World Travelers and the Passover

This week is Passover for the Jews. Our good friend Ayelet promised that if we are unable to go there during our stay on Planet Earth, she would meet us over Jerusalem when we are caught up together to meet Jesus in the clouds. Next year, Ayelet, in Jerusalem!

View over the Caribbean, on the way to Susie’s practicum trip to St. Kitts.  

Whenever I fly, I love to look for Jesus in the clouds.

When I was eight years old, in 1964, I had a passport when my family spent time in the Philippines. I think it’s no good anymore, especially since I think my looks have changed, and I’ve long since misplaced it. I’ve never been to Mexico, and once when we were at Niagara Falls a very long time ago, we briefly crossed into Canada. But when it was time to have an “overseas tour” while I was in the Air Force, it was Hawaii. Technically, yes, it was over a sea, but it was still the United States, so I didn’t need to have my passport renewed.

But when you have eight kids, and they’re growing up in the Church, the subject of Missions Trips eventually comes up. Naturally, when you have eight kids, you’re pretty sure you can’t afford missions trips. But neither could my family afford Girl Scout trips, band trips, and other fun things I did as a child. So, we had fundraisers.

Now, I can tell you that Eric and all eight of our kids have also been overseas and needed a passport. Here’s where they went:

• Eric: Israel
• Lisa: Puerto Rico and Guatemala
• Emily: Israel
• Chris: Mexico and Nicaragua (twice)
• Susie: St. Kitts and Kyrgyzstan
• Robyn: Israel (three times)
• Valerie: Israel, Ireland
• David: St. Kitts and Iraq
• Vivian: Myanmar

Some trips were with our own church, some were with other churches, and some trips were solo. But if they were there on a missions trip, they were there to support a missionary.

Some were sightseeing trips or for pleasure or special events.

Some trips happened after they were married and out of the house.

Some were with a team of college friends.

One was a military deployment.

I have the way to the Indianapolis airport memorized (but appreciate the GPS). And we are familiar with fundraisers.

The first of our kids to go out of the country was Chris, and he was the one I worried about the most. Somehow I had gotten on a mailing list for a missionary in Nicaragua and enjoyed reading his emailed newsletters. But one day, my eyes were drawn to a request for painters. I didn’t know what he meant, and Chris could paint, so I approached the letter in the negative, like a good Norwegian would: 

“You wouldn’t mean an artist painter, would you?”

Well, yes, that’s exactly what they wanted! They’d bought an old building that used to be for auto repairs, and it had a tall black galvanized steel gate that made the place look like a prison. They wanted to use this for a Christian school, so they wanted a mural on that gate so it would look like the kids were entering Heaven.

I said, “My son Chris can paint, but he’s only sixteen, and we couldn’t afford to send him.” 

The missionary said in return, “All he needs is a round trip ticket. We’ll take care of the rest.”

The decision making was the hard part. Chris didn’t always pay attention, so I was afraid he would get lost, like I did at the Honolulu airport, and miss his flight. Was he too young for such a trip, with no one to look after him? And where would we get the money for the ticket?

Well, the money for the ticket was covered quickly. When Grandpa Ware liked an idea like this, he was sure to send a check. And Chris was thrilled with the idea! All that was left was whether it was God’s will. The circumstances seemed doable. So we prayed, and the next morning, in our daily Bible reading, there was this:

“Furthermore King David said to all the assembly: ‘My son Solomon, whom alone God has chosen, is young and inexperienced; and the work is great, because the temple is not for man but for the LORD God.’” ~1 Chronicles 29:1

I cried. It wasn’t a temple that Chris would be making, but God was assuring us through His Word, that He had hand-picked our son for a great work. So, we agreed this would be a good thing, but I made sure to drill him and drill him on what he would be seeing at the Miami airport and how to find his next flight out of there. 

I cried again on the way home after dropping him off, thinking he would be all alone and I couldn’t help him (which wasn’t good for driving!), but he did fine, and the missionary met him in Managua.

We called it a special semester, two months long, during the otherwise frigid Indiana winter months, and Chris got an immersion course in Spanish, along with art and Christian service.

True to the word of the missionary, he was taken care of. He ate a lot of rice and beans in the mission church’s feeding center, and he slept on the roof of their orphanage. He painted not one, but two murals. He went with one of the teams from another church when they passed out water bottles to the residents of the dump, and shared the Gospel. He took cold showers at the end of the hot, dusty, smelly day. 

And he couldn’t have loved it more. The second time he went to Nicaragua, he took several others from our church along with him.

Susie, David, and Vivian are all graduates of Calvary Chapel Bible College in Indianapolis (CCBCi). To culminate their school year, after learning about Christian service, the students at CCBCi always plan a spring missions trip, called a “practicum.” These are usually 2 or 3 weeks long and participation is not actually mandatory, but greatly encouraged.

When the students have counted the costs, they kick into high gear for fundraising. They’ll write a letter to all their family and friends explaining how much they want to go, what they’ll be doing there to aid a missionary family / church, how much it costs, and how what they really want us to do is pray for them. There’s also a student-run practicum dinner, where they serve their guests their student-prepared feast, and talk about where they’re going and explain what the need is. Of course, contributions are accepted, but these dinners are actually prayer meetings. Once you’ve heard about the needs, the next thing to do is to lay hands on the students and pray for them.

