By Jeff Walker
San Marcos — Pastor Gary Smith likes telling stories on Sundays. Using them as a springboard for his sermons, he said he can tell the same story to 10 different people and get 10 different interpretations, many of which he may have never intended — but that’s what he likes. Stories are inclusive. Stories don’t judge.
So when the former Air Force Chaplain decided to transform a list of stories from overseas into book form, Smith was a natural.
Smith has frigid memories of his first few months in Boerdonk, a tiny village tucked away in the heart of The Netherlands. It was a very long, cold winter for him and his family. The wind chill brought the temperature down to 10 below zero, it was so foggy they literally couldn’t see — and they’d get routinely lost trying to navigate through the area. It was eerily quiet. No one left their houses. The only signs of life came from the chiming church bells every morning and the smoke coming from their neighbor’s chimney. These two routines became Smith’s only connectors to the outside world.
“Every day we’d look at each other and say ‘what are we doing here,’ ‘how did we end up in such a far removed place?’” Smith said. “It was the normal six month transition into a new culture, and this happened to be a cold culture which was frigid, with no movement.”
So begins Smith’s new book “Letters from Boerdonk,” a collection of 32 letters relating true-life experiences, reflections on two distinctly different cultures and words of wisdom from a well-traveled pastor. Smith, who served in Boerdonk as an Air Force Chaplain for around 18 months, includes humorous takes on America, friendships, baseball, car batteries and the merits of hassling with a real Christmas tree. But he also adds a colorful set of characters: a generous landlord who also serves as mayor, a Polish pilot and dear friend of Smith’s, and a son, daughter and wife who get showered with love from Smith page by page.
There are lessons in the power of family, celebration, belief in community and the strong place of the church threaded through these letters, which were originally used as e-sermons to the seven areas he served in Europe.
More than anything, this book transplants us into a tiny, warm village that most Americans dream about but will never see. But it is indeed a great place to read about, a great place to think about.
Smith, the current pastor at Christ the Redeemer Church in San Marcos, will hold a book release for “Letters from Boerdonk” from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 6 at the H.Y. Price Seniors Center Tea Room. Larry Weston, illustrator of the book, will also be on hand with some of his own work.
The venue, once the local First Christian Church, holds great significance as it was the spot Smith was ordained as a minister in 1984. It was also the location of his wife’s baby shower in 1981.
Gary Smith and family did survive that first winter. By May in Boerdonk, as the weather started to improve and the fog finally started to diminish, Smith’s then 12-year-old son Daniel looked at him and said, “Dad, we made it.”
“I said ‘what do you mean?’ He said ‘We made it through these five months,’” Smith said.
From here, the family begins to embrace the village and, even more so, the slower pace of life. Daniel becomes fluent in Dutch within a few months, and chooses to join the Dutch School there. Their oldest daughter Amity, a student at Auburn at the time, came to visit, much to the delight of Gary and his wife Pam. In discussing early life in Boerdonk, Smith frequently mentions the church bells he heard every morning.
“The church bells were really interesting to me. In my mind at least, the pace of Dutch village was matched up with the pace of the church bells. They weren’t fast, but they were regular and they were always there and they were consistent,” Smith said. “The church bells irritated me at first. They just reminded you that you weren’t busy. But then, they became addicting. There was a slowness to life that was peaceful... I told my son once that Boerdonk was Lent personified.”
They also began to take note of the subtle social differences that exist over seas.
“Our landlord Toon was the mayor of village, and one of his roles as mayor was to help make sure people treated each other properly. It wasn’t a police type thing, he was just sort of the grandfather,” Smith said. “He came over to our house one day and told us that our curtains were off centered. With the Dutch, everything is immaculate. When I looked at our curtains, they were at most off centered by half an inch. That just really bothered some of the Americans (I talked to), but for my wife and I, it was the most comforting thing.”
But Toon began to penetrate the hearts of the Smith family. He had a great smile and an admirable love of life, hosting dances every Saturday night for 55 years. A former military man, Smith suspects that he was such a gentle person that World War II simply broke his heart.
On days when Smith would be terribly busy, Toon would convince him to spend four or five hours at his home just visiting with family and other villagers.
“We came back much more contented people, much more aware of the value and the beauty of being a community,” Smith said. “They would spend all Sunday afternoon on their porch because the thing they valued most was spending five hours drinking and talking. Most of our treasured times were when I’d just forget everything and go over there for four hours.”
While Gary never originally intended to turn these e-sermons into a book, they began to steadily grow in popularity. He would get e-mails back from people he’d never sent them to, meaning they were being forwarded to more people.
“When I would be gone and miss a Sunday for military obligations, people would e-mail me and say ‘where’s my Boerdonk sermon?’” Smith said. “People were opening up their computers on Monday morning ready for Boerdonk. I started realizing people were enjoying Boerdonk as much as I was.”
For a minister who prides himself on storytelling, people around him were eating these letters alive and looking for more. But just how the book got published is a story in itself.
In December of 2004 Smith, then the pastor at First Christian Church in San Marcos, got a call from a minister in Kentucky wanting him to do a wedding in San Marcos. Christmas was nearing, and Smith felt initially he didn’t have the time. But curiosity got the best of him, so he asked the stranger what this was all about.
The minister had a good friend named Dallas Layne in Kentucky who was stationed at the Air Force base in San Marcos 50 years ago. He was engaged to marry a girl, but the mother wanted no part of it. She wrote Dallas a letter saying “get out of my daughter’s life.” So Dallas just disappeared.
“Now, 50 years later, he has time and money on his hands, he’s raised kids and he’s not married, so he goes on a tour of the Internet looking for old Air Force buddies in Texas,” Smith said. “He stops in Georgetown, which he happened to remember was his ex-fiance’s hometown 50 years ago. He stops at a thrift shop to get coffee, starts asking around if anyone knows this woman.”
As it turns out, that woman was the founder and manager of the thrift shop Dallas had just stepped in. Once they met, they fell in love all over again and planned to get married in San Marcos the next month, in January 2005.
Smith immediately agreed to do the wedding after hearing the story.
“I’m at a point in my life now where fun factor is a big thing,” Smith said. “And it sounded like a really fun wedding to be a part of.”
The same morning he did the wedding, members of the Hays Caldwell Women’s Center were meeting in the chapel, but soon closed the meeting to be witnesses at the ceremony. Among this group of women was Melina Christopher, a Dripping Springs based publisher with High Point Publishing.
Smith and Christopher met, talked a little about his ideas, and she became immediately intrigued by “Letters from Boerdonk.”
“She asked ‘how long would it take you to write the book?’ Smith said.
“I could have it to you in three days.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s already done, it’s sitting in the closet in a box.”
“What’s it doing in a box?”
‘Well I was hoping to find a publisher one day.”
The two have other books in the works, namely retelling the story of Dallas Layne, his wife and their long road to marriage. In the meantime, Smith holds firmly to his philosophy of using weekly antidotes to welcome more into the Christian faith.
Stories, after all, are what he knows best.
