Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / March 5, 2024 | Expresso - Kenna Brantingham

Transcript

March 5, 2024 | Expresso - Kenna Brantingham · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Off to a great start.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm Kenna.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: In a nutshell, I grew up here at TBC and I now attend with my husband Connor and our boys who are three and one.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: My parents are Ken and Ruth Maynard.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Mom's over there.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're the maintenance director and the preschool coordinator, respectively, though both of my parents wear a lot of hats here.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have two younger sisters who are over there.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And an older brother who is a youth pastor in Oklahoma City.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: During the day, my husband Connor works in Stormontville surgery, and I homeschool our three-year-old.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Here at TBC, Connor and I lead the young adult ministry and volunteer with the youth on Sundays and Wednesdays.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Connor also plays bass guitar in the worship band.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Photo evidence.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: So boys, boys, husband, family.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the most recent family picture that we have.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: We've already added one little baby from my sister-in-law and brother.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not pictured.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have had an unremarkable life by many measures.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not self-conscious about that, but I am aware that it is boring.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was homeschooled, raised in a healthy, loving family, and God has protected me from most of the pitfalls of this sinful world.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Praise God.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so what do I have to share?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now that I'm at the old and wise age of 30, I have a few years to look back on and see where God has been working in me and through me.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: In my young childhood years, some things happened that were not noticeable landmarks in my story.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The first was that my great-grandmother, Helen Schimmel, passed away when I was five years old.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I only have vague memories of her.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I do remember the family gathered for her funeral, but not much more than that.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, my great-grandfather David was still living and remained in his own home, so the moms of the family teamed up to split up the week and make sure someone would be going to spend time with him and make sure he was fed every day.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: My mom was assigned Tuesday.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And being a homeschooling mom, she hauled the whole circus over to Great Grandpa's house along with a basket of enough food to feed us all every Tuesday.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: We kids fell into this routine as well and got used to packing up our books and turning Great Grandpa's living room into a one-room schoolhouse.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I recited book reports to Great Grandpa.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: He helped us practice for spelling tests.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: We did science projects at his dining room table and we sprawled on his couch with books for afternoon reading.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: One lesson I did not know I was learning was how to be around an old person.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: I learned later in life that being around someone from a different generation is not a natural skill but a learned one.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Great-grandpa was eventually moved into an assisted care facility and then a rehab hospital.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even though we didn't need to take him lunch anymore, we still visited him wherever he was every week.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Mom would chat with him while we played games or read books.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: This went on until he also passed away when I was nine.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I have a note to take a drink.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: After great-grandpa died, we began visiting my great-great aunt Ellen Titchener, the youngest sister of my great-grandpa.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know her very well at the time beyond biannual family reunions and stopping on her porch for Halloween.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: But she'd been moved to Atria, and mom started taking us kids to visit her every Wednesday afternoon before the Wednesday evening church programs.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: We became regular visitors there, and many of the residents got used to seeing us race down the hall to Aunt Ellen's room.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: We even had our piano recitals there.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: It took me a while to figure out that most kids don't spend very much time in nursing homes.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: In 2010, when I was 16, I had the opportunity to serve at Camp Barnabas in Missouri with the TBC Youth Group.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Camp Barnabas is a Christian summer camp for kids.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, thank you.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little close up.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm used to having a baby, so it's like I can hold a water bottle.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Camp Barnabas is a Christian summer camp for kids and adults with disabilities.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Each volunteer, mostly teenagers or college students, are matched with a camper who they spend all week with, helping them one-on-one to experience summer camp as any kid without disabilities would.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: We get crash course trained for a couple of days on how to help our camper eat, dress, bathe, swim, navigate camp, use the bathroom, and manage conflicts or emotions.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: We don't always know what our camper will need, so we plan for everything.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have a slide.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: There.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: My camper's name was Piper.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: There she is.