A New Thing

     Mike was restless Sunday afternoon and wanted to ride to the mountains.  I didn't really want to go anywhere, but I knew he did.  I even prayed in the car, as though we were wasting time, that the Lord might let us run into someone to share Him with, that somehow in this day He might be glorified.
    Yes, being with your husband is good.  But since he found out he is rendered permanently disabled a few weeks ago, I have been with him every day.  And I wasn't seeing that more time with him was key, even though I know how different I am when I'm swept away from the house.
     As we got up to the Parkway and he rolled down the windows to the shaded road and 80 degree temps, I started to unwind.  Soon we approached the mile marker where we moved in the late 90s, and I was reminded of the sovereignty of the Lord, how we were so desperate. Yet we were in a setting so beautiful that it seemed removed from reality, there with three little girls and a boy on the way.
     Within 5 years, we moved further into Ashe County and right in the midst of a 12 acre ridge that arced all the way around the house.  It never really felt like home though, because there was a whole lot of spending and pushing the envelope.  But there the kids were, five of them by then, in the middle of the high country, running around in the woods and creek, and riding anything with wheels or legs, and even getting to see Megan do a few flyovers.
     In 2008, that life flight to Baptist changed everything: Resurrection: Easter Morning, March 23, 2008. 
      After a year renting in the city, our Jesus quickly made a way for us to live in dairy country in north Iredell County: pond, creek, barn, pasture, and field.  The children, all seven born, could hardly have been in a more pristine environment, conducive to learning and working.
     That, too, came to an end about three years ago, as it made more sense for us to live in Wilkes County, because 5 family members were working here and going to church here at Mt. Pleasant Baptist.
    The recollections made me ask how is it that I could even be moved from the peace I have that God has always and will continue to have a good plan for us?  How is it that deep inside I resisted leaving for that drive on Sunday, questioning whether God could be glorified in that day?

     Mike stopped at The Cascades and surprised me by wanting to walk on down, this after having a defibrillator and pacemaker placed on Tuesday.  We made our way slowly but surely.  It reminded me that there is plenty we can still accomplish.  It reminded me that we still make a pretty good couple.  Parenting, on the other hand,  has always been a hard place for us: instances where he should have been one thing and ones where I should've been another.  I hope they will know that their suffering and want was not in vain, that their Lord has done a powerful thing in bringing us all this far.
    Far is exactly where Megan has been, visiting with the family of her Jeremiah, all the way up in Alaska.  They met at Key West (where Macklynn likely contracted the West Nile Virus that made him quadriplegic, Macklynn, Meant for More?, and my faith and obedience were tried more than ever had up to that point) on deployment for Samaritan's Purse.  She's been to see him 3 times, but this time he made it for keeps and proposed, in a place so remote they had to be flown there, the day before she left for the floods in Texas: Weslaco, which is where the mission church is that Mt. Pleasant Baptist seeded.  She's been there years back working in the community and funding the church building across the way in Mexico.  Not only is it her first official  deployment as the mechanic/driver on site, (doing the selfsame job her father did), but there is actually a mission team there from the home church here in Wilkes: with the preacher, his family, and several others we know and care for. I mean, that's God.

    It's God when you join a church in a different county and one day a young man named Justin taps you on the shoulder and says, "You're the Harpers."  He was the one and only child from the one and only family we shared a gravel road with off the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Now he's a music ministry assistant at the church we had just joined.
     It's God when you move on to another church and see the man named Jerry who baptized you and your firstborn many years ago in the New River, sitting two pews in front of you and finding out his daughter is a member.
     It's God when your daughter is hired on as a full time fire fighter, regardless of her broken leg, because she was highly requested and just as highly trained, at the only fire station in the state that brings in a Sunday school teacher on Sundays, where they are not allowed to perform "unnecessary work" on the Lord's Day, and where Bible study and prayer are witnessed frequently. (And on her days off, she still has work at the Crisis Pregnancy Center.)  
     It's God when that same daughter, who was a timid, late bloomer, has secured her own new car and apartment, right over the hill from another sister and her husband, and can be a very present aunt to her twin nieces.  She is also good enough to offer refuge to her soon-to-be 18 year old sister, who has had a very troubled couple of years, so that she might heal and prosper in the next ones. 
     It's God when a well meaning, "religious," overly concerned of what "NOT TO do" mother of many can be used as a "'repairer' of the breach," likened I think to, "And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in," to her own family. (Isaiah 58:12.) This is "what TO do."

     There was a definitive moment during the many months of our separation, in one of those up at 3:45 mornings for work at the YMCA, so that I could be home before the home school day began, that I came surrendering to the my Lord and Saviour, in a room alone, feeling as close as I have ever felt, however comparatively minuscule, to the anguish of Jesus.  I felt physically strapped and drawn in opposite directions, torn apart, yes, for the guilt of my own sins I could now clearly ascertain, for the sacrifices I had to make, but by far, between my family which might never cohere again.  Completely distraught, I made a very conscious commitment to the Lord, that, yes, I will take this as you use it for your glory, just as I prayed a very sober-minded question in the local school parking lot, empty as it were; asking if I had laid my marriage at the altar of homeschooling that it would be made evident to me, while I know many would have said the very opposite had occurred. But they don't know the ways I know I went wrong, regardless of anyone else's choices.
     And these are the times that made me sure I had to let go, quit trying to save everybody and everything, to be quiet and watch God do what He does.  He told me he would, that he would "deal with ...," and He surely did.
      So much of what is classic Mike will no longer be: obviously, the binges, like the one that nearly killed him with alcoholic hepatitis in December.  The "go fast":  he's ridden his whole life, so he bought a super bike in January.  He bought me a bike too and after a whole ton of prayer, I said, "Yes, I'll learn."  I told our caseworker teary eyed that I had decided to be my husband's wife, and I meant it. But one night on a trip home in the tractor trailer, he asked the Lord if he was supposed to have it, and he promptly totaled it the next morning.  I was spared the treacherous risk I had deemed it to be, but more preeminently my husband saw a prayer answered as swiftly and as clearly as he ever had.
     His ribs had to heal, which gave me cause to give him care and affection and to meet his needs, the way I have a lot of times, but with overwhelming peace and security this time, with no accusations, no doubts.  I knew where home was, wherever he was, and not because I always like everything about him or even feel love for him to be honest, but because I am in covenant with my Lord, and my husband is in so many ways my salvation, my sanctification through Him.  I have seen provision and protection from other sources, but none can replace how God changes me through this person I'm to walk through this world with.

     He likes TV and eating out as much as anyone.  These things too shall go, as matters of budgeting.  The big man-size meals he posts pictures of will change, oddly not because of cholesterol (his arteries look great) or sugar but because of the sodium that makes him gain 5-10 pounds overnight, stressing his already damaged heart.
     Right now, even his strength is gone with the wrist injury from the tornado winds.  He is watching the very fiber of his manhood waste away.  After he made the choice to have the surgery for the defibrillator and pacemaker, which inherently nullifies his CDL, he went to the Social Security office after very deliberate instructions the doctor gave us both, and came home in tears with a dozen roses, per the song.  All the times he said he hated driving were as they had not been.  This was a game changer.  This was the end of the only thing he knew to do to support his family, "unskilled labor" they call the work of an over-the-road driver, even though he can drive with his eyes closed, keep perfect records, and knows most every road, store, factory, town, and city in this country and people who work and live there.  It was one year shy of 30 years, which is why the Social Security worker was shocked at the amount he's to receive once approved.  "Oh, you've actually been working," sadly contrary to the majority of recipients.

