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John Edward Farner
April 20, 1912 - March 15, 2008 The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. (Galatians 5:22)
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There are many in John Farner's
family who spent far more time with him than I did, who knew him far
longer and are much better qualified than I to have this privilege
of speaking at his memorial service. Nevertheless, I am grateful
for one more opportunity, in the hearing of John's family and
friends, to express my thanks for John Farner's life and friendship,
and especially for his example to and investment in his
granddaughter Pam Nichols, the person with whom I have been
privileged to spend my adult life.
At the time in her young life when
she had experienced tragic and difficult circumstances, a time when
she was being spiritually formed and making crucial decisions about
life's most important questions, Pam saw her grandfather living in
practical, everyday ways a set of values, priorities, habits, and
disciplines that actually matched the spiritual faith he frequently
talked about. John Farner lived his relationship with Christ
authentically and attractively, and as Pam spent time with her
grandparents in those years, she decided she wanted a similarly
genuine spiritual life. She determined to be a Quaker like they
were. That decision eventually led her to attend Friends Bible
College in Kansas, and that led to our meeting and, a few years
later, our marriage. I will eternally be grateful to John Farner
for the part his faithful witness played in those events.
When I met John Farner in the
months before our marriage, I soon noted a clear similarity between
him and my own maternal grandfather, Anfred Johnson. As a young
kid, I remember having the impression that my grandfather was some
sort of a retired pastor because of his extensive knowledge of
scripture, the frequency and naturalness of prayer in their home,
his concern and care for people, and the priority placed on the work
and progress of the church. It was only later in my teens that I
figured out the he was in fact a retired farmer, laborer, and county
road maintainer, much like John Farner was. They both made the
spiritual life such an integral part of their identities that they
became ministers in whatever role they happened to be filling.
For some years now, whenever we
were in Melba, Pam has been quizzing her grandfather about his life
and making notes of his answers. On more than one occasion, he told
us about his and Treva's becoming Christians in March 1933 at the
Franklin Community Church during revival meetings conducted by
student evangelists from Pacific College. In February 2007, we
drove John from Sunbridge up to Franklin Community to see the church
and their old farmsteads. It was fascinating to watch John as he
walked through the church and remembered that evening 75 years ago.
In talking to Pam about that experience, he said his favorite hymn
was Amazing Grace because he realized how undeserving and
ignorant of the things of God he was when he went forward to receive
Christ.
After a few years as a Christian,
John told Pam of a day at their home in Nampa when he was at a
spiritual low point. He said he could still remember going to the
back yard, hanging his arms over the clothesline wire, and in
despair pouring out his heart to God. He didn't want just to live
with the label "Christian" -- he longed for a real renewal of his
inner self, for power to obey what he knew to be right and true.
John said there were no lightning bolts or voices, but he went back
into the house a changed person, and that day marked the beginning
of his transformation into the spiritual anchor of his family.
John's life steadily took on the essence of I Peter 2:9, 21:
"You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, ...a people belonging
to God that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of
darkness into His wonderful light..... To this you were called,
because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you
should follow in His steps."
That was the testimony of John's
life during the years Pam spent so much time at the Farner ranch.
She saw his disciplined commitment to follow in Christ's steps, and
the fruit of the Spirit that his life increasingly yielded. It was
those qualities of Christ's divine humanity which she saw in her
grandfather that created in Pam the desire for that same character
and authenticity in her own life.
When we were John's pastors at
Melba from 1988-1991, I remember him loving the hymn O To Be
Like Thee for how its aspiration applied to that period in his
life. I cannot hear or sing the hymn without thinking of John
Farner:
O to be like Thee, blessed
Redeemer; this is my constant longing and prayer.
Gladly I'll forfeit all of earth's treasures, Jesus Thy perfect likeness to wear.
O to be like Thee, full of
compassion, loving, forgiving, tender and kind;
Helping the helpless, cheering the fainting, seeking the wand'ring sinner to find.