When Vivian went to Myanmar, we really didn’t even know at first that that was Burma, and Burma was really only in our heads because of The King and I. Burma was disparaged in the movie because it was so pitifully small compared to Siam! But today, with the military coup in Myanmar, we not only know where Burma is, we know the Calvary Chapel missionaries who live there and run the Calvary Chapel church, and we keep tabs on them and pray for them.

The world becomes a smaller place when you’ve seen it for yourself. Vivian had a Zoom graduation last year because of Covid, and Andrew, her husband, took a job at a Calvary Chapel near Fort Wayne. But when Vivi gave her graduation speech from CCBCi, it was mostly about how much she and Andrew wanted to go back to Myanmar because they loved the people there. 

You might meet someone who has escaped from China and is going by an assumed name. You might have to trek up a narrow mountain road to minister there. You might have to sing the same English language children’s action songs over and over again in each village you’re brought to, without telling the Buddhist parents that “One Two Three, Jesus Loves Me” is not primarily about learning to count. You might sweat more than you’ve ever sweated before in your life. But you’ve invested part of your life in those people, those children, and that becomes your treasure. Eating their foods with them from a banana leaf, you bond, and leave part of your heart behind when you leave.

Robyn’s trip was different. Around the time when Valerie was born, in 1993, we had a friend named Ayelet (pronounced like “I yell it,” and her husband Daniel, who were from Yad HaShmona, a kibbutz with a moshav, or guest house, in the Judean hills. Daniel was getting his degree at Purdue’s vet school and Ayelet was along for the ride. They went to our church because, as Messianic Jews, they didn’t really appreciate crosses in churches. They liked our church because it sported a dove instead.

Robyn was only two or three at the time, but the Ronen’s were unforgettable, and Ayelet loved Robyn’s blond hair and chubby cheeks. They reminded her of Daniel’s cheeks. Although Daniel was an Israeli, his family was from Finland and he had the same blond hair and cheeks.

Ayelet taught us how to do Passover. We celebrated with our church family, but we also had a private Seder with the Ronen’s one year when it wasn’t being done at the church. It was a novelty at the church, but it was a firm, non-negotiable event with Daniel and Ayelet. 

When Christmas time came around, Ayelet made a cookie church alongside the one our family made, but hers was a synagogue.

Then, Daniel had his degree and they were soon gone, as Purdue students typically are. But before they left, they told us about a volunteer program at the moshav. If you could just get there, you could volunteer to work at the moshav, and in your free time, you could go sightseeing. And, members of the moshav community could bring you places where the typical tourists didn’t get to go. Also, Ayelet told me she had a cousin picked out to marry Robyn when she grew up.

Well, who wouldn’t want to be related to a BenDavid? (That means “Son of David” and it is Ayelet’s maiden name.) And it just so happened that Robyn, after having a unit study on Israel in high school, expressed an interest in going there. I think she was fascinated by the thought of meeting Ayelet’s cousin, or another good-looking Messianic Jew. So Robyn saved up her earnings from Leonard’s until she had enough for a round trip plane ticket, applied for a passport and a work visa, and studied Hebrew.

So while I had been apprehensive about Chris in a strange airport, I considered Robyn level-headed enough to be by herself in a foreign country. She had single-handedly done all the planning to get there in the first place! But when she actually arrived at Ben Gurion airport, she felt rather lost and anxious. Fortunately for American travelers, there are almost always people who speak English in an airport, so she eventually found her way to the moshav.

On that first trip, Robyn learned what to do when your employer cracks the whip. A volunteer is not the same as an employee, but she was there to work, work hard, and work fast. Most of the time, she worked cleaning rooms for guests at the moshav, and other times, she would do other manual labor jobs such as pruning the olive trees at their Biblical Garden. (These were very messy indeed!) She and the non-Jewish volunteers got to work on the Sabbath and take Sunday off.

Sadly, Ayelet’s cousin was in the IDF by that time, so Ayelet’s matchmaking idea never happened.

Robyn was at Yad HaShmona during Christmas, and though there was a time delay on Skype of a few seconds, we were anxious to hear from her, so we contacted her from Lisa’s house on Christmas Day, and sang The Hallelujah Chorus to her. She loved it and sang along with what she heard. Unfortunately it wasn’t coming through in a synchronized way, but we all overlooked that as well as we could. We had sent her, at a pretty hefty expense, a Christmas stocking, with items to stuff into it. She had tried to make the famous cookie church, but putting it together with frosting wasn’t a successful idea.

She learned that the Arabs who worked for the Messianic Jews in the kitchen, who intoned “I love you” upon first seeing her, and who ogled her when she passed them, could be cured of this affliction by putting her long blond hair in a scarf.

The second time Robyn went to Israel, she was unable to get the work visa at Yad HaShmona, but she got one instead at a guest house run by a large Messianic church, Beit Immanuel in Tel Aviv, where she became a worship team member. And when she returned home, she was always the one who led the singing at our Passover Seders.

Robyn was in Israel during an escalation in tensions between Israel and one of her neighbors, and it was probably the second trip, so we respectfully requested that she come back early. (Believe me, you watch the international news a lot closer when your children are overseas!)

The third time, she just had to go back for a fellow volunteer’s wedding, and she took Valerie with her for a whirlwind tour.

Valerie, at a beach near TelAviv

What has remained for us is Passover. Sure, one at a time, we might get to see Ayelet again if we have a trip to Israel on our calendar. 

