Re: At First Sight

Greg G. wrote:

> 
>> With her self-assured manner, her natural, blond curls (which seemed 
>> reluctant to be put up in the fashionable style), and her direct gaze
>> from conspicuously blue eyes, Emmy Monika Else von Hollander made an 
>> attractive first impression. Born on December 25, 1884, in the
>> Latvian capital of Riga, she had grown up first in Jena and then,
>> following 1897, in Halle. Spiritual matters had fascinated her ever
>> since a friend had introduced her to the family of Pastor Meinhof, a
>> minister in Halle. As a teenager she had taken great interest in the
>> history of the Moravian Brethren and their founder, Zinzendorf. She
>> became absorbed in studying old and new hymns and spiritual songs,
>> and read with enthusiasm Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. A
>> parallel experience? 
>> 
> 
> At seventeen Emmy enrolled as a student nurse at the deaconesses’
> institute in Halle. At nineteen she worked for a time as a nanny for
> Pastor Freybe and his family, friends in Stappenbeck near Salzwedel
> (about seventy miles southeast of Hamburg). She spent 1905 working as
> an intern at the deaconesses’ center, but gave it up by the end of the
> year because of poor health and emotional burnout. Pastor Freybe
> arranged for her to begin work in February of 1906 at the hospital of
> the Order of St. John in Salzwedel. Emmy worked gladly and dedicatedly
> as a nurse, but the suffering and death that so often confronted her –
> both in the hospital and, from an early age, within her own family –
> made her think about the sometimes mysterious will of God, about his
> compassion, and about the brevity of life. “What troubled me was that
> I felt something divided me from God,” she later said about this
> period. “I could not understand how God, who is pure and holy, had 
> chosen such unholy people for his own, and I found no real answer to
> this question…”
> 

In this inner state and lured by a certain curiosity, Emmy von Hollander 
made her way to Frau Baehr’s drawing room. Upon arrival in Halle for a 
month’s holiday with her parents, she had found her siblings full of 
enthusiasm over Ludwig von Gerdtell’s lectures. At afternoon coffee and 
other social occasions she had heard people openly discussing “whether 
the atonement of Christ still has power and significance today.” The 
whole city seemed to breathe a different spirit. “How I longed that I, 
too, would be gripped by this spirit.”

After the evening at Frau Baehr’s, Emmy did not see Eberhard for a while. 
He had gone to the Harz Mountains for a few days to become clear about 
his own feelings toward this young woman and about God’s will concerning 
her. Still deeply stirred by his talk, Emmy went several days later, on 
March 15, to visit Frau Baehr and find out from her the way to “peace in 
God and in Christ.” And she continued to attend the meetings.