Answering the Call

 

Eric baptizing a neighbor, in Burrows

Pastor Chuck Smith, the founder of what is sometimes known as the Calvary Chapel Movement, has oft-quoted favorite phrases referred to as “Chuckisms,” one of which is “God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.” How did that relate to the Haley Family? Well, it was a process that took about 28 years.

In May of 1999, just after her birthday, Eric’s mother, the other Grandma Haley, passed away very comfortably, in the driver’s seat of her car in a parking lot. I didn’t go to her funeral because I had so many little bitty kids to take care of. But some of the older ones went with Eric and it is said that Susie beeped her dead Grandma’s nose as she quoted a line by Lucy VanPelt about a beep on the nose being a sign of great affection. It was the very picture of impropriety.

Grandma Haley left her children some inheritance, and there was some money available shortly after her death. At the same time, the old cement block fire station next door to our house in Burrows became available, as the township had received one of those grants for new fire stations in rural communities. The old fire station looked like a large garage and only resembled a fire station because there was always an antique fire truck parked outside. Most of those who showed up at the auction wanted to dicker on the price because they only really wanted it as a place to store junk. But we had the money, providentially, and paid cash for it. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but Eric was pretty sure we needed it.

So we owned the large garage (with its own well!) during the Y2K scare, and we stored a little food out there and put in a wood burning stove, in case we were driven to desperation. But in 2001, when that was all over, we began looking at our situation.

The gas prices were rising and our car was falling apart. Eric drove back and forth to Lafayette every single day – six days to watch the store, and then the seventh day to take us all to church. We could never be involved in anything else during the week – it was too expensive. I went to Logansport to shop because it was a little closer.

Then, we had a great idea! We could just close the store in Lafayette, bring all the books to Burrows, and work from a building next door to our house. Most of our business was mail order anyway. People who walked into the bricks and mortar store were mostly there to put the books away in the wrong place or to shoplift. We could save a lot of money by bringing the business home. We just needed to get rid of the items that were there at the store on consignment. 

In the spring of 2001, we contacted every consignor in our records and asked them to remove their items. We told them that anything remaining after a certain date would go to auction. 

In the meantime, we told our pastor that we were leaving him.

This was no small thing. Calvary Chapel Lafayette was founded in 1982 by Pastor Joe Bell, as one of the earliest Calvary Chapel churches in Indiana, and we were there when he had the initial organizational prayer meeting in his basement. 

Since I had experience with the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California (at least the Saturday night concerts!), and in fact Eric and I had been married by Calvary Chapel’s associate pastor Don McClure, we were all in for a Calvary Chapel church plant in our hometown. So we were there for 19 years, involved in various forms of ministry, and moving from location to location as the church grew. 

It’s just that when we moved to Burrows, we were rather cut off from the church. In the days before cell phones, nobody wanted to call us long distance and run up their phone bill. And people hardly ever drove to our house.

The idea that we were bringing our business to Burrows resonated with us. But we had also noticed kids out playing in the streets as we left for Lafayette on Sunday mornings, and we thought, “How can we ever invite someone to church if our church is in another county?” So we were thinking about where we could go to church that was closer.

Well, Pastor Joe emailed us when we explained our plan to move the business. He said, “Hey, if you are moving your business, maybe you’ll want to have church in Carroll County too! How about it, Pastor Eric?”

I groaned. That was unexpected! We wrote him back and said we were trying to make life easier, not harder! So, while we were packing up boxes and boxes of books and unloading them on bookshelves in the old fire station (now, the garage), we were checking out a church in Delphi where quite a few of our homeschool friends were members.

Now you have to realize that Calvary Chapel as a movement had a Statement of Faith back then. It was printed on all of our bulletins and you could practically memorize it, it was so small and happy. For 19 years, our kids had seen that Statement of Faith, too. The first part of it was about how God wants us to worship him in spirit and in truth. That meant, we placed a great deal of emphasis on singing, and then the teaching of The Word.

The second part was about how we were not opposed to denominations as such, only that they tended to cause division among the Body of Christ.

There wasn’t a whole lot in there about what we believed. It was assumed that you would just go to church, hear the Word as it was taught line-upon-line and precept-upon-precept, and then you would know what we believed. And for the most part, we did.

So we met with the pastor of the church where our homeschool friends went, and he was asking how we could even want to go to his church. It seemed he was more familiar with our doctrine than we were! But we said it was okay, Calvary Chapel was pretty easy going about denominations and other churches in the Body of Christ.

We told Pastor Joe that we were going to start going to that church, and I know he was grieved about it and spent some time in prayer. He said, “Shouldn’t you have discussed this with your pastor?” We told him we’d see him again in about three months to visit, but he wanted to give us a big send-off first. We weren’t leaving because we’d had a falling out or anything – we truly thought it would be a good idea to minister where we’d been planted. 

