Mutti
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©The material on this page is copyrighted and may not be passed on
or reproduced without the author's written permission.
You are, however, welcome to pass on or link the URL.
Back to Traute's with links to her other webpages
Mutti was my best friend. For the first six years of my life she was my only friend. I sat at her feet on my little stool while she sat by her sewing machine. As she created beautiful clothes for us and for other people, she introduced me to the characters of folk tales, to the heroes of the Bible, and best of all, to the Lord she loved and served. My favorite story was the one which told of the nine months of waiting and preparing for my arrival. After three boys, she felt assured that this baby would finally be a girl.Mutti was careful how she chose names for her children. When telling me Bible stories, she always explained the meaning of names, and I came to consider them to be prophetic, because I saw the correlation between names and lives. For Mutti's first girl, the name had to be special. She wanted a girl who would be her friend, whom she would love unreservedly and whom she would trust. That is why she called me Traute, the "beloved girl who would be a trusted friend to her." (That is the meaning of the German adjective "traute.") Mutti paid me the highest compliment of my life when she told me that I was the only one of her children who had never lied to her.
When I had just turned one year old, a dramatic event occurred which was to test Mutti's faith almost beyond endurance. After receiving all my prescribed vaccinations, my body reacted by going through the very diseases against which I had been immunized, including whooping cough and scarlet fever, all of them at the same time. When the hospital saw that I had no chance to survive, they allowed my parents to take me home to die. My father called a homeopath who was known to have saved many lives, including his, but by the time he arrived, I had stopped breathing and my body was cold. He nevertheless undertook a treatment which he thought might revive me. He sent my parents out of the room to spare them the agony of the drama. He dipped me in very hot water and then wrapped me in cold towels. And the shock treatment did revive me.
Mutti has told me countless times about those anxious moments of waiting, talking to God, committing my life to him. She asked him to restore me to her only on the condition that I would live my life serving him. She gave God her consent to take me home at that time rather than allow me to live an ungodly life. That reminds me of the story of Hannah who dedicated Samuel to God's service. There is one big difference, though: Mutti did not hand me over to an ungodly high priest for spiritual training. She undertook it herself.
In February of 1945, we fled our burning city with little more than the clothes on our backs, but Mutti made sure that she saved two books which were to be my most valuable treasures, a Luther Bible and a Singvöglein (our Sunday school hymnal). I would sit on a footstool again reading to Mutti page after page of that Bible and we would sing the songs from the Sunday school hymnal. For the next four years, that Bible was the only book I would read, and its content became food to my spirit and soul.
Mutti loved to sing. She taught all her children to love music and she also taught the women in church to sing while playing guitars. Even when her memory failed, she had no problem singing praises to the Lord from memory. When she was no longer able to find her reading glasses, she would sit by the piano, and to her amazement, she was able, for the first time in her life, to play all her favorite hymns by ear. That was the Lord's special gift to her, she told me.
She loved the concerts in which I was singing and always made sure that everyone around her recognized me as her daughter. She was never content just to listen. She would join us in the choruses of Bach's Christmas Oratorio or his St. Matthew Passion or of Haydn's Creation. None of the other concert-goers complained about her singing. Maybe they received a special blessing that day.
And she knew how to pray. When she attended our family Bible studies, she was no longer able to follow the discussions, because her hearing loss made communication difficult and her memory loss restricted that communiction to her mother tongue, but she loved to be with the children who attended the Bible study. She would sing with and for them. All the children would hug her and she would pray for them. No one ever told her what to pray for, but she would invariably cover the needs in every life. She was truly praying in the Spirit.
Mutti is no longer praying. She is in the presence of the Lord to whom she was talking in her prayers. But she is still singing. And she is walking around glory shaking hands with all the new saints she is meeting for the first time and hugging all the ones she knew here on earth. Actually, she isn't walking. She is running. When she was well, she never had time to walk. She was always running.
When I go home to be with the Lord, I know who will come running to meet me -- my Mutti. First she will give me a big hug, and then she will grab my hand and drag me to meet the Lord, the same Jesus whom she introduced to me so many years ago.
I grieved for my mother for the 30 long years in which I saw her personality deteriorate from the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. I am done grieving. Now I rejoice with my mother. She is whole again.
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