Prequel IV (1945–1950): Conceived and Consecrated
- Ken Kalis
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
In Tender Branch, I told how my father’s faith and my mother’s teaching formed the early soil of my life. They had already planted in me a love for Jesus, though I was still too young to understand His name. But every story, every prayer, every song at 658 Monroe Avenue was pointing toward something more. What had been tender and green was about to take root — in a house, a family, and a consecration that would last a lifetime. These were my first steps in "Looking for a City."
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Theme Verse: “And the woman conceived and bare a son.” — Exodus 2:2
I am as unlike Moses as can be, he who was rasied a prince, and "was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds." Acts 7:22 Our commonality was that we were born into danger but had mothers who loved us and brought us up in the Fear of the LORD.
Moses had many homes, from a palace to a shephered's cote on the backsie of the wilderness. I had only one, 658 Monroe Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ —This is how it looked in the 1940s. Mom, Dad and my two brothers lived there then, but that was about to change.
I love 658 Monroe Avenue because it was our home. Still is, in some ways. When I dream, I am often there — in that solid, wood-framed house tucked between the city and the church. The walls held laughter, prayer, and the hum of hymns that filled the evenings. If every place has a spirit, this one was wrapped in Scripture and song.
Just before I was born - 1945
World War II had just ended. America was victorious and hopeful. Emmanuel Pentecostal Church, 658 Monroe itself, and my brother Don were all ten years old. My parents had been married for sixteen years. Bobby was fifteen, Don ten, and both were good boys — though one was the dreamer, the other the doer. Mom hoped her next child would be a girl. Dad was ready to do his part.
Mom and Dad, September 1945
Instead, she got me — born June 16, 1946, on Father’s Day — and my father rejoiced.
My coming was not easy. I was a sickly child, allergic to dairy, wool, and grass, and often covered in eczema. The hospital bill from Rahway Memorial, carefully saved for decades, was $105 — seven days in a “lovely” new hospital, as Mom called it, without insurance or complaint..
Dad drove the long way from Elizabeth to Rahway that Sunday morning, proud and praying. I think now of Jacob — the old father who finally received a son in his gray years. He couldn’t have known how close we came to loss, how fragile both mother and child were in those first days. What went wrong, Mom never said, and Dad, true to form, kept his silence. He was a man who prayed rather than explained.
Mom, though, liked to talk. She “gallivanted,” as Dad would say — a word full of affection even when it wasn’t. Together, they were a paradox made perfect: Mom gathering people in; Dad lifting them up in prayer. One spoke of the need, the other sought the Lord for the answer.
They lived by one simple creed, hung in our narrow hallway:
“Only one life, ’twill soon be past; Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
Those words became my first theology, written not on tablets of stone but on a metal plaque that hung over the desk in the hallwaby the stairs.
Consecrated
That September, Dad drove us across the Pulaski Skyway en route to Ridgewood Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn to be dedicated to the Lord. Uncle Hans Waldvogel — my father’s old mentor and my mother’s childhood teacher — presided.
I remember none of it, of course. But I’ve heard the story so often that I can almost see it: Dad in his Sunday suit, cradling me before the altar while the congregation sang:
“When He cometh, when He comethTo make up His jewels,All His jewels, precious jewels,His loved and His own…”
Those words entered the very cells of my being. I was loved, chosen, and given to Jesus before I could even say His name. That song became my birthright, and I have been trying to live into it ever since. I always thought of myself as one on Jesus' jewels: 'Like the stars of the morning/His bright crown adorning/they shall shine in their beauty/bright gems for His cown."
Back in New Jersey, the rhythm of faith at 658 Monroe was steady as breathing: morning prayer, daily Scripture, grace at meals and church on Sundays. Mom and Dad spoke of Jesus with the same familiarity other families reserved for cousins or neighbors. To them, He wasn’t far away — He was the unseen guest at every meal, the quiet listener in every conversation.
It wasn’t a perfect house — there were money worries, health scares, the usual tears — but it was a holy house. And holiness, as my father would later say, is not perfection but belonging — belonging wholly to God.
Early Songs and First Words
Mom kept a baby book, cloth-covered, with a lamb on the front. It records that my first word was “Light,” my first phrase “Messy there.”Before I could walk, I could sing. By 18 months, I knew “Jesus Loves Me” and “This Little Light of Mine.” I sang them to my brother Don before school, praying with him in the hallway. Somewhere in those childish tunes, I began to sense the invisible — that life was not just what we saw, but what we believed.