Well, during that time at our friends’ church, we learned just how much we aren’t Calvinists. Even Susie had a hard time in Sunday School as a middle-school-aged kid. She was shocked when her teacher asked her if she would be okay with it if God sent him to hell. She couldn’t understand why God would send her teacher to hell if he was saved. But the teacher only stressed that God is sovereign and He does what He wants to do, so we can’t question that. 

This flies in the face of the truth that Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved, and the promise that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. We had to tell Susie we disagreed with her teacher, and commend her for being alert.

There were several such shocking incidents, and Calvinism proved itself to be not compatible with Calvary Chapel beliefs. Two months later, we thought it had already been three months, and we went to Calvary Chapel again in relief. I had been feeling like a tree that had been toppled with its roots exposed, drying out and drying up. During the day, I was playing all the Maranatha! Music records I owned, all day long.

Pastor Joe just smiled when we came back and he said he didn’t think our venture into a different church would last long. He said once you’ve been in Calvary Chapel for awhile, it’s like an inoculation against anything else. We said, so, you were mentioning that Eric should be a pastor? Did you mean that?

Immediately, he visited Eric’s store, which he was still busy cleaning out, and handed him a pile of books. In the evenings, we read Calvary Chapel Distinctives, Harvest, and Why Grace Changes Everything, all by Pastor Chuck Smith… When we read the Distinctives, the light bulb went on. Yes, Yes, YES! This one really defined the movement so much better than the Statement of Faith. 

Books by Pastor Chuck, including Calvary Chapel Distinctives

But… it spoke about being called to the ministry. What about us? Were we called?

Thinking back, Eric could remember those days when he was first saved, and that he had believed God had called him to the ministry. He didn’t get his job as a chaplain’s assistant in the Air Force, and he never really pursued that after we got married, but he brought it up from time to time. We just didn’t know how we could go to Bible college with a couple of kids. We thought about Moody Bible Institute because the tuition was free there – but not the room and board. We didn’t know how we could afford that. So we just pursued business instead.

And then there was a turning point, and a rather sudden one. Eric had just walked out of the post office in Burrows, and he saw a car turning onto the highway from the parking lot. The driver, an older lady, did not see the oncoming truck! It struck her and disabled the car, turned her around, and put her on a collision course with the post office and Eric’s parked car. Eric ran to the car, pried the door open, grabbed the steering wheel, and forced the car into an embankment where it finally stopped. Then he prayed for the woman until an ambulance arrived. 

Eric knew that was a sacred moment, a “re-call.” Excitedly he told me that it mirrored a time when he was a young believer, when a bicyclist was hit by a car, and the first thing he could think of to do was to pray. Though when the adrenaline wore off, Eric was really sore from pushing the car all by himself, we later heard that all the lady could remember after the accident was being prayed for by a nice young man.

That experience was confirmation to him, that God had called him, at this time in his life, to the ministry.

Pastor Joe said the Lafayette church could commission Eric to start a new church plant in Carroll County. Then, after a while, they could license him and later, they could ordain him. We didn’t know how that could happen without Eric going to Bible college, but Pastor Joe said, “You’ve been sitting under my teaching for 19 years and you’ve been faithful in my ministry. Yes, you are qualified, and I believe you are called.”

So, Eric was called! I was pretty excited and supportive of him. I had seriously always wanted to be a pastor’s wife, but had had to settle for an airplane mechanic. We did lots of other things throughout the years, but this was truly wonderful, not just any old job. It is an awesome, awesome responsibility and a high privilege to be called to be an undershepherd of The Good Shepherd. It is the best “job” in the world.

Then I got sweaty palms. What about me?? Was I called? I was that mom of little kids who only owned sweatshirts! Our pastor’s wife Peggy was always a picture perfect pastor’s wife and I was sure I could not be a Peggy! I had to talk to Peggy, but I felt like hiding! All my past flooded back to me – the times I had ruined other people’s lives. Eric had the neat calling experience, but I didn’t. I just had a lot of sin and shame in my past. Sure, the Lord could forgive me, but could He use me? Really? We still had six kids in the house!

Peggy heard my fears when I finally expressed them to her. And she just said, “If your husband is called, then you are called!” Really? Even if I can’t play the piano or the guitar? All I can play is the accordion and drums. All those doubts...

Pastor Joe just said, “Keep reading those books I gave you,” so we did, and there was a whole set of Pastors Conference teachings as well. Then, he set a commissioning date for Wednesday night, September 12, 2001. But I had a pressing question that just wouldn’t go away, so I emailed him about it. I said, “Joe, you say Eric and I can pastor a church, but we have never given you full disclosure about our past …”

“Your past is forgiven,” he said. 

“But you might change your mind if you only knew…”

“The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable,” he replied, quoting Romans 11:29. So, I relaxed. 

Maybe, just maybe, God actually wanted people who didn’t feel good enough. Then we would know where all the successes come from – not from our own perfection, our natural abilities, nor even our winsomeness, but only from God’s Holy Spirit at work in our broken lives. It would be more difficult for someone who actually believed they were good enough, to give up the helm and let God do the work. 