Eric, at Yad HaShmona, during a trip to Israel,

with Ayelet, Daniel, and one of their kids

But we have never forgotten that she taught us how to do Passover, and we still do, every year. 

One year, we had a real live Judaizer at our Carroll County church who had been spreading the false doctrine that we as Christians became Jews when we were saved and now we had to keep the Law. So on purpose, we didn’t have Passover. Instead, Lisa talked us into going to her church and having it there.

But since then, we have not missed, not even for Covid. We hosted a Facebook Live event in 2020, the same way most churches at that time were just getting started with livestreaming, out of necessity. This year, we’ll be doing our virtual Passover again this Thursday night, April 1, which is still technically Passover week, but just not when you usually have the Seder, at the beginning of Passover. 

There will be lamb, the way Jesus would have experienced it, but understanding that Jesus Himself was God’s lamb, the perfect once-for-all sacrifice. (Sorry, we can’t share it with you when it’s virtual, but you can watch us!) There will be singing, dancing, and joy over God’s deliverance for His people in Moses’ day, and remembering that that is a picture of how Jesus rescued us from our sinful state and will again deliver His people at the End of All Days. 

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem! There is nothing that says “Pray for Jerusalem” like having friends there.

Dear Father, we do pray for the peace of Jerusalem, as well as peace for the rest of your people who are still scattered. We also pray for the peace of all the countries where our family has ministered, especially Iraq and Myanmar. We pray for the true peace that comes from knowing the Prince of Peace, Yeshua HaMashiah, Jesus. For it is in His Name we pray, Amen.

Fun With Photo Albums, Part 1: 1956-1957

This past Sunday, Eric and I spent the afternoon with Dad, after having had to miss a few months because of wintry weather. My intention was to write down what he did in the military for posterity. There’s something very cool about having a servicemember for an ancestor. For instance, a tintype of a soldier in uniform will sell for a higher price than a tintype of an ordinary civilian. And even the old 1950’s family Bibles have several pages for Military Service in the family. The perennial question everyone wants to know is “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

I even had a Bible verse ready for this post:

“... but the people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits.” 

 ~Daniel 11:32

So, armed with two photo albums and a pad of paper, we headed to Dad’s house in southern Indiana after church. I thought, “I’ll just turn to the pictures of his overseas locations and start writing when he tells me what they were.” 

But that’s not how it turned out. 

I was pretty sure at least one of the albums was something he had handed me several years ago, saying he didn’t want it but I might like to have it. Probably all the pictures of him with my mom were an eyesore to his second wife, and she wanted to be rid of them. So I was careful to avoid all the pictures of our little family that I treasured but he might not – where my parents obviously loved each other.

But now, both of Dad’s wives are dead and buried, and presumably both are in Heaven. So Dad was not willing to skip all the pictures I thought he wouldn’t like. Surprisingly, he recognized them all as his happy memories, too, most of which he’d taken himself! And he wanted to flip through both albums, page by page, and tell me stories. I couldn’t have loved that more! So I took lots of notes and we began at the beginning. This is Part 1, most of which I’ve covered before, but scantily. This time, a few more details, as Dad told me the old stories.

Flipping to the beginning of Album #1, so as not to miss anything, Dad exclaimed, “Oh, that was our wedding night!” (January of 1956)

Yes, that’s what it probably was, but I don’t know who took that picture! It was captioned simply: “Wow”

Not much further in, he saw pictures of Mom pregnant with me like this one:

“That car! I loved that car! It was a ‘47 Hudson. We wore it out, pulling the trailer across country. Poor car!”

Then he told me how when they were married, he didn’t have a driver’s license but she had one. He said he flunked the test a couple of times, the first from making too wide a turn, and the second from hitting a cone while trying to parallel park. Both were needed skills for towing that trailer, their first home, when it was time.

“Oh look! There’s my mother!” And in fact, there were several. My mom loved my Grandma Cheva. Here’s a really wonderful picture of her. She told me a long time ago that Grandma had fine, baby-soft hair. It looks like she has just been arranging Grandma’s hair for her in this picture from 1956. Mom must have been just barely 18, and Grandma probably was about 38-40.

And then, I was born.

“Oh look! There’s you! There’s a LOTTA pictures of you! I used to take a lot of pictures. That was me!” 

Yes, I had discovered that! Here’s me, at three hours old, at Walter Reed Army Hospital. It’s my first baby picture, from October of 1956! And it is an observable fact that people have been pulling those lousy masks down under their noses for decades.

And when I grew up (to about 9 months old), and my mother was already pregnant with Rennie, we took our cross-country trip to Dad’s next station in California.

“Did I ever tell you what happened on the way to California?” 

Before they reached California, the little family experienced something pretty scary: one of the tires on the trailer blew out, causing the trailer to swerve into the other lane – and it just missed being hit by a semi truck! I might have had a real short life and Rennie might not have seen the light of day if God hadn’t kept the truck at bay.

Mom and Dad ran out of money and couldn’t get all the way to California (probably from having to get a new tire), so they called Grandpa Ware. I guess they must have figured out how he could wire them some money.

When they got there, in August of 1957, they found a good church and before long (at least in my album), Dad was baptized. 

“Look! There’s my baptism. That was before we were married,” he said.

“Oh yeah? Why does it say, “August of ‘57” on the edge of the picture?” But it was definitely Dad. Baptized in water by full immersion. This is precious to me, because my dad, early in his manhood, made a decision for Christ. Like me, he was baptized as a public testimony to the inward change. There was another picture nearby. 