DONNIE AT TEN IMAGE
There were simpler memories, too: of a jealous dog named Fluffy who thought the new baby was competition, and nipped at his toes until big brother Don got rid of it. There was a corner drugstore run by Dr. Hoff, neighbors whose names still echo faintly in my mind — Mrs. Blakeney, Virtue Monte, Claire Singleman. Each one left a mark, like small brushstrokes in the portrait of a boyhood blessed and protected.
My earliest and truest companion was Lena Dudas, my “Nee-Nee.”She was in her twenties, training for the ministry, and poured her whole heart into me. I was her calling. She read me poems, taught me rhymes, and called me her “little jewel.” When I wiped dishes or sang a hymn, she clapped her hands and said, “He’s a wonderful baby.”I answered, “Best baby in town!”And we both believed it.
Lena often read to me from Robert Louis Stevenson — A Child’s Garden of Verses — and her voice made every line a blessing. Those afternoons, bathed in the soft light from Monroe Avenue’s tall windows, were my first lessons in beauty and devotion.
“When Jesus Comes” — My First Encounter with Grace
Then came the illness. Donnnie rode his bicycle to the local dump to get goat's milk for me. The asthma attacks frightened my mother and exhausted my father. Nights when I could not breathe, when the dark pressed close. Mom would rock me, sing to me, and finally, when she could no longer keep her eyes open, she’d put on a 78 record of George Beverly Shea
singing When Jesus Comes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUg9jXswE8c
“When Jesus comes the tempter’s power is broken,When Jesus comes the tears are wiped away;He takes the gloom and fills the life with glory,For all is changed when Jesus comes to stay.”
It was then — in the middle of that song, gasping for air — that I felt Him. Not an idea, not a storybook figure, but the living Jesus.The Presence. And I knew that He had come to stay. From that night on I knew I belonged to Jesus.
Lena became my Sunday school teacher. She taught us that Jesus loved the little children — all the children of the world. We sang, we prayed, we colored crosses and crowns. In that tiny room above the sanctuary, the kingdom of God was as near as the crayons in our hands. Those were the golden years of innocence, when heaven seemed only a prayer away.
By 1949, I was old enough to go with Mom to Pilgrim Camp in the Adirondacks, founded by Uncle Hans. I got a chance to wash our car, before we drove the 250 miles to Brant Lake, NY. There I swam, sang songs, and met missionaries who told stories of Africa and India. I didn’t know it then, but they were sowing seeds that would later call me into missionary work of a different 21st-century sort myself.
Lena got married in 1950 and chose me as the ringbearer. What a sign of growing up!
What a difference a year or two makes from the family photo in the yard of 658.
In 1950, before I started school, Mom took me and my friend Janet to see the Statue of Liberty — a fitting image, I think now, for a child learning to breathe free.
That photograph in the backyard of 658 Monroe says it all. Three sons, a mother radiant with pride, and a father standing a little apart, solemn, watchful, content. Behind him, the house — narrow, solid, full of grace.
That house and those people consecrated me to God before I could ever choose Him. And He, in His mercy, chose to stay.
Closing Reflection
When I look back on those first years, I see now that nothing was wasted — not the illness, not the fears, not even the jealous dog or the old hymns. Every detail was shaping me for a life that would begin and end in the same truth:
“Only one life, ’twill soon be past;Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
From conception to consecration, from Rahway to Monroe Avenue, from lullabies to worship songs — Jesus was there. And He still is.
Closing Reflection for Prequel IV (and for the Whole Series)
And so the story closes where it began — in the quiet rooms of 658 Monroe Avenue, where prayers were whispered, hymns were sung, and a child learned to rest in the presence of Jesus before he could even speak His Name.
Everything that came later — the moving of the rock, the epilogues of work and wandering, the long arc of grace and loss and discovery — traces its line back to these early consecrated years.
I did not know it then. None of us ever does.
But the Lord was already shaping the life I would live, the faith I would cling to, and the long journey I would one day try to set down in words. Before the calling, before the striving, before the heartbreaks and the healings — before I ever reached for the Rock — He had already reached for me.
These four Prequels now stand as the foundation stones beneath the twenty-three years of Moving the Rock and the five Epilogues that followed. Together they form one whole story, a single testimony:that Jesus Christ, who met a sickly child in a darkened bedroom, has stayed by that child’s side to this very day.
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