On September 11, 2001, Lisa called our house and told us to turn on the TV. So we hooked up our set to the cable leading to the large aerial antenna outside and tuned in the best we could, and watched replay after replay of the footage of the horrible attack on America by Muslim terrorist jihadists. Our church opened up that evening for people who wanted to come and pray, seek God, and mourn for those lost lives. Most churches did. We noticed with interest that the church we’d been visiting did not. Calvinists seem to always be afraid people will pray “wrong.” Or at least that church did. We never went back there.

We asked Pastor Joe if he still wanted to have the commissioning service the very next night.

He said, “Yes, I think we need this now, more than ever.”

On September 12, our whole family lined up across the stage and sang a song the Lord gave Eric for the occasion – “My One Desire.” Then all of us laid hands on Daddy as he knelt in our midst, and we prayed, along with the church elders, for his ministry in Carroll County. And we fully expected God to use us all to fulfill His Great Commission through our family.

Pastor Joe and Eric, with Jerusalem as a backdrop

When I was younger, I saw church buildings in the various places where we lived. And I always thought, well, God doesn’t need any more pastors because He already has enough churches. You could say the same for hair stylists, dentists, or morticians. But I was forgetting the attrition rate. Pastors retire, die, or sometimes quit because of the stress of the ministry. Pastors need to pass the baton to young people who are new to the ministry and need to be trained in the faith. That’s why Paul had his Timothy, and why there is always a need to disciple those who are new converts. Some of them will be tomorrow’s pastors.

A pretty large percentage of our children have been called to the ministry in some way, even if it’s not their primary money making “job.” We have singers and musicians, teachers of children and youth, pastors, missionaries, evangelists, and wives of pastors and associate pastors and pastors-in-training. They make me proud, seeing them filling roles in the Kingdom of God. 

Because, Jesus Himself saw that the fields were ripe and ready to harvest. And we were to pray that the Lord of the Harvest would send more workers into His field. Answering the call of God is to fulfill Jesus’ prayer.

“Called by God” looks different for everybody. And I was flabbergasted that He would affirm that He could use me. This is what He said:

“For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.

“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.” ~1 Corinthians 1:26-29

This gives me hope! He has chosen the weak (like me!) to do His work, so that He will receive all the glory. Even so, Lord Jesus, we work, and we wait for You!

Providing for a Family and Three Times I Cried

We used to have a wire-haired terrier named Barkly, whose cleanliness instinct was ruined. No matter where we kept him, he was used to pooping indoors and not pooping outdoors, and that posed a problem. The dog “marked” a wicker baby bassinet in the living room and soiled the summer kitchen when we tied him outside. We took him to an animal shelter, where it was said that surely he would find a good home since he was so cute, but Barkly is now in doggie heaven, since nobody in their right mind would have him. 

The year 2020 saw out-of-control rioting, burning, smashing, and looting of small businesses in primarily Democrat strongholds. This was supposedly outrage over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who was arrested and detained with pressure on his neck under the knee of a police officer. However, if the protestors had really been concerned about the loss of life of a black man, they also could have been concerned about the loss of livelihood of all those small business owners whose businesses were pillaged and destroyed. Most of them were owned by their neighbors.

As a small business owner, that burning and looting did not sit well with me. No doubt, we can expect BLM and Antifa to be at it again in the near future, whenever things do not go their way because it has been proven that they have some strange immunity to prosecution. 

It is the small businesses of America who employ nearly half of our total workforce – and 99.9% of businesses in the US are small. I draw a parallel between Barkly and BLM / Antifa, who don’t mind pooping in their own home. Or, if not that, it is something more sinister. By the time this is posted, we may know more, since tomorrow is supposed to be the inauguration of another Democrat U.S. president. For the sake of our country, the Church, and our struggling small businesses, I am praying God will intervene.

But let’s talk about how the Haley family made a living here in flyover territory, and how we were eventually brought to realize our own American Dream. This will probably take more than one post, though ...

I’ve spoken before about Dr. Ray & Dorothy Moore, who “wrote the book” on homeschooling. That was how we got started, and their books were our manuals for many years. The first book was Better Late Than Early, which set the stage for homeschooling by explaining “the why” of it. That book was followed by Home Grown Kids, and later by Home Grown Schools. Because they so adamantly believed that children should not be in any kind of formal instruction at an early age, the Hewitt-Moore Child Development Center eventually split up and became the Hewitt Early Childhood Center, and the Moore Foundation, the latter of which agreed with and taught Moore’s principles. 

Another principle they believed in and taught in their books was that the home was the best place for the father – that he should not be leaving home all day long, but should stay home and involve the family in moneymaking enterprises, called “cottage industries.” They wrote an entire book about this, called Minding Your Own Business.

