Loyal Glenn Siedenburg

Robert Siedenburg

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01/14/2016

Loyal Glenn Siedenburg

A photo of Loyal Glenn Siedenburg

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Robert Siedenburg

17 favorites

01/14/2016

Loyal Glenn Siedenburg

A photo of Loyal Glenn Siedenburg

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

Comments

Robert Siedenburg

17 favorites

01/14/2016

How does one encapsulate a life of nearly a century into a brief eulogy? Even modern compression software couldn’t do justice to Dad’s life in the time we have today.
For those of us who knew Dad well, he was a warm and affectionate man. He loved to sing, to smile, and to laugh, but of course he had a deeply serious side too. He was a master story-teller, and he loved a good clean joke. Nearly three years ago Dad was in the Freeport hospital with a really bad case of the flu. I called his room hoping to talk to him. He didn’t have his hearing aids in, and it took a minute to get past the “who? Who?” business. Then he said, “Oh, Rob, it’s you. Hey, I just heard a new joke,” and he told me about the city gal who wanted a deer-crossing sign moved so the deer wouldn’t cross the road into her garden. As soon as Dad started telling the joke, I knew that his spirits were high and that he was going to pull through.
Just a couple of months ago when Dad came out of anesthesia for the surgery to put a stent into his esophagus, he told a joke. When my sister asked him where he had come up with that joke he said, “Oh, that’s an old one I heard years ago.” And when he told a good joke, Dad would laugh just as loudly as his listeners. He loved to see people having a good time and enjoying a good joke. And anyone who knew him loved to see him flash that beautiful grin.
Through his years of writing stories, Dad has written some really funny ones, but he’s also written a couple of tear-jerkers. The one about my pet deer comes to mind, and another one he mailed me when I lived in France with my family. That latter one told about how their dog would go to the top of the lane every week night to wait for my kids to walk home from the school bus, only to come home whining sadly when they didn’t show up. He used that as a picture of how sad he was that we were gone from the farm. The story ended something like this: “Too long your happy voices have been gone from the farm, and Mother and I are sad for our loss.” Well, Dad, today we are sad for our loss, for the fact that we won’t hear your happy voice around the farmstead, that we won’t be able to hug you, and that we won’t see your brilliant smile.
You could find Dad around the farm most days by listening for his voice. He had a lovely Irish tenor, and he would belt out the hymns and old songs as he went about his work. In the hills, you can hear voices over the sound of a tractor engine, and my brother and I often located Dad out in the field by the song we heard coming from a hillside where he was tilling the soil or working a crop.
Dad was a bit of a mathematical whiz, and he could do remarkable things in his head. When I was in grade school I suffered badly during the years when I was supposed to be learning long division. The problems actually gave me severe headaches. Dad set up a desk for me in the milk house. Between baskets of feed I carried in for the cows, I’d work a set of problems. Then I’d run the milk machines in the milking parlor while Dad ran the nine-check on my problems, circling the incorrect answers. I understand the principle of the nine-check, but somehow I could never do it myself.
I had been married, then separated from my first wife of twenty-five years, and finally divorced. After a long friendship with my present wife Mary, I asked her to marry me, and she agreed. Of course I brought her home to meet my parents. On Sunday we all went to church together, and afterward we went back to the farm for a big Sunday dinner. When Dad bowed his head to give thanks that day, he said, “Father, help Mary to understand that, just as we are accepted by you in the Beloved, so she is accepted by us in the beloved.” I don’t know whether Mary was touched by that prayer or not, but I sure was.
Dad was always a great inventor, as so many American farmers are. How many different ways are there to fasten a gate? One time when I was living in Rantoul, Illinois, a couple of single ladies who lived over in Bloomington, Illinois, asked me to help them build a pen back of their house for their dogs. They had priced chain-link fencing, and it was going to run into the hundreds of dollars. I suggested cattle panels and T-posts and took them to Farm and Fleet to show them what stock panels looked like. They decided that was the way to go. I was to drive over the following Saturday and build their fence.
As I was driving to Bloomington that Saturday morning, I called Dad to brainstorm about how I could make a gate using a piece of stock panel. Over the phone we came up with a plan to cut the horizontal rods in such a way that we could bend two of them up on the piece of panel next to the gate, set a six-inch long half-inch pipe nipple on each, then bend the two horizontals just above them down on the piece of panel that was to make the gate. The system we talked through on the phone worked beautifully in practice, and the ladies and their dogs were very pleased with the arrangement.