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um she was ten years old and had a full slate of mental and learning disabilities, and I quickly learned that my role with her was mostly conflict de-escalation.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: If we had to leave the pool, she wanted to harm herself.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: If she got hungry, she wanted to harm other people.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: If she got too hot in the July sun, she wanted to harm me.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I learned a lot of patience that week.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: But also learned my own limitations and saw God take over through me when I was out of my own strength.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: A turning point in my story came toward the end of high school in early 2011, a few months before I turned 18.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: My maternal grandma, Gwen, who lived out in Portland, Oregon, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's a handful of years before, and had since had someone living with her to make sure she wasn't getting into trouble.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: This roommate person was sometimes one of my cousins, sometimes a family friend, but was never a caretaker because grandma was more or less able to take care of herself.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Toward the end of 2010, however, her mental faculties started to show more decline and a full-time caretaker was needed.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was decided by the aunts and uncles who lived closest to grandma and who had the responsibility of her that a granddaughter would be the best case scenario caretaker for grandma.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: For reference, on this side of my family, I am grandchild number 28 of 61 living grandchildren, in-laws not included.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So there were some options.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: The requirements for this granddaughter were that she needed to be an adult who could live on her own, was willing to care for grandma, and was available.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was the third granddaughter asked.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: My mom sprung the question on me one evening for me to think over, and to my great surprise, I just said, Yes, I can do that, right then and there, without any consideration whatsoever.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I am a careful planner, an overthinker, and a lover of control.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So this was highly unusual for me.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: In retrospect, I know that God was saying yes for me, because he knew that the next step for me in my personal and spiritual growth was going to occur in Oregon.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to summer of two uh to September of 2011.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: All summer, as people would ask the inevitable, what are you doing in the fall?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I would tell them, I'm moving to Oregon to take care of my grandma with Alzheimer's.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: People at church, the dentist, the lady at the DMV, classmates at Washburn Tech from where I was graduating, and others all had some version of surprise.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And wow, um, that sounds so hard.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Are you sure?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: To my credit, I'm stubborn enough to not back out of something I've committed to just because someone says it might be too hard for me.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: I gritted my teeth to prove them wrong, not knowing at all what I was getting myself into.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And off I went.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was freshly 18, graduated from high school but deferring college for the present, and moving by myself to Portland, Oregon to become a 24-7 Alzheimer's caretaker.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: My contract was for nine months.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I became a housekeeper, cook, chauffeur, and companion.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I watched my grandma, who was one of the most capable, hardworking, and gifted people I knew, forget how to check email, do laundry, turn on the radio, or cook for herself.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: I clumsily managed frustration-induced emotional outbursts stemming from an awareness of her own diminishing abilities.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was young and new at keeping a house but giving it my best shot.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: In grandma's mind, I would be a perfect project to turn from a willing but selfish teenager into a young woman who was wife material.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, grandma discovered that she was not able to teach me anything related to keeping a house.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Those nine months were very difficult on grandma, and she took it out on me in ways that stung in the moment before I reminded myself to see it from her foggy, disoriented perspective.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: This woman who had birthed and raised 12 children, run a farm, been a pastor's wife, and taught college courses, was finding everyday tasks that she knew were easy to be too hard.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: My years of spending afternoons with elderly relatives gave me an opening to be compassionate to her situation.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to sit with her and through prayer talk through some of her most depressed and confused times.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: In many ways, Alzheimer's care is like having a toddler, but backwards.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: With a toddler, there are so many hard things to be working through, and you have to do a lot of the reasoning for them.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: But you get to celebrate every day because of something new learned or a new milestone reached.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: When someone you love has Alzheimer's, you still have the everyday struggles and helping in many ways you would a toddler, but you watch and grieve every day while every skill and memory is forgotten.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Despite grandma's mental faculties taking their permanent leave, what she retained had a huge impact on my spiritual walk, and God taught me things about Himself through her that she would never have expected.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: She spent almost all day, every day, listening to sermons on the radio, CD, or cassette tape.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: When she wasn't listening, she was reading her Bible.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I would hear her reading aloud to herself in her chair, but if I checked on her, I'd see that her reading lamp wasn't on, she didn't have her reading glasses, the Bible in her lap was either closed or upside down, and she had her eyes closed.