computer science and mathematics at Central College.
Karen Mae Grice was born November 11, 1961 (she's four weeks older than I am) in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Darrel and Sharon Grice. She grew up in Ankeny, Iowa and attended Hope College (my
father's alma mater) for one year and Iowa State University (her parents' alma mater) for three. She finished her B.S. in 1984, her M.S. in education with an emphasis in school psychology from the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse in 1985, and started working as a school psychologist in Pella in 1986.
Karen and I met in the choir of the First Reformed Church in Pella and we were engaged to be married at Tulip Time, 1988. We were married on December 17, 1988, the first day of Central's Christmas break. We moved to St. Paul in August of 1989 and I resumed graduate school at the University of Minnesota. Our first daughter, Katie Marie, was born on May 27, 1990. I finished my Ph.D. in Robotic Navigation in August of 1992 and we returned to Pella where our second daughter, Miriam Kae, was born on January 13, 1993. In the span of five and a half years God gave me a job, a wife, a daughter, a Ph.D., and another daughter. My cup runneth over.
In two weeks in June, 1996 I had one of the most interesting, and one of the best experiences of my life. I was part of a fourteen member Habitat for Humanity group that went to Nicaragua to help some poor families build decent affordable houses. The name of the town we worked in is El Bluff, population about 3000. Until 1988, El Bluff was on a peninsula on the Atlantic coast. Then Hurricane Joan hit and destroyed most of the houses in El Bluff and turned the peninsula into an island. When we were there, 32 families were working on 32 homes. All the families worked on their own homes and the homes of others in the project. The cost of the houses was about $2500 and the homeowners were to pay half the cost over 20 years, about $5/month. School teachers on the island make about $50/month.
The people of El Bluff were very appreciative of our help. I was overwhelmed. They welcomed us with a parade of kindergartners and a five-man drum team. The kindergartners sang songs and waved flags. Then there was a party the last day we worked. Many songs were sung including one (to the tune of "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain") with fourteen verses, and a chorus after every one. Each person in our group had one verse with his or her name in it.
The trip wasn't all work. We spent some time on Little Corn Island. I went swimming before breakfast and again in the afternoon in the clear waters of the Atlantic off the sandy beaches of that island. An interesting custom on Little Corn Island is taking a famous nickname. I met Elvis and Bing Crosby, and heard about Donald Duck. Elvis and his wife run a hotel on the island and we stayed there. Bing Crosby was quite a character. He welcomed us to "Peace and Love Farm" by enthusiastically quoting Psalm 100 and feeding us bananas, pineapple, coconut, fish, cheese, sugar cane, and mints. Most of that food he picked right before serving us. The fish and cheese were being smoked in a big barrel. He also sang Psalm 150 and accompanied himself on a guitar.
God saw us safely through 8 airplane rides, 4 boat rides, more than 10 hours in a van, and many dangerous taxi rides. One of those boat rides (from El Bluff to Big Corn Island) lasted 5 1/2 hours and the boat went up and down and up and down most of the way and sometimes rolling, pitching, and yawing all at once. No one in our group got sick. I had fun the first 4 hours, but then when the wind and rain got more violent I had had enough. That ride, like the whole trip, was an unforgettable adventure.
One of the leaders of this trip was Central College chaplain, Fran DeJong. I remember a tee shirt of hers that read, "Live simply so others can simply live". Many people spend far too much on luxuries and give away far too little. I expect many people living in homes where the household income is less than the median would think I'm in that group of people who spend far too much on luxuries and give away far too little. Having written "living in homes" makes me consider the homeless as well.
In June of 1997 I started my second job, as a telecommunications engineer, at Lucent Technologies. I worked in Naperville and Lisle, Illinois and we lived between Winfield and Wheaton. When I was teaching at Central I had a web page with my family tree on it. Henk Ratering noticed it from his home in the Netherlands. It turns out we are fourth cousins once removed. Soon after starting work for Lucent they sent me to Huizen, the Netherlands. I contacted my distant cousin and he graciously showed me around Drendt, a northern province of the Netherlands. On November 30, 1998, our son, Nathan James, was born. Now we have children born in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. Both my sisters and Karen's brother have two children each. Karen's brother has two granddaughters, and my sister, Camilla, has two grandsons.
Lucent lost a great deal of money in 2000-2002 and reduced its payroll by more than 100,000 employees. I was laid off in November of 2002. After three months of looking for work and not finding anything, Andy Phillips called from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. He asked me to apply for a teaching position, I did, they offered the position, and I accepted. I taught at UWEC for two years and then moved to software development at UWEC in 2005. Andy was in the class with me when Wayne Richter told of his connection with Alonzo Church (see my Turing Machines page for more on Church and Turing).
For two summers my family vacationed at beautiful (and inspiring) Inspiration Point on Lake Spitzer, Minnesota. Here's what we looked like in 2006 and below in 2007.
