Plain View Farm, Rural Bryant, SD

Heritage can be ignored and neglected, we know, and then it is lost. When something like Heritage is lost, it can seldom be retrieved. Heritage is something that must be kept alive, or it will slip away forever into obscurity. When it is gone, it will be regretted deeply, but the loss cannot be made up. We must not let that happen to us! But again, what do we mean by Heritage? Let me say this first: does anyone care today what Grandpa Ginther's politics were? Does anyone care how Grandpa Stadem voted and for whom? Except for idle interest, no one would care to inquire about their respective political stands today. What people would care to know, if whether they were good fathers, good husbands, and had love for their families. What was their character? What kind of men were they? Did they have integrity, or not? What kind of marriages did they have? Did they care for God or not--and how did they serve God, or didn't they? What did they think about salvation--or was it of no concern to them while they lived on this earth what their eternal destiny might be?

Those are some of the questions that would probably still matter today, after fifty years have passed since their deaths, are they not? I know they would be questions I would like the answers to. I do happen, as a grandson of both these men, to know the answers. As for their politics, I have no idea, I would have to guess. And I really wouldn't care what they were, as a matter of fact. But as to the important things, I don't have to guess, I know the facts. You see, these men left legacies, and they still matter, indeed, they matter a lot. This is what we are concerned about, these lasting legacies of our grandparents, who did not merely spend some time on earth, work at this or that occupation and calling, marry his sweetheart and father some children and raise them to adulthood--then retire to the rocker on the porch and one day die as all men do when the heart finally beats its last beat and stops. No, all men do such things, to varying degrees of success or failure. But what makes our Stadem legacy worth preserving, worth cultivating today, worth celebrating even at the Heritage Center, is that Grandpa Stadem, particularly, left a GOLDEN legacy for us to enrich ourselves with! If you spend any time on the Plain View Farm websites, you will learn the seemingly inexhaustible richness and bountiful diversity of that legacy in the accounts about Alfred Stadem, Bergit his wife, and his children. Alfred Stadem's legacy was played out in the lives of his wife and children, they were the artist's palette with which his legacy was painted, in all its splendid array of bright colors, appealing, warm hues, beguiling nuances, contrasting shades, and sometimes dark umbers.

We see Alfred Stadem in the round, a strong-spirited, manly but engaging, fully-orbed man, because he was eminently a social, relationship-energizing man, investing his manifold talents and considerable brain and ingenuity and love of God in people around him, starting with his wife and family, then extending out to his neighbors, friends, church and the community of Bryant. Though he cultivated "separateness," he certainly continued to cultivate sociableness with it! His godliness did not shut him into a closet--just the opposite, it took him out of the closet to reach out to others, even as far as Mexico!

To maintain himself as a man set apart, in the world, but not of it, he deliberately, steadfastly cultivated the look of a humble, common man, with agriculture as his trade--but he was an extraordinary man. I think there are many things that could be called out of the ordinary about him. We know about his auctioneering, his well-digging (using a water wych technique that works "well" today, the well-digging people of of the Bryant-Lake Norden locality have lately informed me!), his serving on a hospital board, his years and years of being Sunday School superintendent, his zealous support of Christian education, his plunging strenuously into mission work in Mexico with his beloved wife for years until his passing, his work promoting the Lutheran Fellowship Meetings and serving as an official on the board while sharing in the Christian Fellowship with great zest, his love of simple fun and frolic on the Farm in bands that he organized and led, his love of beauty and how he worked to beautify the Farm with rows of trees and orchards and even a fish pool, his cultivation of hospitality, so that any guest could come and he drop whatever he was doing and would be a most welcoming host, as long as the guest was on the property--there are many, many aspects to him we cannot even pause to identify here if we want to get to the main point. Yes, he had a multifaceted life, to be sure, but the aspect that intrigues me most about him, even above his burning faith in God and his zeal for righteous living to the point where he might be criticised for being too straight-laced and demanding of proprieties, was his choosing to be "separate."

Alfred Stadem regarded himself as a practicing disciple of Christ, a Christian pilgrim on this earth, his whole life. As a pilgrim just passing through, not intending to remain on earth's sod (or under it after three score and twenty years), with heaven as his destination, not a grave set in a pleasant grassy plot of the Bryant cemetery, Alfred Stadem determined early on in his young manhood to live a separated, consecrated-to-God life. Life in town was "not what it was cracked up to be," as he put it in the vernacular when describing urban life.

To achieve this and help him live that separated, consecrated Pilgrim way, he married a Christ-loving woman who was of like mind and spirit, another pilgrim who regarded this life as her opportunity to love and serve God and her fellow man, but all with the purpose of spending eternity with the Lord in heaven. She too, then, was a pilgrim.

The material things, consequently, did not dominate Alfred and Bergit. They had material things, to be sure, but the material things did not have Alfred and Bergit and consume them, as they consume so many Americans, and so destructively, in this materialistic, consumerist culture. Money was useful, but it did not really matter very much to Alfred. He wasn't interested or aiming to make a lot of money, then retire. He wanted a godly, productive life, but not in the material sense that most men would reckon a life well lived and profitably spent. Always a pilgrim, Alfred never forgot that everything in life is passing and transitory. He therefore thought it wise not to place much stock in material things, since they weren't going to stick around anyway. Why try to accummulate more and more, when it was all going to slip from your fingers in the end? Wisdom would tell a man to concentrate on more lasting, eternal things, which you were more likely to enjoy forever, since they were not based on shifting earthly dust or sand.