Dad couldn’t pass a stranded motorist without offering help, and most of us kids have inherited that trait. One time he brought a hitchhiker home for the night some time around Thanksgiving. We fed the guy, made sure he got a good night’s sleep, and took him to a major highway the next morning so he could catch a ride on to his destination. Years later I brought home a hitchhiker. He came back to visit a few months later, along with his girlfriend. There was something wrong with his car’s registration, and Mount Carroll’s finest wrote him a ticket and took him to the sheriff’s office until he could post bond. I was off at a National Guard drill, so the young fellow called my dad, who went to town, accepted the fellow’s check, and paid his bond. Well, the guy’s check was no good, so Dad was out $50. He was always philosophical about it, though. “You’ve just got to help people,” he would say.
Through the years lots of people have approached me to tell me how Dad helped them or encouraged them.
When Dad was about ten years old, he visited the Mount Carroll Church of the United Brethren in Christ with his Grandmother Siedenburg. On one wall of the sanctuary in big letters were these verses from the Bible, found in the Book of Malachi, chapter 3, verses 8 through 10:
“Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” On that day Dad decided that he would always tithe his income to the Lord, and, so far as I know, he always did—and then some.
Another story related to Dad’s faith has to do with a big field of hay that was down and raked into windrows on the Schubert farm my parents rented near Ideal, Illinois. Dad had one crew baling hay and another hauling the bales to the middle of the field where he was building a stack that would later be covered with a big tarp. From his vantage point atop the stack, he could look off to the west where he saw a line of rain coming slowly toward his field of hay. If it rained on that hay, the entire cutting could be ruined, along with the stack of bales. Standing there on top of that hay stack, Dad raised his arms over his head and asked the Lord to keep the rain from his field. Closer and closer it came, but then it stopped, the sun came back out, and the hay was saved. Surely that experience strengthened Dad’s faith, a faith that remained strong his whole life.
One day a few weeks ago we left my wife Mary with Dad, while Mother, sister Merry, and I went to Lanark to the burial of a wonderful life-long friend, Evelyn Bergdall. While we were gone, Dad and Mary had a heart-to-heart talk about many things. He wondered why he was suffering, and she said, “Dad, this is your final exam.”
Dad replied, “No. I passed my final exam long ago.” By that he meant that he had put his trust in Jesus as his personal savior, and that he had settled things spiritually long before. One of Dad’s favorite old songs was “The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago.” Over the past few months, as Dad grew nearer death, he began to ask his friends and neighbors whether he’d get to see them again in heaven. He wanted to be sure that the people he thought so much of would get their tickets to eternal life so that he could spend eternity in God’s presence with them. If you’re a friend of Dad’s, he’d want me to ask you that question this morning: have you settled things with the Lord? Do you know where you’re going after this life? Receiving the Lord as your personal savior is a very simple transaction. You just tell him you’re a sinner, as we all are, and invite him to be the Lord of your life.
One morning when my older sister Delight was about eight, and I was about six, Dad was late getting the milking started because a big wind had damaged some of the buildings. The wind was gusting, and sheets of rain were sweeping up our valley in relays. When it was time for Delight and me to start off across the field to walk to the school bus, Dad came to the front yard, right by the porch, put one arm around each of us, and prayed, committing us to the Lord. I remember walking off that morning with my head held high, knowing that Delight and I were safe in the Lord’s protection. When Dad prayed, you knew that the Lord heard him.
Last week we got a Christmas card from Abby, a friend from Chicago. She recently put her trust in the Lord Jesus as her personal savior, and she wanted us to know. She said she had been to so many sad, dreary funerals of friends, where everything seemed so hopeless and final. Then she attended the funeral of a born-again Christian friend. Abby said she had never before seen joy at a funeral. It seemed more like a celebration than a lament. Her friend’s husband called it a “homegoing celebration.” She decided there was something there that she and her family didn’t have, and she wanted it. In Isaiah 29:11 we read, “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” This is the God that my dad knew, loved, and served. That’s what the Lord has for you, if you’re willing to receive it.
Our wonderful dad has given us a great start in life. He’s helped to ground us in practical matters, and in matters of the heart and soul. We miss him terribly, but we look forward to seeing him again in the presence of the Lord, where there will be no more sickness and no more death. Thanks, Dad. We love you.

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Kathy Pinna

32.8k+ favorites

01/14/2016

What a wonderful tribute to your father! You were blessed having him and he was blessed having you.

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