O to be like Thee, while I am
waiting, pour out Thy Spirit, fill with Thy love.
Make me a temple meet for Thy dwelling, fit me for life and heaven above.
O to be like Thee, O to be
like Thee, blessed Redeemer, pure as Thou art.
Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness, stamp Thine own image deep on my heart. (Thomas O. Chisholm)
As a good farmer, John knew that
if the sap/life in the tree is apple sap, and if it is free to move
in the tree as intended, the fruit that gets produced will be
apples. In the spiritual life, he had learned that by giving
Christ's Spirit complete freedom to live within and through him, and
by seeking to be like Jesus, Christ's character of love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and
self-control increasingly became his own character. Like countless
Quakers over the past three centuries, John found that those inward
qualities of Christ's presence and character got expressed through
his life in several consistent ways or "testimonies" that enhanced
not only his own life but the lives of those around him, much like
spices bring out the best in the foods to which they're added.
When we lived in Uganda, we took
two vacation trips to Zanzibar, a tropical Indian Ocean island off
the coast of Tanzania. While there, we took a tourist excursion to
the farms of several smallholders who produced nutmeg, cinnamon,
cumin, vanilla beans, exotic pepper, and several other spices. We
had always enjoyed those spices' influence on a variety of foods,
but we had no idea where the spices came from or how they were
grown. And because there was nothing particularly glamorous about
the little spice farms, we could have repeatedly driven right past
them without ever suspecting that such useful crops were being
produced there.
Pam has borrowed the acronym SPICE
from Quaker pastor and blogger Scott Wagoner in North Carolina for
several recent articles describing how the fruit of the Spirit gets
consistently expressed as simplicity, peace, integrity, community,
and equality through those who seek to be like Jesus. Sometimes it
is easy for us to enjoy and benefit from exceptional lives like John
Farner's without ever stopping to consider the true source of those
remarkable qualities.
Simplicity
John lived in quiet contentment with God's care and provision, and
that resulted in a commitment to simplicity that was marked by
Christ's love and joy. People in Indiana have heard the story of
the small oak writing desk in our dining room in Winchester that
came from the Farner household. In the early years of John's
marriage, in the midst of the Great Depression, John had to travel
for two weeks to northern Idaho for his work for the Dairy
Association. Treva asked for some "emergency money" for the time
he'd be away, and John reluctantly came up with $10, a large amount
of cash in those days. When he returned from his trip, John was
dismayed to learn that Treva had spent $8 of the emergency money on
the little writing desk, something he obviously didn't consider a
necessity. Although he wasn't happy about the purchase, John's
simplicity was guided by love, so he let Treva be Treva, and the
desk stayed in the home.
When we spent time with the
Farners in the early 1990s after returning from Africa, we
discovered that they were still paying monthly rent for old
Trimline dialer telephones long after the whole world had moved
on to privately owned touch-tone phones. In discussing an upgrade
with John, his initial response was "these phones work fine; why
would we want to change them?" His simplicity was flexible enough,
however, to allow us to install easier to use touch-tone phones, and
to save him a considerable sum by stopping the rental arrangement.
The last car John owned was a
Chevy Cavalier with rapidly-fading blue metallic paint. John took
good care of it, and it ran well, but the finish evidently couldn't
stand up to the Idaho sun. John would sometimes talk about
upgrading, and no doubt he could have, but he always ended up
deciding that that car wasn't worn out, it got him where he needed
to go, and he didn't need anything newer. Christ's character of
self-control enabled John to be honest about his needs, and kept him
from upgrading cars just to impress others.
John's enjoyment of his life was
marked by his frequent whistling of hymns while he worked. It was
joy that came from within, not from expensive hobbies, the latest
gimmick, or things he owned. And his joy in life was further
evidenced by his recording something of his activities nearly every
day for years on spiral-bound calendars. It was always fascinating
to listen to John and Treva disagree over the details of something
that happened years ago, then watch John go retrieve that year's
diary, find the date/event in question, and settle it from his
notes. In most cases, the people who want to remember their lives
enough to write it down are people living with joy because of
Christ's presence.