We tried a lot of things to make money “on the side,” and we needed to! But sometimes it’s hard to find one that really works!

When we just had the two young children, we wrote and delivered singing telegrams for a living. Eric and I both had uniforms with white shirts and slacks, green vests, and green visors. I made the vests and visors. Eventually, Eric did all the deliveries and I manned the phones and schedules. We both wrote songs. 

Me in my uniform, with Lisa (5-1/2 mos. old) at Grandma Haley's house

Eventually, we wrote an entire book of standard songs that we used in our business, but for more money, people could still order a custom one-of-a-kind song. We sold the publishing rights to the standard songs to a balloon distribution company called Balloon City, USA, and they produced and sold these songs, along with tiny cassette tapes of ourselves singing them. (That day, we found an all-day babysitter, locked the noisy parakeets in the back room, and took the phone off the hook.) Every month, the balloon company sent us royalties from the sales, and they wanted us to do more.

Book Two was produced later, and though we were supposed to have received a copy of that, we never did. We gained much notoriety in the Lafayette area, and we were featured in many a newspaper article, along with our specialty acts, such as Jeremy Camp’s father Tom, who sometimes went out with his guitar and harmonica; another Tom who was a local bagpiper with the 42nd Highlanders; and Carolyn, who played Santa Claus and the Queen of Hearts. Eric also dressed up like a cow, a female pig, Scrooge, and a hobo. We added balloons, flowers, candy, bumper stickers, and stuffed animals. Our preschool girls learned their colors by identifying the color of the helium balloons, which had been blown up in the basement and floated up to the top of the stairwell before they were tied together.

On Valentine’s Day we always prayed we would not be dumped with snow. That was our biggest day of the year – back-to-back singing telegrams from early morning till late at night, every 15 minutes, with people who worked for us going four directions at once. Once, I stayed up all night long the night before, hand-writing all the telegrams and coordinating the Valentine’s Day schedules.

Since I also kept the books for the business, which was doing so well we actually had it incorporated as “Haley & Haley Singing Telegrams, Inc.” with hopes of franchising, I was really surprised because somehow, even though we were really busy, we never seemed to be getting ahead. What I didn’t know was that Eric had been embezzling private funds on the side and saving them up for a fur coat for me! 

Eric heading out in Hank the Tank, 

which was chosen for a delivery car because of its balloon capacity.

But then, we started homeschooling and it was really important that I focus on teaching the kids! So we took down our shingle and tried something else. About that time, Eric began buying review copies of college textbooks. We got into this because Eric had met someone who knew there was money to be made in the area, but they were giving up the territory themselves.

Since we needed to get out of the house from time to time, and we missed Daddy, we sometimes took an all-day trip with him, packing lunch in a cooler, school supplies, and consumable workbooks. We had the freedom to have our school on the road, to visit a museum on a college campus while he was buying books from a professor, or to have recess by the fountain. Yes, we sometimes got shy of having anyone see us, to ask why our kids “weren’t in school.” But over the years, that wore off. Our kids were free! We sometimes pointed to other kids on a school playground and referred to that fenced-in area as “the zoo.”

Eric was also buying collections of bound periodicals from libraries, who were digitizing all of them to save room. When he was able to invest in a collection like that, he would make a lot of money suddenly, and we would be able to pay our bills! But it was sometimes difficult to get around in the living room for awhile. 

The book buying job didn’t last long, though. Book buyers were sometimes stigmatized by professors who considered it unethical to sell books they had received free from publishers as review copies. Sometimes Eric had a retiring professor sell his whole collection, but other times, Eric was told he was not welcome (but not officially). So either we ate that week, or it was slim pickin’s. And after awhile, we found out that there was something a little sketchy about the company that was buying up the textbooks, so Eric started selling his books to the University Bookstore on Purdue Campus instead. It was an honest company and that worked much better.

The moving of very heavy boxes and loads of college textbooks and oversized books ended up taking its toll on Eric’s health, causing backaches and arrhythmias. Eric found himself in the hospital from overexertion and dehydration from too much ice tea. The ambulance ride also was a result of the Urgent Care people hooking up the heart monitor leads backwards, but still ...

So, he finally decided it was time to go back to work at Home Hospital, where his job as a monitor technician was still wide open after he’d left it to do singing telegrams. No one had taken his place. But somebody really needed to be there on night shift, to read those rhythm strips and alert a nurse that someone was having tachycardia or atrial fib. So they were glad to hire him back. 

On the side, Eric worked at his dad’s antiques store (Leonard’s Antiques & Used Furniture). When he found out that his dad had been throwing away all the books he’d acquired when he bought estates, Eric offered to buy the books from him, and he rented a single bookshelf in the store, to sell the best ones. The sale of those books also supplemented our income, and Eric’s dad found out the books were actually worth something, but he still let Eric have that part of the business.