Katie studied Sign Language Interpretation at Bethel College ("forward with Christ at the helm") in Mishawaka, Indiana starting in the fall of 2008 and graduating in the spring of 2012. In February and March of 2010 Katie had a wonderful experience going on a mission trip to Haiti. The devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January of 2010. Katie worked in an orphanage, including signing for deaf children. In the summer of 2010 she was one of five exceptional young people in charge of a YouthWorks site in Pennsylvania. It was a wonderful, albeit sometimes difficult, summer. Katie formed a special friendship with another one of those five young people in Pennsylvania, Mark Givens. Katie and Mark got married on July 29, 2012, thanks be to God! Mark graduated in December of 2011 with a Music Education major from James Madison University. He has a job teaching band and vocal music in Mathews County, Virginia. Katie interpreted for deaf students in Richmond and Goochland for three years. This picture shows my parents with their three children, three children-in-law, seven grandchildren, and first grandchild-in-law.
Miriam studied art education at Viterbo University in LaCrosse, Wisconsin from 2011 to 2014. She went on a wonderful mission trip to Ghana in January of 2012 with Cru. She thankfully declined the marriage proposals while there. The proposals came from boys around ten years old. She went on another mission trip, this time to Tanzania, in 2014. Many people heard and responded to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Miriam is a youth group leader at First Free in Onalaska, she owns an Amway business, she's a freelance artist, Miriam Kae Joyful Light, and she's an art teacher at a private school. Another youth group leader at First Free, Justin Cavanaugh, took an interest in Miriam late in 2017. They went to Tulip Time in Pella in May and saw a windmill and lots of tulips. On June 1, 2018 he proposed they get married and she said, 'yes'. They became husband and wife on October 27, 2018, thanks be to God! Justin is an IoT guy with Kwik Trip in LaCrosse.
A few years ago, I had the great privilege of working with Nathan cleaning up after a flood in Minot, North Dakota. Then he went on a mission trip to Texas where he enjoyed working with power tools (he shot many hundreds of nails) and helped remodel a center helping those with alcohol and drug addictions. Nathan graduated from high school in 2017 and finished a residential construction program at Chippewa Valley Technical College in 2018 in which he helped build this house. Nathan used to be the shortest in the family (see wedding picture above), but he passed up his sisters and mother when he was 15. He went on another mission trip in 2019 to Texas and helped build three houses for people who lost their homes to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. After three years with Tradesmen International, he started building houses with C & M Construction in 2021. Then in 2023, he started driving a truck for Johnson Roll-Off. Then in 2024, it was back to Trdesmen.
Karen had an unexpected heart attack in 2008 and open heart surgery in 2011. She's had chronic pain since then. She also had shoulder surgery in 2014, then was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy in 2023. The fallen-ness of this world would be too much to take if the Good News were not better. My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2012. Her mother died from Alzheimer's in 2004. My mother died from a heart attack in 2016. Both the Bible and Timothy Keller's book, Walking with God though Pain and Suffering, have good news for those who are suffering and for their loved ones.
Mark and Katie had a baby, Abigail Grace Givens, born September 21, 2015! This is the first grandchild on both sides and the first great grandchild of my parents. Katie and Mark's second baby, James Gabriel Givens, was born November 30, 2017, the day Nathan turned 19. Their third baby, Lily Mae Givens, was born June 26, 2020.
Being a grandpa is wonderful!
I'm so glad my mother had a chance to meet Abigail before she left this earth.
In January of 2020 Karen and I celebrated 30 years of marriage in Hawaii. It was a delayed celebration, and more exotic than our honeymoon in Brainerd, Minnesota. We had a wonderful time and made great memories.
My favorite authors are C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Agatha Christie, Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nabeel Qureshi. I strongly recommend Lewis' Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and The Sweetness of Christ, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Oldtown Folks, and Qureshi's Seeking Allah Finding Jesus.
I like reading biographies. I wish I had biographies of my great grandparents and all my ancestors. My maternal grandmother told me about her grandmother who was expecting a baby, my great grandmother, on the ship she took across the Atlantic. I don't know if that baby ever saw her grandparents, maybe in heaven. I'm looking forward to heaven and hearing of God's goodness in the lives of all the saints. What's your story? All of our stories are connected. All of us are distant cousins, if we are not more closely related. We are all part of a grand epic story, Jesus is the hero.
Here's an image of the only picture I know of of all four of my grandparents. From left to right, Benjamin, Gertrude, Myra, Norman, Henrietta, and Ralph. My mother's maiden name is Frens, and my grandmother's maiden names are Tripp (paternal) and Velhoff (maternal).
Here's an image of a picture of my great grandpa, Johannes Frens, my grandpa, Benjamin Frens, my mother, sisters, and me. Johannes was my only living great grandparent when I was born. I have his Dutch Bible, one bound volume containing the New Testament, the Psalms with musical notes, and the Heidelberg Catechism. The fourth gospel in Dutch is Johannes. Now this website has images of six generations.
An image of a picture ... that reminds me of what Richard Whitaker said at Central College regarding Ezekiel. Ezekiel did not see the Lord. He did not see the glory of the Lord. He did not see the likeness of the glory of the Lord. He saw the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord!