My Brother Cut Me Out Of His Wedding, His Kids’ Lives, And His Christmas Card List When I Married Outside Our Church. Last Week, His Wife Called…
After fifteen years of silence, my brother’s wife called me out of nowhere to ask for my blood type. I had no idea why the family that rejected me suddenly needed something only I might be able to give.
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I Married Outside Our Church fifteen years ago, and my brother cut me out of his wedding, his children’s lives, and every Christmas celebration afterward. Then, on a Tuesday night at 9:15, my phone rang from an unfamiliar number. A woman immediately asked about my blood type without introducing herself. When I demanded to know who was calling, she hesitated before saying her name was Elda. My brother’s wife. I hadn’t heard her voice since we were young, and now she was begging me not to hang up. I stood frozen in my kitchen, holding a dish towel, unable to understand why she had suddenly broken fifteen years of silence.
My name is Nehemiah Strother. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I teach chemistry at a public high school in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I’ve taught for fourteen years and coach the Science Olympiad team on Saturday mornings. My students know me as the teacher who creates dramatic chemistry demonstrations on the first day of school. My wife, Mary, is a pediatric nurse. We’ve been married fifteen years and have two children, a twelve-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl. We live in a brick house with a crooked porch, only six miles from the church where I grew up. Six miles should be nothing, but after I Married Outside Our Church, that distance became an entire world.
The church is called Valley Fellowship, a small religious community of roughly two hundred people in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Most members have known one another for generations, and many are related. My father, Zebediah Strother, has served as its presiding elder for thirty years, following in his own father’s footsteps. Growing up there wasn’t entirely unhappy. I remember potluck dinners, neighbors helping raise barns, and elderly women arriving with casseroles whenever someone became ill. There was genuine kindness inside that community. But alongside the kindness came strict rules governing almost every aspect of our lives, including whom we could marry and what medical treatment we could accept.
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Women were expected to wear long skirts and keep their hair long. Television and dancing were forbidden, and marrying someone outside the fellowship was considered unacceptable.
There was another rule, one I had questioned since childhood. Members were forbidden from donating or receiving blood.
The elders taught that taking another person’s blood into your body was sinful. Some members had even died in hospitals rather than accept transfusions.
When I was ten, my father preached at the funeral of one such man. He praised the man’s faithfulness, but I remember watching the grieving children and wondering whether they saw it the same way.
My older brother Barnabas was three years ahead of me. Growing up, he was my hero.
He taught me to fish on the North River using a cane pole and a can of worms. Later, he showed me how to drive our father’s truck across a hayfield.
Once, when I broke a church window with a baseball, Barnabas accepted the blame and the punishment without ever mentioning it again.
He was considered the good son.
I was the one who kept asking questions.
Why couldn’t we watch television? Why were girls forbidden from wearing pants? Why should someone die when a medical treatment might save them?
Eventually, I attended James Madison University while continuing to live at home and attend church three times a week.
During my junior year, I met Mary in a chemistry laboratory.
She had short red hair, a remarkable laugh, and a Catholic upbringing completely different from mine.
We fell in love.
I knew what would happen if I Married Outside Our Church, but I asked her to marry me anyway.
And years later, standing in my kitchen with Elda’s unexpected phone call still echoing in my ears, I began to wonder what could possibly have made her reach out now.