In 1988, Leonard Haley passed away at age 61. And since Eric had been here for his dad, his mother sold us the store on contract and later gave it to us outright. Eric quit the job at the hospital again, changed the name of the store from Leonard’s Antiques and Used Furniture, to Leonard’s Antiques and Books, and finally, as books started taking over, to Leonard’s Books. We moved to Burrows but Eric still commuted to Lafayette every day to keep the store. And every day, before he left home, our kids laid hands on him and prayed for good success at the store. It didn’t take long for them to memorize the prayer they used, and since they all prayed at once, it sounded like a Pentecostal prayer meeting.

Lisa and Emily both went with Dad on certain days of the week while the rest of their siblings stayed home. Lisa walked down the street from the store to St. Elizabeth Hospital to do candystriping and take Latin from a nun. Emily entered book descriptions into a database we submitted to Bibliofind, while simultaneously painting her toenails. We paid her for the number of books she entered. 

Sometimes Dad’s North End store was the setting for a school project, such as having a Medieval feast with friends in a homeschool co-op, complete with wall tapestries and trenchers. Lisa and Emily made armor and jousted with their friends atop their daddies’ shoulders, on the sidewalk in front of the store, while customers of the bar across the street came out to watch the fun.

These jobs seemed like they should do the trick financially, but they were always not quite enough. We periodically tried to make a budget, but gave up because it really never added up right. How could it? We always needed just a little more before we could be financially stable. We would be selling an average of eight books a day, … but needed ten. So we were in earnest prayer for ten. 

But somehow, we never lacked. We didn’t have insurance, but we had a doctor who cut our fees because he could, and because we were in the same homeschool support group. His kids were always in my plays. And when we started having home births, the midwives were hoping we could make monthly payments, but probably would have accepted chickens if they had to. We always found enough to pay them.

We did have really big gardens, and the kids were recruited to help with the gardening and the canning. We would put up about a hundred twenty quarts of tomatoes every year, and squeeze and can at least 50 quarts of grape juice. We were given a wheat grinder, and we bought a bushel of wheat from a farmer, sometimes two, and that and the soybeans and dried corn would be enough to feed the growing family just fine. And there was always some amount of Earned Income Credit on our taxes.

So, referring back to my title for this post, why did I cry? Well, for one, Lisa had some space between her front incisors. That had to be solved with a little bit of a brace to squeeze them together, and it wasn’t too expensive. But with this first one, we had set a precedent. When Chris needed some major orthodontics done on his teeth after that, his work would cost something that seemed pretty astronomical. I had to be the one to put the $5,000 on our credit card for it, and when I did, I cried, but I tried not to show it. It seemed it could never be paid off, and we didn’t do any more of that with the other six.

So when we finally realized the book sales really never were quite what we needed, I began doing some odd jobs from our home to make some more money. We had very good friends who felt sorry for us and wanted to help, so they came up with ways we could earn some extra bucks, even though we weren’t really qualified in those areas. Once, I did an audit of a CEO’s spending for someone on the board of the corporation and set up some new accounting software, but I charged too much and did the job too slowly, so the CEO was really angry at how much it cost him. Since he yelled a lot, I was really glad when he fired me!

Another time, I was coached on how to be a drug rep, selling packets of tea that were a bad-tasting cancer cure from China made from reishi mushroom. My friend even bought me professional clothes so I could do a presentation for prospects and not look like a mom of little kids who only owned sweatshirts. I was only occasionally successful, and eventually, after having too many returns, my friend’s husband fired me. This was really not my cup of tea. 

I also did tax preparation using a professional tax software, hoping all the time that none of my clients would be audited and then suffer financial loss because of some mistake I’d made. Yeah, there was some anxiety involved with that job!

And then, there was line editing / proofreading. That was a job I really loved doing, so I did it for both fun and profit. There was a Biblical counseling book by my famous brother-in-law, Dr. Kerry Skinner, and there was a really technical book by my friend about the Chinese mushroom cure I was selling. And I read every single article on LifeNews.com for three years, to find all the errors and sent them to author Steven Ertelt, whom I’d never met, but because he was doing such a service to mankind and he couldn’t afford my inflated prices, I did that for him in exchange for an ad for Eric’s business – which worked very well, I might add! (More about that business im a future post.)

Eventually, with all this experience behind me, I put on my professional outfit, slid my neatly typed resumé into my professional briefcase, put on make-up no less (being desperate), and answered an ad in the Carroll County Comet for a proofreader for the paper. They said they couldn’t afford me, that I was overqualified, and that they wanted some housewife at $7.50 an hour a few hours a week for a little extra spending money. That just wasn’t enough for me to drive to Flora.

But there were times when we were at the end of our rope, times when I just didn’t know how we could get along, with having to put a little more on the credit card, and then a little more, and then a little more. And we needed to have some kind of income, so I faced the possibility of having to work outside the home. 

