Klaus Meier, age 77, died unexpectedly at Darvell community on 2 January 2010. He is survived by his wife Irene, 10 children, and 50 grandchildren. His son Arnold spoke to the children and young people about his father’s life the following day:

I would like to tell some things that my dad shared with me over the last couple of years. What’s important when somebody dies is that each person’s life has a purpose. Each of you, and each of us, needs to discover what that purpose is – why has God put us here? – and then to be faithful to that. The last letter my dad wrote me was short; it said, “To be fighters for Jesus is the issue. It is a spiritual battle and the harder it gets, the better it gets.” And from another letter:

We sing the song, ‘Come to Jesus, come to Jesus, come to Jesus just now.’ That challenge sounds, and that is the only call we can hear and follow right now. All it needs is to decide for Jesus. When we have made that decision, then the fight will start. The German pastor Blumhardt notes that Jesus had only twelve disciples, and that perhaps that was because the fight starts and ends with our own flesh, and there are very few who are willing to fight this fight day in and day out. Our ‘flesh’ would like to make the kingdom of God, but that does not work. We need a commander who subdues our own flesh, and if you do not want Jesus Christ as your commander, then you can be as pious as you like, you will not enter the kingdom of God.

These same thoughts were also found in my dad’s pocket, written in his distinctive scrawl, after he died.

My dad was born in Zurich in Switzerland; his parents brought him as a baby to the Rhön Bruderhof in Germany. The Gestapo expelled the community from the country in 1937, and imprisoned his father Hans. My dad always remembered the letter he’d written as a five-year-old to his dad, saying that if the police didn’t free him from prison, he’d come with his hoe and knock down the walls to let him out. (Remarkably, Hans was later released and rejoined the family.)

Klaus with his fiancée Irene, 1959

My dad’s family moved with the community to England and then to Paraguay, where he completed primary school and went on to study medicine. In 1961 the entire community migrated to North America. Shortly after moving, my parents married and started a family.

As a child I was awakened daily, not by an alarm clock, but by a sound coming from the other side of my room wall; it was a click-click clickety-click and then a long pause, and then a bit more clicking and then brin-n-n-g! The sound was my dad typing letters on his old typewriter. He typed hundreds and hundreds of letters, keeping in touch with people all over the world. He wrote these letters, but he was a terrible, terrible speller. When my dad went on trips he would send reports home, and whoever read these would have quite a time deciphering them; often it was quite humorous attempting to make out what he was trying to say! I was sometimes embarrassed by this, and told him so. He said, “That’s never going to stop me from writing – if my error brings others joy, then that’s a wonderful thing!” And that’s important for me – to be able to laugh at my weaknesses and not be too upset if someone else has a chuckle at my expense.

Another incident happened when I was in college. Dad obviously wasstruggling, we didn’t know with what; he seemed uncharacteristically depressed. But then quite suddenly he became himself again, enthusiastic and fun-loving. We sensed that something had changed dramatically – almost literally overnight – but it wasn’t until last year I asked, “Dad, what happened?” He replied:

I had a dream. I was hanging over a cliff with a bottomless chasm below me and all that held me was a thick rope, which in my dream I saw was the love of the brothers and sisters reaching out to help me. But that thick rope had been cut strand by strand, until all that I was hanging onto was a single strand. In my dream I saw that it was my pride and stubbornness over the years that had each time cut another strand of the rope, and now I was hanging by the single one. I cried out in my dream in a very loud voice, Help! Help! As Idid so, I was pulled up out of that chasm by the single thread.When I awoke it was so clear what had happened, I didn’t need to speak about it. I knew what to do. I needed to accept the love and care of brothers and sisters – the care that reaches out to all of us.

When we were children, Dad tended to approach things intellectually, with a lot of thinking and discussions and arguments; but these last years he lived more from his heart. Dad always cared a lot about teenagers – his own and others – and I would like to conclude with something he wrote a few years ago:

To the young people of today I want to say this – there are two ways to find Jesus:

1. You seek him directly and without compromise, and find him.

2. You go about it via other goals and interests, in other words, you kid yourself about finding him.

This second way will lead you to the situation of the prodigal son, who ended in the moral manure you all know about. It was there that he remembered his father’s house and how good it was. The only problem is that today you might die before you find this; you may end up dying of AIDS, hallucinations, or some other thing. But remember, you will have to come to Jesus one way or the other. You cannot avoid him, and you cannot escape him. And he will clean you up with fire in an age where you have nothing to say anymore.

The first way is vastly better than the other, but it needs a listening to his call, which is there for all who want to hear, and then the fight. It is easier to die a martyr’s death than to die to oneself every day, but it is vastly better to die every day free-willingly and in obedience to his call, than to go to the place where there is gnashing of teeth and growling of souls in agony.

Working as a doctor in Urguay

Someone once said to me, the devil is my self-will in opposition to God’s will. Think about it: self or God – which is more important? But unless we put this question as sharp and clear as that, we deceive ourselves. Nobody can make you do anything. Everything has to be willed by you, struggled through by you, and hoped for by you. Every one of us is placed on this earth by God to do a task set by him. You come on this earth for a few years and then you go out into eternity again. The task is to win this earth back for God, because at this point the earth is under the hand of Satan, the deceiver from the beginning. It is Satan who tries to make us choose the second way, and he manages in far too many instances.

If all of this sounds sad to you, then you are very mistaken. It is the greatest joy to live, to fight, and to sacrifice oneself for Jesus!