     He sees the end of something; I see the beginning, "Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert." (Isaiah 43:19.)  I wrote a prayer the other morning, "Lord, guide our days that we know your Word and honor your name; that we waste nothing, time or thought, that we lean into each other and the children and that we all lean into the kingdom; that we pray, learn, serve, work/exercise together, that you be glorified."
     Every single word, I mean.  These two youngest kids have held our family together like glue.  They have been the subjects of ferocious protection, and they have been a reason to finally get this right.  Not to objectify them, but it is awfully amazing to watch what the Lord will work out because of and through practical needs.  If we had quit our family as it were convenient, they would not have been born.  And "today" would not look the way it does, with our eclectic 13 year old son and our artistic 10 year old daughter. 
     In this trial, I professed also, as I was led of the Lord, to make His word paramount in our home.  And as it stands and is portrayed in Matthew 4:4, “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," we "eat" of it three times a day: in the morning with me, before lessons individually, and at night with their father.  
    Our new norm is going to involve a lot of togetherness, which is something we have not experienced outside of crisis.  It will be challenging to not have a "breather"/dispatched trip to make us miss each other.  But the kids will have a full time father. Macklynn is particularly in need of it.  And Madalynn will not have a distant father or the influence of a perpetually strained mother. 
    I suspect that things I can't imagine will come to fruition.  I expect that I will finally learn what it means to be my husband's lover.  I think we will all learn together - he was always the more fun teacher anyway. I believe we will worship together. I hope God has a mission for us together.  I look forward to planning and making meals together. I wonder where we will walk and explore together.  I smile at the thought of seeing our grand babies, together.  I can't wait to watch Michael play football at Western Carolina, together, and to give our Megan away to the one who sees in her what we do, together.  I anticipate the Sunday afternoons together when the kids come around, not because they are coerced or always want to or even feel like it, but because they have respect of the Father's will, purpose, and order: Proverbs 16:3. 
     And here's what I know:  that my place is home, wherever that lands me and however many more times that Mother's Day rose bush from the Parkway has to be dug up.  That fact was apparent to me before all the tests came back and decisions made.  And, who knows, the Lord might make room for me to write about it all.  But for now, I am witness that every day is a big day for our family: every kind gesture, every visit, every invitation, every conversation, every ounce of forgiveness, every defeat of sin and submission to Christ, not because Mike is dying but because ....the Holy Spirit is living.                                        

As for Me and My House

     It's after midnight, and I'm about finished with the hard work of parting with the majority of the books that have lasted till this move.  Now, I had sworn off years ago nursery rhymes, Disney, anything even slightly promoting "good" witchcraft, and anthropomorphism, which leaves no wonder that children think animals know their imminent demise. But, somehow along the way, I let down my guard, compromised for sentimentality or for traditionalism, because we can't seem to get enough of good ole country living stories.
     You know, we wonder why our kids are satisfied with things that are "unprofitable," futile, and vain.  Yet, look what we've been "feeding" them, since they were old enough to listen.  How is it that a Christian would read her child a book that her God has intentionally been left out of?  Why is it okay that the lessons He has taught us from the beginning are so easily portrayed as someone else's morals, as though he does not exist?  No wonder we need a hero; there is no God.
     This process is gut wrenching for me, as selective as I thought I'd been, especially the young children's ones and those they learned to read to. Because certain of these books represent windows of time and memories with each child individually.  But how can I continue to harbor them when I know what I know now?  In this age of information, it doesn't take long to find out: that when a person looks up the author of Sarah, Plain and Tall, "Christian" is automatically marked out of the search because there is no association; that when Louisa May Alcott is searched, we find her father was a Transcendentalist and the apple didn't fall far from the tree; that L. M. Montgomery of "Anne of Green Gables" fame wrote books that were "moral, but not Christian," and was disillusioned by religion as was evidenced by occult and humanism themes in her later work; that John Piper writes that Robert Louis Stevenson went so far as to join a club with the motto, "Ignore everything that our parents taught us," renouncing, of course, the faith of his father; that Mark Twain was quoted saying, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so," and, "if Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian;" that Pooh's creator's son said that if he had spent the time on him that he did his characters that he might have had a father; and that even Old Yeller has nothing firm to stand on.  
      Then, there are Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew books on Focus on the Family's pluggedin's review that say "None" under Christian beliefs.  Fancy Nancy, that we have many of, has no Christian anything yet is sold on Christianbooks.  That should be an alert to how far we've gone. And an article about the American Girl company says that there has not been a new book accompanying a doll with a Christmas story since 2000.
     Have we been the silly women led astray the Bible speaks plainly of?  The one thing I can say is that I'm glad the kids have been workers more than readers, else they might have spent many idle hours with these books, of milk instead of meat.  A good thing is that we can hold on to tales like Pollyanna and The Swiss Family Robinson and Little House (although it sounds like Pioneer Girl has something more to offer than the others), and even Pride and Prejudice.  And there are still mainstays like C. S. Lewis, John Bunyan, and Elizabeth Prentiss.

     We get one shot at this.  Make it count.