I was pretty sure I could get a job with Roxy, the produce manager at Marsh. I was intimately familiar with the names of every kind of fruit and vegetable in the store since we were all on the Fit for Life diet after our #6 baby, Valerie, was born. And Roxy was so used to seeing me there with kids in tow that she had begun to put all the “seconds” in large boxes and sell the whole thing to me once a week at $5.00, rather than packaging them up and selling them at a discount.

But as we thought about this idea, I took a long walk in the country with Eric, and we talked and prayed, ... and I cried. I could not stop crying. When I thought of having to get a full-time job so we could make it, I knew it meant the end of homeschooling. And I could not bear the thought of entrusting the kids to a public school. We hadn’t done that since Lisa was in kindergarten. It was too painful to think about.

So, we just pressed on, somehow, and always managed to find some other way to live and pay our bills.

Then, I had bronchitis, which became worse and worse, until I started having atrial fibrillation. Eric knew what that was from taking my pulse and got me to the hospital fast.

The diagnosis? The bronchitis had progressed to pneumonia with pericardial effusion. There was fluid in my lungs up into the bronchi and leaking into my pericardium – the outer area of my heart – and that was squeezing my heart and causing irregular heartbeats. The cardiologist was advising me of my condition and telling me that if the antibiotics didn’t work, he would have to pull the fluids out of my heart with a long needle, and he didn’t want to do that. So a lot of prayer went up on my behalf. As a reply to all that prayer, God did a miracle of healing in my body, and Dr. Krause was quick to point it out at my follow-up visit. He didn’t even make another appointment for a return visit. 

But… I had to file for Medicaid. Government assistance. We had avoided that for so long! But here I was, in the Family Services office, filing for a welfare program. The social worker told me all our kids qualified too, so here, fill out this paperwork for all of them. And while you’re at it, here’s what you sign to get food stamps. I cried.

The social worker saw me crying and somehow knew I was feeling shame and misery. With a little bit of conversation, she found out from me that I felt like a failure, that we should be able to just trust God and depend on Him for our every need, so why did we need government assistance? She bent down next to me to look me in the eye and said, “I’m a Christian too. And I would just say, maybe God wants to provide for you this way for a while.”

So I signed the forms, always with the understanding that there would be an end to this season in our lives. Our wonderful family doctor didn’t take Medicaid payments, so we couldn’t use him for our kids anymore. But we still didn’t have to put our kids in a public school, which we also called “government welfare schools.” (Think about it!)

God did take care of us. Again, we had no lack.

There were two more jobs I haven’t told you about yet, so this story is to be continued. Eventually, there was the “American Dream,” and the way there was pretty interesting. Here’s what I can tell you about “the way there,” without telling you what lies ahead:

Yes, the LORD will give what is good; And our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness will go before Him, And shall make His footsteps our pathway. 

~Ps. 85:12-13

Better is a little with righteousness, Than vast revenues without justice.

A man's heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.

~Proverbs 16:8-9

The Lord leads us by going first. He has “been there, done that.” I wonder how many failed enterprises Joseph had before Jesus reached maturity. And there were times when the God of the Universe was literally hungry. Does He care, when we go through these trials? Absolutely! And rest assured, our individual circumstances and the needs we have along the way will help Him get our attention and direct our steps, as we but follow in His footsteps.

As for tomorrow, may God, whose name is “Salvation,” save us from our enemies…

Of Third World Countries and Third World Worlds

I have an attitude about my homeland that, I guess, must have come about because I’ve lived in a third world country before. Maybe everyone should try it for awhile. It just seemed like something I took for granted – that nobody in their right mind would actually choose to do that.

During the summer of 1964, when I was seven, my family parked our cute little trailer on a friend’s farm. Then, we went to Hawaiian Gardens, California, and lived there in one of my grandfather’s apartments. Dad was sent to the Philippines for a two-year tour of duty. We could go along with him since he would be gone so long, but he had to find a house for us to rent first.

Shortly before Christmas, Dad sent for us, and our family boarded a military transport (or “hop”) to get to the Philippines the cheap way.

Though I was glad to see my dad again after several months’ separation, the Philippines, or “the P.I.” never impressed me. It wasn’t like we ever went to the sandy island beaches to sunbathe. We did have a typhoon. 

I don’t know for sure. I have never been back to the P.I. since 1965. Maybe now Manila is modern and clean with air conditioned buildings everywhere. Maybe they have gotten rid of the cannibals in the jungle. Maybe the open air garbage truck pulled by the carabao has been replaced with a modern compactor-style truck such as those that come rumbling through Burrows. Maybe the guards at the gate of the housing division where we lived no longer steal your pet dog and roast her with rice.

Boomby, who escaped and was presumed eaten.

I know that I was young and it was a long time ago, but there is an important comparison I can make. 

Exhibit A. On Good Friday, 1964, in the P.I., my mom took us to a parade which featured people walking down the street whipping themselves on the back to make themselves bleed, and a few others who chose to be crucified for a while in the hot sun, to try to prove their devotion to God and earn their way to Heaven. I remember the stench of sweaty bodies, the blood that was splashed on us, and how my mom was so traumatized that she accidentally ran the sewing machine needle through her finger when we got home.