Having determined early on not to live as men commonly did in the urban societies of town and city, he chose to be a farmer by trade as the most amenable way to cultivate his separateness as a pilgrim making his way through life's circumstances to the heavenly city promised all God's true children. He was so talented and such a good worker, he might have tried most anything and made a success of it, even made a respectable pile of money doing it. But no, instead he chose farming (the simplicity of lifestyle, that comes from a small farm operation), and to keep his goal firmly in mind--eternal heaven, not transitory and vain earthly riches--he kept his holdings deliberately modest, even small. Other farmers saved and as soon as they could bought acreages, enlarging their farms whenever possible, always expanding and getting bigger and bigger, with all the complex operations and increased time spent on them that expansion dictated. Alfred did not follow that generally accepted way, he had his own unique course in life, which was keeping separate as a Christian pilgrim from the world and its misdirected ways, as he saw it. He held a steady course as a pilgrim, right to the end. He lived as a pilgrim in this world, and he passed from it a pilgrim.

Have we ignored or forgotten this aspect of Alfred Stadem's legacy, loved ones? A few have seen this aspect (which has Scandinavian roots, by the way, in the Christian culture and pious Christian faith and simplified, unostentatious lifestyle of Scandinavians for generations) and followed the same sort of course, of separation from worldly values of getting and getting and spending and spending, while saving to heap up riches, investing and expanding our retirement portfolios, building ever bigger houses and barns, even if they aren't that needed. But it is only a few of us who have followed Alfred Stadem's example in this, right? What Alfred Stadem chose is so contrary to the common, contemporary American lifestyle. It smacks even of David Thoreau and his Walden Pond experience (which only lasted a couple years, by the way, whereas Grandpa made his separation last his lifetime). Some of us might say, "It doesn't take all that." As a young boy I once wrote this limerick: "Much wants more, avoids the poor." Not bad for a young boy! It expresses a philosophy that is completely anti-materialism, does it not? It is expresses the way too that Alfred Stadem lived his life by choice. Why is this important? The Rich Young Ruler in the New Testament came to Jesus, but he went away sorrowful. Why? Jesus asked him to give up his material wealth to the poor (and he was very rich) and follow Him, but he wouldn't, so he could not become a disciple of Jesus. Here he could have become, at Jesus' invitation, one of ther Twelve Apostles, but he gave up his opportunity for material things, things that would all pass away. He gave up eternal life and eternal blessings, for things that would be taken all away from him at death! How tragic!

I know this way of Christian, pilgrim-like separation, of eschewing material values and choosing instead to cultivate the non-material, spiritual realities, is not popular today, it may even seem strange and anti-social to our post-modern secularist mindset--but I love my Grandpa Alfred Stadem for this aspect of his--it makes him a truly worthy man to emulate, in my humble opinion. I inherited somehow some of this disposition, to look upon materialism as a threat, or a hindrance, to more important spiritual values, and felt this way early on in my iife, and have tried to be faithful to this view in my life--even though I did not consciously know it was Grandpa Alfred Stadem who first showed us the way to do it.

Others might look upon him as out of date, out of touch with contemporary society because he was rustic in his lifestyle and even was concerned for souls and their salvation, even thinking him a patriarchal hay seed or country bumpkin, but actually I see him as a very wise man, truly wiser than most men, in choosing to live separate like a pilgrim from this world's obsessive, matrialistic way of life, while remaining always concerned for sinners and their need for Christ's salvation. He spared himself the excesses and griefs of materialism and being enslaved to things. His "simplicity" was actually very much ahead of his times. The most sophisticated financiers and stock market people on Wall Street in New York dream about what Alfred Stadem had! We know, because they tell us so! He was a very happy man, as his pictures indeed reveal--he could be very sober, but he was usually quite genial and good humored. He loved his wife more than anything, except his Lord. She was the sweetest frosting on the cake of his life, but she also was his staple meat and potatoes too--for man cannot live on sweetness alone but has to have real sustenance to keep up his strength and vigor.

To sum up, Grandpa Stadem (unlike the Rich Young Ruler in scripture, who came to Christ but went away sorrowing, unable to become a disciple because he refused to give up his material wealth to the poor) discovered the key to a life worth living (and knew that he had found it) that, faithfully and steadily applied by the God-fearing man of integrity, not only produced happiness and purpose for himself, but left a lasting, valuable impression on those who were privileged to be his family and descendants, not to mention his innumerable friends. He lived separate, being a Christian pilgrim on this sinful old earth, but remained eminently sociable. He was of the common man (not a snob or a step up from others) and could relate to anyone regardless of color or culture or educational level, as his Mexican mission support and church work in Mexico proved. He loved good, wholesome fun and clean humor. He hated profanity and ungodly habits and Sabbath breaking, but (despite some judgmentalism, which he later repented of) he could reprove those who swore or drank in a way that was conducive to their changing their ways to respect God in their lives. He was a manly man, he knew what hard work was, and never left it to others to do for him, but remained gentle and a gentleman. He hated egotism, he avoided the "big I", as he called it. He was always ready for Christian fellowship--it was so high on his list of values, he would drop essential farm work temporarily to be a host to visiting friends, family, and other guests. He was a loving father to his many children, a faithful and loving husband to his wife, a friend to sinners, a support of Christian charity in diverse places of need, an evangelist of the soul-saving, life-transforming Gospel of Jesus Christ wherever he could minister in that way. We might go on and on, and we could, but for limited space. His legacy is indeed golden, and well worth preserving (and it behooves us to be involved in carrying it on in our own lives, I believe, and sharing it with others as well, unless we have something better to do with our remaining days on this passing old earth).--Stadem Grandson, Ronald Ginther