People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:13-15)
Growing up in a small Michigan town in the years immediately following WWII and living in a warm and loving Christian home was in many ways idyllic. Mom was the typical 50’s homemaker, who accompanied her washing, cleaning, and cooking duties with radio broadcasts from WMBI (the long-range AM station from Moody Bible Institute). Dad was the typical bread-winner, who came home every evening, stopping to pick up the newspaper on the front steps before coming in for supper.
The whole family ate breakfast and supper together (lunch, of course, we kids garnered from our lunch boxes at school), and after supper Dad read to us from Elsie Eggermeier’s Bible Story Book. Afterward, he and Mom read the paper and we kids played or tuned in to comedies or mysteries on the big Motorola console radio.
Bedtime meant bed-side prayers, which always began with “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray thee my soul to take.” That was the school-year routine. [Lunch box photo source.]
But summer—ah, what a joy! After breakfast, the OAK boys (Ohlman, Andrews, and Kenfield) met briefly to determine the plan for the day—which we would share with our moms, who then simply asked whether we were coming home for lunch or if they needed to pack a sack lunch for us. Hastings was divided into quadrants, called wards, and the typical rule for kids was this: if you knew your four-digit phone number and knew your address, you were free to roam your ward. Mom’s knew you were somewhere in the ward unless you asked permission to go to another ward. Each ward had its own elementary school, so most of your friends were from your ward.
Ours was the First Ward, which was blessed to include a few town-edge farms. Closest to us was the Kelly farm with probably 80 acres, which included a cornfield, a couple pastures, and a wonderful woods with a muskrat pond, a creek, and an old railroad bed (the former Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw Railroad—sometimes called by the old-timers the “Cuss, Kick, and Swear” railroad). We called the now trackless bed “the tramp trail” because hobos sometimes used it to walk from town to town and job to job.
On occasion a tramp would show up at our back door, and Mom would usually give him something to eat on the back stoop, an act that earned our house a hobo mark that indicated that the kind lady living there would give you something to eat. [Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw Railroad photo source]
We called Kelly’s woods “the grubs,” (our having no idea where that name came from). But the grubs was where I received my outdoor education and my love for nature. The OAK boys sometimes spent the entire day there making tree houses or various hideouts, looking for frogs to catch and dispatch so we could eat frog legs (which really do taste like chicken), shinnying up and swinging on saplings, or picking wildflowers to bring home to our moms (Lanny Kenfield’s mom was blind, and she especially loved the fragrant violets).
How I miss those days now—missing them mostly for our grandchildren, who often ask me to tell them stories of my childhood adventures: about the time a captured turtle bit my belly and sent me home screaming in pain as he flopped up and down, about my cocker spaniel tripping up a bull who was chasing us in Kelly’s pasture, about my cutting my foot with a hatchet I had found in the grubs, and so forth. Sometimes I’m able to take our grandchildren into the woods, but that doesn’t make up for the opportunity of their being free to wander, play, entertain themselves, and become intimate with the woods and pastures. Kids need to experience—and explore—the outdoors.
About a month ago while walking on a newly-built roadside trail, I did discover a couple boys building a hut in the woods, and it filled me with nostalgia. Fortunately I had my camera with me and could capture an activity that has now become so rare. The Wonder Kids page of this website is provided to give parents, grandparents, and other child caregivers tips about getting kids back outdoors and ideas about instructing them in important truths about their Creator and His “other book”—what theologians have termed the “general revelation.”
Nothing electronic can come close in value as an “educator” of children than the wonders of God’s creation. We gotta get ‘em out there!
I wonder how many children of Christian parents even know that Jesus still lives, that He is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, and that He is the Redeemer who with the Father keeps and eventually takes our souls and will ultimately return those souls to incorruptible bodies that will enjoy endless life on a restored earth. Teach that to a kid today!

Our family of six lived there for eight years, our dad having become a partner with another Christian man in Hastings Motor Sales, a Dodge and Plymouth auto dealership. Hastings is the county seat—the governmental center of Barry County, a blue-collar region in central West Michigan. A few factories in the town provided the majority of bread-winner jobs. One was the once-famous Hastings Piston Rings Company—a plant about a quarter of a mile from our house, where we kids used to scrounge around for cast off springs that we extended from dowels and shot at birds.
were no-doubt the most significant factors in the spiritual formation of my dad and mom, both of them coming to Christ through his ministry and taught for almost four decades by its radio programs and its 






I walked home one winter’s Sunday morning after church. It was a lovely day. The sun shone so warm that you could not help thinking of what God would be able to do before long—draw primroses and buttercups out of the earth by force of sweet persuasive influences. But in the shadows lay fine webs of laces of ice, so delicately lovely that one could not but be glad of the cold that made the water able to please itself by taking such graceful forms. And I wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious, work of nature, always kept it beautiful. The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy, therefore all His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form (




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