Exhibit B. On New Year’s Day, 1975, my mom and I went to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California. Maybe I don’t have to describe that to you, but I remember the bold colors and the scent of millions and millions of flower petals.

Can you see the difference?

I was really glad that we went to the school on Clark AFB – Wurtsmith Elementary School. Every morning, very very early, the blue Air Force bus came through our housing division. We were taken to the Air Force base to have school in a World War II era quonset hut. Then we returned home before the hottest part of the day began. It was a little weird to be going to school where once or twice we kids found an unexploded bomb on the playground. But at least most of the time our teachers and fellow-students spoke English, with the exception of the Filipino student teacher who was trying to teach us new words in Science, with a heavy Tagalog accent.

We were asked to decide whether we wanted white milk or chocolate milk with our school lunch. Most kids – or actually practically all the kids – wanted chocolate milk, but I was already a health conscious youngster and I chose white milk. What I didn’t know at the time was that all the milk was shipped in. The Philippines didn’t have dairy cows! And because of the outrageous temperatures, the milk would spoil, so they just sent dry milk and it was reconstituted before it was put into the little paper cartons. I am a quick learner, though. The chocolate helped to improve the taste, so I was all-in by the next week.

Our house only had large fans and I was perpetually hot and sticky. I always wanted Mom to make me dresses out of the thinnest fabric she could find, and was always very disappointed when she told me I would have to wear a slip.

So I did nothing but read – a lot! I became as inactive as possible, and the extra weight I put on from that policy only served to make life more miserable. If ordered outside, I would hide in a shrub.

We had a housegirl and a houseboy, who worked cheap. They lived in the barrios and it didn’t take much to sustain them, so the housegirl cleaned the house and waxed the floor red with a mosquito repellant, and the houseboy did the yardwork. We were told never to walk outside barefoot because the water around that place in the backyard was actually sewage, and if you walked in it, you could get hookworms. The housegirl did our laundry in a wringer washer and hung it up to dry on a clothesline, but I was afraid to go back there myself. 

Rennie and Dan playing in a sprinkler hooked up to the clothesline. 

 The laundry was done in the building to the left.

Dad picked up a virus called Mènére’s Disease that affected his inner ear and made him dizzy. He still has that.

And those mosquitoes! They were like demon drones. If you dared to leave the car windows down overnight, in the morning, you’d better bring the pepper spray with you before you entered the car with all the enemy combatants lurking in the shadows. My mom decided to play a trick on her stepmother, who was always writing her with news she’d read about how the Philippines was a terrible place. She found the biggest cockroach she could, one that was about as big as a business size envelope, somehow killed it without destroying its form, and stuffed it into the envelope. Then she wrote that she was enclosing one of the smaller cockroaches, because the big ones didn’t fit into the envelopes.

The income from working for us really helped our native domestic servants, and it helped our housegirl get her education. At school we learned a song about the Philippine national house – the nipa hut. Since we didn’t live in a nipa hut, but in a real house, that meant that we were the “rich Americans.”

There were three times that I remember very well, that were remarkably happy times while we lived in the P.I.:

1. My dad did have 30 days of paid vacation. That was always a little mysterious to me because I didn’t know why he wasn’t going to work. When I was younger, I thought I should help the family because my dad was unemployed, so I told people’s fortunes. (Like I could!) But now that I was eight, I understood more, and we were so happy to be able to go to John Hay Air Base in Baguio, up in the mountains, for some R & R during Dad’s vacation. We brought home some souvenirs from Baguio, including a carved wooden headhunter and a carved game of Sunka. I don’t know who ended up with the headhunter, but I got the Sunka game.

2. My dad’s brother, Uncle Sam, was in the U.S. Navy, and once his ship docked in the Philippines. We went to see him and he gave us a tour. I was young and didn’t have the words so I called it a “boat” and asked if we could see the “steering wheel,” to which Uncle Sam strongly objected. This was tremendous for me, kind of like Laura Ingalls when the mail train finally came through. Although Uncle Sam didn’t bring any mail, we did get ice cream!

3. And then, there was the incident at the U.S. embassy. I still don’t know why we had to go there, but when we did, we walked into the United States of America. It was as if we had been transported to another location, like Narnia. Or like Heaven. I was home again! And we had ice cream! (Notice a pattern here?)

And this is my point. I have grown up in the United States of America. There has been no other country as sound, as peaceful, as heroic and generous, as clean and prosperous, as the United States. She is my home and I love her!

