2025 has been a year of seismic shifts. The loss of two men I greatly loved, admired, and respected seemed to punctuate those changes for me.
At the beginning of February, my childhood pastor, Ron Kennel, died. By the end of the month, my dad, Joe Krabill, was also gone. Ron was 81. Dad was 94, a little over two weeks away from celebrating his 95th birthday.
When I was about two months old, Ron Kennel was installed as pastor at Wellman Mennonite Church in Iowa. He’d stay there for about twenty years and I became a lifelong friend of his son, Steve.
Ron grew up on a farm in Nebraska and weighed whether he would become a scientist or go into ministry. While he ultimately chose the church as his vocation, he never lost his love and appreciation for science, especially astronomy.
Pastor Ron brought the telescope out on multiple occasions for us kids from church to gaze at the stars. He expressed as much passion for pointing out the different constellations as he did for preaching the Gospel on Sunday mornings. He also enjoyed cats and once told me that their creation was proof that God has a sense of humor.
We didn’t hear much fire and brimstone in Ron’s sermons. We heard about God’s love and about the teachings of Jesus, along with some church history lessons about the reformation and the early Anabaptists who died defying the practices of a church operating under the authority of the state. And of course, about the greatest commandments to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love your neighbor as yourself.
Ron and his wife, Judy, moved to Goshen in the late 1980s, and he eventually pastored at Clinton Brick Mennonite Church near Millersburg. I visited him in Goshen in 1990 - several years before I had moved to the area. I was just beginning my career in radio.
He said to me, “Tony, I really miss NPR. There’s no NPR station around here.” This was in the limbo year after WAUS dropped its NPR membership and before then-WVPE Station Manager Tim Eby convinced Elkhart Community Schools that they should pick up NPR programming.
Ron was a staunch supporter of WVPE and once I started working here, he was one of my biggest fans.
Joe Krabill was a pretty big fan of mine, too.
Dad was a hard worker, a union bricklayer for more than forty years, and a farmer. He got up at 4:30 every morning to chore and (after Mom made him breakfast and packed his lunch box) he would hit the road by 6 to go to a construction job; often 25 miles to Iowa City or 50 miles to Cedar Rapids. And then he came home, ate supper, chored and tackled some other farm project, then fell asleep in the living room while the rest of us watched TV. I suppose it was primarily because he had a day job, but I always appreciated that we put up hay in the evening instead of during the heat of the day.
It was rough for Dad in the early ‘80s. There weren’t many construction jobs and crop prices were in the toilet. We didn’t lose our farm, but Dad was certainly worried that it could happen.
I never really saw that anxiety in him, though. He would often comment on how good life was, even in the midst of all of that.
Dad expressed some regret in later years that Mom ended up being alone so much of the time out on the farm. But he made that four-bedroom farmhouse feel like her mansion. He had a basement dug out and finished enough so that we could live in it for a year while he gutted and remodeled the two floors above. He crafted a beautiful stone fireplace in the living room.
Dad didn’t raise his voice often and, as my nephew noted at his Grandpa Joe’s memorial service, that was one of his strengths. He didn’t need to yell or bark orders (most of the time).
Dad conversed with ease and found connections with people anywhere he went. But he wasn’t a public speaker. We had to strain to hear his prayers before meals, heartfelt as they were.
Dad and Ron do leave behind a mostly traditional legacy of manhood. They were strong, but they were also mild. Not boisterous. Not demeaning. They were kind hearted and treated those they met with dignity and respect. That’s something we could use a lot more of in 2025.
Music: "Nothing is Lost on the Breath of God" (Colin Gibson)
Hoi Ting Davidson-violin
Hannah Yang-viola