“In THAT church!” he said, pointing. And it was obviously a precious memory to him, too.

I loved how my dad loved those pictures. These were both meaningful to me, and meaningful to him. This is really not very far into Album #1, so there will be more stories from time to time. Just know, it was real. I was brought up with God – that’s how my mother and father wanted it. And I have never forgotten that.

When I left, my dad was watching from the porch and waving, his face beaming. It had been a very good day, a wonderfully healing day! And, again I am amazed at how much better God’s plan is for me, when I'm listening for His voice, than what I can ever dream up myself.

Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Matters

 Imagine what it would be like if every person in America who believed that abortion is the murder of an innocent child acted like it, not just once or twice, but millions of people constantly confronting the abortion industry. That idea was the driving force behind Operation Rescue.

On January 22, 1973, abortion became what is called “The Law of the Land,” because seven people in black robes decreed it to be so. All of the states’ pro-life laws were suddenly nullified, not by a real law passed by Congress, but by judicial fiat.

At the time, I was a junior in high school, my dad had just retired from the Air Force, and our family had just moved from Arizona to California. My thoughts were not about abortion, but rather which boys I met were cute and whether they would make a good boyfriend. However, by that time, I had already learned and accepted as truth, the concept of The Population Explosion, which was just as stupid and counterproductive as Climate Change. We were taught that in order to save the planet, we could only have a maximum of two children, and my biology teacher taught that concept as Gospel, being fully convinced in his own mind to the point that he, being even more righteous than others, would have none.

Naturally, by the time I graduated from high school, I had received enough of this conditioning so that I considered myself “pro-choice,” and brought the concept home to my mom who told me, to my surprise, that she was pro-life. I was pretty sure she hadn’t paid any attention to the issues of the day! But I didn’t listen to her silliness because she was only my mom, and what would she know? Of course we needed abortion so that we would not run out of room on the planet!

After high school, a year later I was already married, and Eric and I both considered ourselves radical Christians, Democrats, and pro-choice. Eric had campaigned strongly for George McGovern. I only knew that Grandpa the Mayor was a Democrat, so it must be in the genetic code. 

My first station in the military was Andrews AFB in Maryland. We went to an Assembly of God church in Camp Springs. My second station was at Hickam AFB in Hawaii. We went to an Assembly of God church in Pearl City. We heard nothing whatsoever about abortion. And we voted for Jimmy Carter for President in 1976 while we lived in Hawaii because he was a Democrat and a born-again Christian. He was also a former military man like we were, though he drove me crazy since he couldn’t say “nuclear” right when he talked about his experience on the Navy submarines. 

Jimmy Carter was pro-choice, of the persuasion that “I am personally opposed to abortion, but I believe in every woman’s right to choose.” We agreed.

But when I separated from the Air Force in 1978 and we moved to Lafayette, Indiana, we went to an Assembly of God church there. And suddenly, there was a preacher, Pastor Charles Hackett, who was up there talking about abortion being wrong in his sermons. Where did he get that? That’s not in the Bible! We were offended and went home huffing and puffing about his injecting politics into his sermons, and that, more than once.

But the truth of the matter was that we hardly even knew what abortion was. No one had explained exactly what abortion meant before we adopted our firm position on the subject. It seemed like it was just something vague, like a method of not having a baby. It’s one thing to say, “I support abortion,” and it’s quite another thing to say, “I support the killing of a child while she is living and growing inside her mother’s womb.” Nobody would say the latter! That would have been tantamount to admitting to blatant barbarism and that wasn’t us!

So when we strolled through the Tippecanoe County Fair in ‘78, and my baby bump was getting obvious, a smiling woman tending the Right to Life booth handed me a balloon, saying, “Surely you’re pro-life!” But I wasn’t! And I was not keen on the idea of having a balloon with “Pro-Life” on it tied to my wrist. So I gave it back to her.

It took some time for me. One very hot summer day, one of our two oldest girls was heard getting grossed out (“Ewwwwww!”) by something she found on the outside of the house. I investigated and found out it was slugs.

I was very excited because I had heard that you could salt a slug and it would melt, but I had never tried it. So I ran to grab the salt shaker to perform my experiment. What I saw then changed me forever. The slug did not melt. The slug rose up, writhing and twisting. 

Suddenly, I connected the dots between this poor suffering slug and a human fetus undergoing a saline abortion. It was salt on a wet slug that was burning its small body and if it had a voice, it would have screamed. And it was salt on a wet body that killed tiny embryos or fetuses in the womb. But tiny embryos are humans. Like me. I imagined myself very small, in a bath of burning liquid, inhaling and swallowing the same burning liquid with every one of my screams.

After God spoke to me through a suffering, silently screaming slug, Eric and I began to be pro-life crusaders. We felt led to look into buying a house and opening it up to unwed expectant mothers, and we almost pursued doing that, but then we met some people who were trying to establish a crisis pregnancy center and joined forces with them instead. The result was “Hope for the Unborn,” and after that office was opened in Lafayette, I became one of their earliest hotline and counseling ministry volunteers. 