When we send our children overseas – like when Chris went to Mexico and Nicaragua, or when Susie went to St. Kitts and Kyrgyzstan, or when Vivian went to Myanmar – we send them there to minister. They are there to bring education, or food, or clothing, or some other help to those less fortunate. They are less fortunate because they have not known the Lord Jesus Christ. Missionaries are able to bring the Gospel message. Some will stay with their missions country.  I know missionaries in Latvia, Ukraine, China, and Managua, who have stayed there long-term and embraced the people to whom they minister.  But not many would be willing to give up their U.S. citizenship.  At least, they would have to think very hard and pray about that before they did, because America is their home.

Why, then, would anyone want to turn our nation, our home, into an atheistic third world country like the ones we have been helping, feeling sorry for, and praying for all these years? 

Why would we want what Russia has had – persecution of Christians, torture, and imprisonment under Communist rule? 

Why would anyone want what my dad saw in Saudi Arabia under Islam? When he came home from being stationed there in 1955, he had pictures of a beheading, and a severed hand and foot from someone who had been caught stealing and tried to run away.

In Communist China, the leaders tear down churches, and forcibly abort babies and sterilize women so that there is virtually no such thing to most people as a “brother,” a “sister,” an “aunt,” an “uncle,” or a “cousin.” Or, if someone is so bold as to give their child a sibling, their entire family is stigmatized. If you believe in any deity other than the president of China, you run the risk of imprisonment with torture. There are crematoriums built near the Uyghur “reeducation” camps. Have we already forgotten Tiananmen Square?

In Haiti, there is voodoo and abject poverty. In Nicaragua, there are open dumps – where people live, find food, and scavenge items to sell, or to wear. In Mexico, the drug cartels run everything.

In the third world, there is poverty, hunger, disease, hopelessness, and a lack of resources. Our nation has all the answers to these.  They are wrapped up in Jesus Christ, who has abundantly blessed our nation because it was founded on a fundamental belief in God and in those Judeo-Christian values you find in His Book – the rule of law, the equality of all people, and the God-given freedoms of those people to live, to work, to speak, and to move within the boundaries of the law.  The framers of our Constitution acknowledged that our rights come from God, embraced God’s Book, and arranged our government in accordance with the Book, as God’s avenger over evil and protector of the family unit.  

God is all over our founding documents, our money, and our monuments.  Do you sometimes feel America has lost her footing? It is when we disregard our godly heritage and trade it for worship of something else that we begin to look more like a third world country than a first world one.  America, wake up!  Did you know that there are missions groups in other countries who have felt God calling them to the United States to share the Gospel message with our heathen nation?

If I have learned anything in my travels, it is to appreciate that “There’s no place like home.”  Coming back from the Philippines, my family drove out to the farm where our trailer had been stored.  I found that the built-in cabinets in the bathroom had shrunk!  It was weird!  Then, that trailer, along with the vacation trailer Dad had built, found a new home in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, across from the high school baseball field.  

Me, shortly after settling in our new home in Sgt. Bluff, Iowa.

Our main trailer is to the right, and the vacation trailer is to the left.

How American it was, to watch through the chain link fence, and see the Little League teams running around the bases in the summer!  

I finally learned how to ride my bike there because the roads in the P.I. had been too rocky for a timid beginner.  Yes, Iowa, though I had never been there before, was home.

 My 10th Birthday, and my first bike

So now, here’s what Eric and I read Sunday morning, in Psalm 84:

1 How lovely is Your tabernacle, O LORD of hosts!

2 My soul longs, yes, even faints For the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

4 Blessed are those who dwell in Your house; They will still be praising You. Selah

10 For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

Eric and I read this beautiful passage about living in the house of God and how the soul longs for that lovely and rich place, and discussed between ourselves the glories, not only of the tabernacle God inhabited in the midst of the children of Israel, but of the heavenly home where we will live with God forever. 

Then, upon retrieving my phone later that morning, I got the news that the wife of my Real Brother had passed away the previous night, after battling Huntington’s Disease for twelve years. So I called him. Although I had been too lazy to go back downstairs to grab my phone and had missed his middle of the night call, I was glad that I had some fresh manna for him when I finally got to talk with him. God’s Word is new every morning!

And this is what He was telling us, among other things. Janet, Mike’s wife, had been longing for the Courts of the Lord for a long time. She knew the Savior. She knew He would be waiting for her. But like the child who cannot understand why a journey is taking so long, towards the end, the oft-repeated refrain was, “Are we there yet?” And then, like young Margie stepping into the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines, Janet was suddenly there, finally … home.

Deep inside, we all want to go home. Lisa may remember when her friend’s grandmother was appalled because Lisa was sighing about how she just wished she could go to Heaven NOW. This grandmother thought Lisa was morbid and suicidal, but I assured her that Lisa just understood, maybe better than we did, how beautiful and how desirable Heaven is. 

If we know the Savior, the end of life here means finally being able to go there, to our real home.

So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.

We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. ~2 Cor. 5:6-8

And now that Janet is home, that’s where she wants to stay, waiting for the rest of us. Who would choose a Third World World over the First World World? Not me – no more than I would want to live in Venezuela!