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, she was still perfectly reciting the Book of Romans to herself because in her mind she could see it.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: The scriptures she could summon from the depths of her failing mind had a huge impact on the power of the Bible in my own life, and I began reading it myself as I had never done before.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: There were days when her Bible recitation time was the only time she was at peace, and the rest of the day she was wrestling with questions about why God hadn't let her die yet, or lamenting that she believed she was no longer of use to anyone.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: This was a lot for an 18-year-old to be dealing with, and I frequently admitted to myself that I couldn't handle this.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was too hard, as everyone had warned me.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I saw God show up for grandma through me in many ways that are hard to describe.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: On days when she was deeply depressed, I sometimes had just the words to say to comfort and encourage, but as soon as they were said, I could not recall what they were.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: I would sometimes spend a whole afternoon sitting with grandma, listening to her and talking with her, without any personal experience with depression or aging, and God would allow me to understand her and give me what she knew what he knew she needed to hear.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: I also saw the grace of God in my own fumblings as I navigated some of these hard days.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes God wouldn't give me the words to say, and I would find that my own patience and compassion were not wide and deep enough for the emotional needs in front of me.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the beauties of Alzheimer's is that every day is a brand new day.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how disastrous a day could be, and there were many disasters, God showed that his mercies were new and I could rely on him.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Grandma always forgot the previous disaster and started the day with love and gratitude.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that has been an enduring lesson in having fresh grace and forgiveness for myself and those around me.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Another way that God helped me grow in my spiritual walk was having to strike out on my own in regards to a church.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up here at TBC, so moving somewhere else forced me to consider what I actually want from church.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I spent about a month church shopping in the least churched city in the country, finding churches that held some slight resemblance to TBC.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: The one that I found that felt like home was meeting in a school gym and was smaller than the Koinania class, which was not what I was expecting to land on.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Through that church, I heard fantastic Bible-based sermons, joined a Bible study, joined the prayer team, and made some lifelong friends.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: That church was the motivating reason for my staying for a second year.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: As my nine months came to an end, it was clear grandma would still need care at the end of the summer.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was asked if I would consider returning for a full year, and I happily accepted.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: When I moved home for the summer, I began dating Connor, the story for another time, and so my main consideration was a long-distance relationship made much easier by technology.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: My second year, starting in August 2012, was much less turbulent, both in terms of the lessons God was teaching me and because grandma was no longer aware of what she couldn't do.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: This kept her from being angry, and instead she was mostly content and curious about the very strange world around her.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: She continued to spend most of her day with sermons, Bible recitation, and prayer, and I was even better positioned to learn from her faithfulness.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: She still longed for eternity and patiently waited for her day to come when she would be reunited with her husband and two of her sons.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: So now to the epilogue.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I moved back to Topeka in August of 2013, leaving Grandma in the care of my CNA certified cousin Elliot.
• 13:15
  unknown: Not yet.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I had prayed about making my move to Oregon permanent, but I never felt peace about that decision, so home I came.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: I worked, finished college at Washburn, and within two years was married to Connor.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Grandma passed away in August of 2014.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is a picture from her funeral, and I counted, I think 19 grandchildren are not present.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a sampling.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm roughly there.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: She was fully nonverbal by this time and was very near to heaven's door.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'll see her again and we'll laugh about some of the things we went through together during those two years.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I take a bird's eye view of my life thus far, I see how God was working to put experiences into my life so I would be prepared for the mission he had for me in Oregon.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know that my story's not done, though, probably.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that someday I'll look back again and see that God was using what seemed mundane today, maybe mentoring high school girls or teaching my toddler to read or something else entirely, to be a pivotal experience for the next thing he has for me.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the point?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: What can you do with this collection of anecdotes from my short life?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Firstly, I hope you can feel encouraged if you find yourself in the mundane or the meanwhile's, as Connie talked about at Galantine's, that God is teaching you in ways that you might not expect or perceive.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: I hope if you are like me and you think that you missed out on having a fun testimony, you take a harder look at what God has brought you through, taught you, protected you from, blessed you with, or showed you about himself.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Our testimonies are not about us at all, really.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's always about him.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.