In fact, I was regularly doing counseling when I was pregnant with Chris.  One day, towards the end of the pregnancy, one of the other counselors told me they’d made an appointment and asked if I would take it for them. Being uncomfortable with my swollen legs and feet and large belly on a hot summer day, I wasn’t really excited about the appointment but went anyway, praying I could help the mother in crisis make the right decision. But when I walked in, I found out my friends had arranged a surprise baby shower for me. How wonderful! But after I opened presents, I spent some time lying on my back on the floor with my swollen legs up on a chair.

Baby Shower at Hope for the Unborn

Then, in the late 1980s, a homeschooling friend of ours at the time recruited us into the ranks of Operation Rescue, just as it was gaining in strength and popularity. It was exciting and new, and we were consumed with the idea that if everyone who believed abortion was murder acted like it, there would be no abortion in a very short amount of time. 

We spent the night at Steve’s house in Indianapolis in sleeping bags, went with him to the rally the night before, heard what we were going to do, learned the ropes, and were inspired by the Scriptures. 

“Run to the Roar” and “Rescue those who are being led to the slaughter” were our battle cries. Gates, we were told, don’t move. If the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church, then the Church needs to be on the offensive. As a driving force, the Church of Jesus could batter down those gates of hell. But it was time to stop pretending we didn’t know what was happening under our very noses in those whitewashed sepulchers.

So we got up before dawn, dressed warm, and put our bodies between the victims and the killer. Naturally, this one event could not stop Big Abortion in America, but it could spread to other cities and the movement could grow. Before long, there were week-long and month-long campaigns in certain cities, especially where the very worst abortionists operated, like the notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller a.k.a. “Tiller the Killer.” We did not stop Big Abortion, but we put some fear into them. 

We all knew the drill: sit there and don’t move till somebody drags you off. Then, when one person is dragged off, "scooch" – move your butt over till the hole is filled in.

Well, we did get arrested. We expected that. Then there were the court dates and a pro bono attorney who would tell the judge that we were doing it because of our religious convictions to rescue the perishing ‒ the “necessity” defense. It never worked and we were usually lightly fined for trespassing.

We’d spend a night in jail, though, and witness to the inmates. Sometimes we were released before the night had passed because we took up too much room. Other places would rather release “Barabbas” (drug dealers, prostitutes, etc.) to teach us a lesson.

Here's a visual for you, a 700 Club broadcast from the same year we were rescuing:

See Vintage footage of Operation Rescue

Once, my attorney in Indy asked me a bunch of questions before the hearing, and I answered, yes, several kids at home (don’t remember how many at the time), x amount of income (not much) and I do a lot of canning. He ended up (to my surprise) presenting all the documents to the judge and asking for a dismissal of the charges due to indigence. I didn’t even know what that meant!

But it worked! The charges were summarily dismissed and I was free to go. I looked it up and just praised God, because when I recognized that it meant "needy" I whole-heartedly agreed. Our God shows Himself powerful when His people admit to their neediness. 

When I got home, someone had a welcome home cake ready with a character in jail on top! 

I rescued several times, most of them in Indianapolis, but also once in Kettering, Ohio. That last one was significant because I had recruited several others who were arrested as planned, but before the last of us were dragged off, someone was whispering, “Hey, the appointments are already inside. Let’s go and find another place to rescue.” So we slipped away and tried to find another location. Being unsuccessful, we had to just go home … without our friends. That’s when it got ugly for our friends. 

In Kettering, the justice system was pretty warped and the rescuers were in jail for about six weeks, straight through Easter … for sitting in front of the abortion mill. I acted as a go-between, soliciting prayer in the churches and keeping people updated. But I felt guilty for being free while they were suffering.

Another time, we took much of the Christmas money our family had sent us and used it to send Daddy to New York City with several other pro-life activists to rescue in front of the notorious Margaret Sanger Center Planned Parenthood abortuary. The place is a stronghold of abortion, not unlike the Gates of Mordor. 

The longer Operation Rescue continued to disrupt the natural flow of dead children, the more hostile and vicious the pro-abortion opposition became. We had to be prepared to suffer. In some localities, the police were using nunchucks to remove rescuers from the doors, and you could get a broken arm from those. But in New York, the police didn’t use nunchucks. They did turn their motorcycles around and blow exhaust fumes at the rescuers to gas them out. Eric and some of his fellow rescuers slowed down the removal process by lying in the middle of the road in front of the police buses that were hauling other rescuers away to the jail.

My dad wasn’t thrilled about how we’d used his Christmas money.  But you see, this is where Lisa got her convictions. She saw us do that, and she celebrated her birthday with an Operation Rescue themed party when she was 8 years old. We used streamers to simulate a jail in the area of the basement that used to be the coal bin and played "scooching" games. She loved it! 

We also sometimes packed up all the kids very early on a Saturday and brought them all the way to Indianapolis, where we would picket and do sidewalk counseling in front of the abortion mills as they opened for business. We met a particular stalwart pro-life warrior named Bob Rust there, who died of Covid in 2020. He was a Catholic man, who did sidewalk counseling faithfully, in all weather, every single Saturday morning because he didn’t want the babies to die alone.

And when we found out that Dr. Hass in W. Lafayette was an obstetrician / abortionist, we worked to expose him, having funerals for babies who had died at his hands, out on the sidewalk in front of his office. We recruited various pro-life pastors to eulogize a baby we described and named. We found tiny bloody baby parts in the dumpster. We prayed and warned people away from his services as an obstetrician. In fact, one of our friends went to him when she was pregnant and he told her he couldn’t find a heartbeat, so come back in a few days for a D & C. When I found out about that, I strongly urged her to get a second opinion, and lo and behold, there was a living baby who would have been cut up and thrown away by this dangerous person. It appeared the “good doctor” needed some fast cash and didn’t mind sacrificing one of his “wanted” patients. I’m so glad Grant’s life was spared! 