Peace John
Farner also expressed Christ's character by living in peace. I only
knew him for the last third of his life and was only around
occasionally, but to me, John was the picture of inner peace -- with
God and with himself -- as he sat surveying the Melba Valley from
his living room. In the thirty years I knew him, I never saw John
act in hostility or intentionally hurt anyone, and from our
conversations about Christian discipleship, I know that he
considered nonviolence to be part of the call to be like Jesus.
Like Pam and I, John was perplexed by the international insecurity
and wars of our time and had no easy answers for them. But when it
came to choices he could make, it was the spiritual fruit of peace,
kindness, and gentleness that defined his treatment of people.
Those traits are often portrayed by the dominant culture as
weakness, but John Farner's life demonstrated that in fact they are
the signs of great strength. Early on the same day that John died,
an elderly woman in our community in Indiana (the mother of one of
our church's elders) also died. She too was a deeply spiritual,
gentle, kind person, the sort that the world is desperately short of
these days. Our sorrow over the deaths of these saints is in part a
recognition of the loss of their beautiful witness of peace in a
world bent on violence.
Integrity One
of the first stories I ever heard about John Farner was the tale of
the new house on the hillside west of Melba, and the agonizing wait
in 1975 to learn whether he would be paid for that year's corn seed
crop after refusing to send detassling crews into the fields on
Sunday. The money for building the new house had already been
spent, and losing that crop would have been financially disastrous,
but John stuck to his principle of honoring the Sabbath and trusted
God to take care of the corn. As far as I knew, he was always
honest and dependable and always treated people right. His
stewardship of everything in his life -- possessions, the farm, the
earth, relationships, time -- was marked by genuine care. When he
determined what he sensed God wanted him to do, he did it. Soon
after I met John, Pam told me to notice his pronounced jaw muscles
and explained that he developed them when he began chewing gum as a
substitute for cigarettes after coming under spiritual conviction
about smoking. John's life of integrity was a visible expression of
the spiritual qualities of goodness and self-control.
Community The
spiritual trait of faithfulness was expressed in John's life through
his consistent and committed involvement in a number of
communities. Whether it was in his family, his church, the farm and
livestock community, civic organizations, or other associations,
John made meaningful contributions and consistently made sacrifices
for the common good. Because of Christ's love at the center of his
life, he continued the historic Quaker witness of "watching over one
another for good."
Equality As
an outsider coming into the Farner family, it always appeared to me
that every one of John's children, grandchildren, great
grandchildren, and other family members got an equal share of his
heart -- they each got all of it. John loved all of his family
completely and unconditionally, love that was obviously the fruit of
the Spirit of Christ who controlled his life. We who came into
John's life by invitation from immediate family members received
that same unconditional love. John's spiritual life enabled him to
see "that of God" in others, and he treated them that way. Even in
the increasingly diverse world of 21st century Idaho, John's respect
and decency towards all others testified of Christ's love expressed
in everyday life.
So just as spices enhance and
bring out the best in the foods to which they are added, John
Farner's friendship and ministry to all of us has enriched and
improved our lives. We have gathered today to give thanks to the
Lord for loving us so beautifully as to bless us with a loved one
and friend like John, and for the many ways that the world is a
better place because of the good John accomplished here for almost
96 years. And just as spices and fruit come from seeds, John's
example and care-filled ministry has planted these seeds of
spiritual vitality, beauty, and productiveness into the lives of all
of us who were privileged to know him. We will best honor his
memory and continue his concerns and ministries by nurturing those
spiritual qualities in our own lives and families, allowing them to
grow up in us to produce the fruit of Christlike lives, thus
continuing to spice and sweeten the lives of new generations the way
God has blessed ours through the life of John Farner.
Ron Ferguson
19 March 2008
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