By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER

Ohio Correspondent

FORT RECOVERY, Ohio — It was 1999. St. Anthony’s Dinner Theater was going to be a one-time event to help the youth group.

It’s still going, but the mission has evolved to assist rural families with huge medical bills, said Janie Timmerman, the group’s president and founder. Its efforts have provided $813,000 in assistance.

“After the first year, everybody said, ‘Let’s do this again.’ So we did it the following year,” Timmerman said. “Then everybody said, ‘Let’s do it next year and let’s add a night because we sold all of the tickets.’ So we did.”

Timmerman directs the annual Christmas play. There are 50 people in the cast, ages from 6 up to 70, and there is a choir with 35 members. They do 12 November performances, each with 220 patrons in attendance.

About 350 volunteers are involved, in all; some cook the sit-down dinner. The setting is an old elementary school that was closed in 1976, and the tickets sell out fast early every year.

“It’s wonderful the way they work together,” Timmerman said. “We do a different play every year, but it is always about Christmas. I want it to be humorous, but it has to send a good, Christian message; that’s our goal.”

Her original idea to raise money for the youth group changed in 2001 when she was talking to a couple whose son and daughter-in-law had a severely handicapped son. The medical bills were exhausting them financially.

“I said without hesitation, ‘Maybe the dinner theater can help you,’” she recalled. “That’s how we got started with our mission now, which is to assist families who have huge medical bills. Last year we assisted 12 families; this year we already have nine requests.”

Clint and Nikki Kremer and their family benefited eight years ago after first insisting some other family must have more need the group’s help. Timmerman and her husband said, “No, we want to help you.”

“Our oldest had been diagnosed with a terminal illness,” Nikki Kremer explained. “We knew she (Ava) was going to lose her ability to walk. We lived in an old farmhouse that we had been fixing up, but there was no way to make it handicap-accessible.”

The couple, who raise cattle, had already redone much of the house but water damage caused by the basement shifting had harmed even the remodeled portions. They still had a mortgage on this house with no value.

“Jim and Janie Timmerman came to us and said they’d like to help our family,” Kremer said. “I always tell people when Jim and Janie were sitting in our kitchen at this time, I felt like I was being hugged, and they were still sitting in their seats. I had that warm sensation of being hugged.”

Shortly after that Timmerman told Kremer she felt like the Holy Spirit was saying, We need to build you a new house. Besides the funding from the dinner theater, the community pitched in, donating labor and material.

The family now lives in a handicapped-accessible ranch-style house, where Ava can move around in a wheelchair. Every year since they were the beneficiaries, her family has volunteered with the dinner theater.

“It was the most humbling experience,” Kremer said. “Our community rallied behind the dinner theater and made this happen.”

They also made it happen in 2016 for grain farmers Ryan and Angie Schwieterman and their family, especially their daughter, “Miracle” Mayah.

“Mayah was diagnosed in the womb,” Angie Schwieterman said. “At 17 weeks we found out that she had a fatal form of skeletal dysplasia, which is a medical term for dwarfism. They said she would suffocate and die right after birth.”

Doctors were able to intubate her at birth. A month later Mayah’s specialist did an exploratory scope for a tracheostomy and said he had no idea how they were able to intubate her. “She should not be here,” the doctor told her parents. “She is a miracle.” That led to her nickname.

Mayah is getting stronger as she gets older, Schwieterman said. “She is very strong-willed and determined. She has bilateral club feet among other problems with her legs, but she is determined that she is going to walk.

“Seeing what the dinner theater had already done, it was an amazing honor to be chosen and to have our community’s support,” she added. “It helped us be more comfortable to bring Mayah out into the community.”

You can see more on Mayah’s progress on her Facebook page by searching with the phrase “Miracle Mayah.” And to learn more about the theater effort, search Facebook with “St. Anthony Dinner Theater.”