Dr. Hass temporarily halted his abortion practice because he fell off a ladder and broke both legs, but when he was back on his feet, he was committing abortions again. He should have reconsidered while he had the chance. The last we heard of him was that he died when his private airplane crashed. And for awhile, Lafayette was abortion free.

In response to the success of Operation Rescue, Congress enacted laws to make rescuing a felony. If you sat in front of an abortion mill, you could have your assets plundered and your voting rights taken away. Many states were using RICO statutes (racketeering) to squelch rescues, like we were the Mafia. Randall Terry, the head of O.R. was caught in that trap, and others took the reins of the organization. The next trick was FACE legislation – Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances. This was only about abortion mills, nothing else. No one was ever prosecuted under FACE for blocking an entrance to a wart clinic. Then the freedom of speech rights of pro-lifers were suppressed by enacting “bubble zones” to keep sidewalk counselors from approaching abortion-minded women.

Operation Rescue is still alive and well today, but it has a different focus. Besides the standard sidewalk counseling, O.R. uses every possible means to close the clinics themselves, from collecting information about tax evasion, or publishing information on their website about all the fraud and assault scandals that plague these places, to being involved in the famous undercover journalistic efforts of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who took hundreds of hours of video footage to obtain evidence of Planned Parenthood’s direct involvement in the illegal sale of baby body parts. 

Here’s one of the earliest examples of the videos exposing this hideous and illegal operation.  Note:  Deb Nucatola does abortions at the Planned Parenthood in Lafayette now:

See the undercover video implicating Planned Parenthood

O.R.'s current leader, Troy Newman, was among those sued by Planned Parenthood, along with the Daleiden and Merritt team, for disrupting their bloody business. The case against Planned Parenthood has still never been prosecuted because of extreme pro-aborts like Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra who refuse to bring charges.

This is what Operation Rescue says of itself: 

“Operation Rescue is one of the leading pro-life Christian activist organizations in the nation and has become a strong voice for the pro-life movement in America. Operation Rescue is now headquartered in a former abortion clinic that it bought and closed in 2006. From there, Operation Rescue launches its innovative new strategies across the nation, exposing and closing abortion clinics through peaceful, legal means. Its activities are on the cutting edge of the abortion issue, taking direct action to stop abortion and ultimately restore legal personhood to the pre-born in obedience to biblical mandates.”

Until recently, Lisa was an officer for the Springfield, Illinois Right to Life and I’m so proud of her! During her time in leadership, more people were packed into the Illinois State Capitol nearly two years ago than ever had been before (some couldn't get in), to protest the extreme kill-your-baby-till-his-birthday pro-abortion law the legislature was considering. 

March 20, 2019, at the Illinois Capitol

It ended up passing and being signed into law, but it sure wasn’t because people didn’t try. Meanwhile, her oldest daughter Joy was a manager for the Right to Life office, while my oldest great grandbaby Charlie played on the floor nearby.

What I can say about the pro-life movement is that it is encouraging that there are still people who are fiercely fighting this great evil in our land. Even after the 2021 March for Life in Washington DC was canceled because of Covid concerns, there were still many people who went anyway and stood for the babies who have no voice. Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the two Supreme Court rulings that foisted abortion on the nation have been crumbling for a long time. So far God has spared the nation, but He cannot continue to ignore all the blood that has been spilled.

We cannot afford to be complacent. What will you do to save a life? How can you support a woman who has tragically believed her only choice is the abortion mill?

“Oh, God, our hearts go out to the women who are deceived into thinking their baby is not a baby, who are used and their babies cast away. Save us, Jesus! Help us to know how to encourage women who are in this situation that they are strong and capable, and that there is no reason to go through the trauma of abortion.

“We especially come against Planned Parenthood, which has come to roost in Lafayette in recent years, distributing dangerous abortion pills to unsuspecting women. Few have the wherewithal to stand against this powerful baby-killing organization, and when they do, they are silenced. We pray for David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt et al, who are fighting the good fight, that they would be successful in their efforts. We pray that you will raise up other capable warriors in this battle and surround them with your angel hosts.

“And we pray that we will live to see the day when abortion is eradicated from our land. In the mighty Name of Jesus Christ, who used to be an embryo too, Amen.”

Resources:  

(Note:  Many of these organizations overlap in their mission.)

Direct Action

Operation Rescue

Center for Medical Progress

Live Action

Pro-Life Action League

News

Life News

Life Site News

Education and Advocacy

National Right to Life

Students for Life

Susan B. Anthony List

Events

Life Chain

40 Days for Life

March for Life

The Master’s Voice Players, and How the Haley’s Did Drama

I had a dream recently that I was viewing a video recording of a play, put on by our home school drama club. It was breathtakingly beautiful and the recording was movie quality. But I could not remember participating in that play and that was really puzzling. We were in all of the plays, so how could we have missed this one? My compadre, my right hand mom, Debbie Glenn, was in my dream, and she showed me some of the props she had left over from that play, and I told her those would bring high prices in an auction … for homeschoolers … from that era. They were our memories … 

It all started when our oldest, Lisa, was in about 8th grade. There were a few other families who were interested in putting on a play so I found a couple of one-acts that were cute and only took a few actors. They were in the farce genre, just for fun, but this got our kids on a stage of sorts (in a church) in front of their parents and friends. One skit had a memorable line that you would just have had to see the play to understand: “Thank goodness, the table is spread!” Ridiculously, the line was repeated throughout the play.

Our major purpose was to afford our own kids the opportunity to work with others to do some of the things we loved doing in school ourselves. I would have loved to do marching band with homeschoolers, but that would have been complicated without a solid background in subjects like music theory.  I would have had no idea how to approach teaching a youngster how to play a saxophone!  But I was in plays in high school, and Eric took stagecraft, so this seemed feasible.

My particular interest had been there since my early high school days, when I had been introduced to the possibility of a career in Theatre in New York during a National Girl Scout Opportunity. When I came back from the trip, I helped a Brownie troop write a play and put it on. Whenever there were skits that needed to be done, I was right in the thick of things. Summer theatre at Litchfield Park, Arizona, and plays and Drama classes in both Arizona and California high schools just added to my pleasure in being somebody else for a period of time. I never had a lead role. I was never in a musical, with the exception of The Sound of Music after Eric and I were married, with Lisa and Emily as VonTrapp kids.

Emily as Gretyl in Lafayette Civic Theatre's Sound of Music

Eric was a Baron in The Sound of Music and I was a partygoer in the same scene.

But I didn’t get to dance with him.

But I had seen it done several times, so I felt like I knew how. I always said, “Let’s put on a play and I’ll be the director.” Soon after our humble beginnings, other families also showed interest, and we expanded our operations to another church in West Lafayette that actually had a real stage, albeit a small one. Parents with skills emerged, who were able to find or make costumes, build sets, find props, do make-up or direct backstage goings-on. We all wanted to see our kids participate in the group project that resulted in their names in a program, increased confidence in front of a crowd, and that high that comes from the successful completion of a performance, that sometimes has the audience on their feet engaging in wild applause.

We found a good script for Little Women, but bemoaned the fact that we had no budget for it. So I came up with an idea of doing a fundraiser doing a non-royalty play, charging for tickets, and talking it up. That would have worked, but the fundraiser play was a melodrama, and the villain backed out at the last minute because he thought the script had no redeeming value. The failure of the play that year taught us a good lesson in humility, but also clarified the focus for the future.

After that, I made sure to:

1). Choose options with redeeming value

2). Make sure the kids trying out (and their parents) got to review the script first, and 

3). Have the actors sign commitment agreements that literally only gave them an out if the Second Coming of Christ happened before the play date.

I also took time to explain and teach the script, usually before each rehearsal. When I found, for example, characters who set good examples, we would discuss it, tie it together with Scripture and prayer, and commit to getting the message across to the audience. There was a reason, in this group of Christians, that we were going to be on-stage, and we needed to understand what that was.

Final instructions before curtain, "backstage" in the Reed Case house at Canal Park. 

 Robyn played a waitress in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Every three years, I taught a drama class in the co-op with a year-end recital, rather than having a play. The last time we had one, it was because Robyn insisted on it.  Her older siblings had all been in a class and she wanted the opportunity, too! So I squeezed all four of our remaining kids into that class, including Vivi, who was technically too young, but who did a great job. I was a little busy that year, and I unfortunately suffered from thinning of the hair, but we survived the harrowing experience somehow.

For the class, we had real textbooks with homework in the form of exercises prepared ahead of time and presented in front of the group, critiqued by fellow students. We learned how to create a character and think his thoughts.  We learned that an actor must never break character even when distracted by outside influences like crying babies or even loudly laughing audience members.  And sometimes I tested that by walking around behind the actor as they performed, taking notes.

(I must say that I have seen actors break character during tornado warnings and fire alarms, but that is perfectly legitimate.)

At the same time, an actor must be cognizant of such things as holding for laughs, not upstaging someone else (standing in a position to command attention when it’s not your turn to do so), and not turning his back on the audience (“Your back is bare!”). 

We learned how to believably pantomime using dummy props or no props at all, to project our lines using our diaphragms (speaking to the man in the purple shirt in the back row), and to use our whole bodies to communicate. It was often necessary to have classes in how to make believable expressions using one’s eyebrows, or to have workshops on how to pronounce all the words in one’s lines and know what they meant.  For the latter, I brought in my massive Oxford English Dictionary to research meanings.

At the end, there would be a recital to show off what they’d learned: one scene at a time, with simple costumes, simple props, and one or two actors on a bare stage.

The other years, we had plays. We had a club that voted on the script we would use, chosen from among the possibilities I presented. As a result, we never did things like Charlotte’s Web because nobody wanted to play a pig or a spider, but we did every meaningful, clean-cut large cast play with Victorian costumes possible.  At one point, after trying several other designations, we settled on the name, The Master’s Voice Players, or MVP Drama Club.

We did Uncle Tom’s Cabin twice, though one family never participated in that play because they basically favored the South in the War Between the States. For the rest of us, the play was highly favored because it was historically significant, and its various characters agonized over the subject of slavery.  The message?  Wicked slave owners who beat and killed their slaves went to hell, but good people, whether Christian abolitionists, Christian slave owners who loved their slaves like family, or Christian slaves who prayed for their masters, went to Heaven.  See the pattern?  Christians went to Heaven, whatever their status in life.  In fact, there’s a really cheesy ending where someone is carried away to Heaven on the wings of a dove, but I won’t spoil it for you.

Over the years, we learned English country dancing, fencing, and how to hold a cigar properly. We had a real auctioneer come in for a cameo appearance selling slaves, and our escaping slave crossed the Wabash and Erie Canal on a reinforced styrofoam iceberg. We borrowed real antique desks from a restored Carroll County schoolhouse to use in Anne of Green Gables. And Eric was always there to be able to supply correct period antiques to complete sets, from his store in Lafayette.

Usually I was told to get out of the way when it came to make-up and hair. There was a chapter in our textbook devoted to makeup techniques and sometimes we had a professional in to teach a class. But when I tried to help, it usually meant the job would have to be re-done. Likewise, I was well aware I needed to stay out of the way with lights, sound, and set-building. I just told people who were skilled what I was after, and trusted that they would be able to make it happen.  I was rarely disappointed.  I just watched things come together, stood in awe of what they could do, and told them how grateful I was.

For my part, I concentrated on my coordination job: critiquing and coaching, recruiting for the things I couldn’t do, scheduling rehearsals and watching the time, and just thinking of all those little details that would make this a real play and putting them on my everlasting lists. They might say things like:

• Maybe Anne should have a big bow here. 

• How can we make her hair green without ruining her hair?

• Teach Josie Pye how to say French teacher, instead of French teacher.

• Boughs of evergreen – pronounced like “to bow,” not “boff.”

• All lines HAVE to be memorized by next week!!

• That hat casts too much shadow on her face. Can we get something smaller?

• I cannot hear any of his lines. He must open his mouth much wider.

• The door opens the wrong direction – we can see everybody backstage when he’s entering!

• Topsy needs a song and dance routine here. Let’s work on choreography.

• Special group scene rehearsal next week. All 20 people in that scene come at 5:00.

• Costume fittings with Mrs. Glenn during the next rehearsal. If you’re not on stage, she will try things on you.

• Make sure the Devil has red lining in his cape.

• Hank – just climb up on top of the desk to do your soliloquy.

• Don’t breathe when you’re dead! (At least not very much.)

Did I already mention that Debbie Glenn was my right-hand mom? Debbie had energy, know-how, and a bubbly personality everybody loved. She was often my stage manager, but gravitated towards costumes, make-up, and hair. She played piano during Penny and the Magic Medallion, our first and only musical. Plus, Debbie could whistle louder than anyone I’d ever known, so she could always get the attention of an excited group of teens faster than I could, when the need arose. 

Eventually, the club had so many costumes that we had to rent a storage unit, and Debbie kept track of them in organized tubs. Sometimes, she planned and hosted costume fitting sleepovers for the cast, where the kids would eat pizza, try on whatever they wanted to out of the tubs, and have fashion shows. If we didn’t have what we needed, Debbie would buy sheets, recruit some other mothers and older daughters, and make Victorian dresses, with crinolines and lace. I was amazed at what she could do!

Sometimes there were clashes. People didn’t always like the decisions I made. Once I cast a freshman in one of the coveted major roles, as the nosy neighbor Rachel Lind in Anne of Green Gables. I was questioned about that and people shook their heads. But I always went by the auditions, and that year I saw potential in a freshman.  She did very well in her part and vindicated me. Sometimes I had to cast a girl as a man because we didn’t have enough young men. That was rarely well-accepted, but hey, I did it myself once, as Simon Legree, so I didn’t see a problem with it. Eric, being familiar with facial hair, was always recruited to apply fake beards and moustaches with some kind of adhesive.  

Then, when I would cast someone who had already played a major role in one of our plays, in a minor role the next year, that wasn’t a wildly popular decision either. Somehow, it was taken for granted that the seniors would always get the best parts, but my philosophy was that the best actors (during auditions) would get the best parts.  And of course, there were always people who didn’t like the way I cast my own kids in parts.  Some people thought I was prejudiced in favor of my kids.  My kids thought the opposite!

Once, I had to decline doing the play the kids had voted to do (being pressured by some forceful members) because I had a baby due in the spring, and I needed to do a play that was less involved. That resulted in a small revolt. About that time, we began questioning whether our modus operandi of voting on plays was feasible.

When we were at the height of our popularity, I held a workshop for parents in support groups in other counties on how to start their own drama club or troupe and was interviewed by Home School Legal Defense Association on their radio broadcast about the same subject. It was widely believed that home school drama was either very good or very bad, but usually not fair to middlin’. We felt comfortable being in the very good category.

A conflict arose from the small revolt I mentioned, that resulted in more kids going into a new, rival drama group because they were in a new, rival co-op. After a while, our club (along with our co-op) grew smaller and smaller until there really weren’t enough kids or enthusiasm left to put on a play, so those who still wanted to be in plays joined a group in Lafayette instead. That included our four kids who were still left at home. They found rides into Lafayette, while I got more and more involved in our home business. 

The Lafayette troupe produced very large plays like A Tale of Two Cities, 

Valerie (L) with her two sons, in A Tale of Two Cities

while the rival drama group in Carroll County did musicals with not quite enough musical talent to do a great job. I had greatly feared that, but maybe I shouldn’t have, since over time I had seen some public school productions that had that same problem but the audience still clapped.

Though I was too busy to be involved in putting on plays anymore, I was recruited to be a judge in the Lafayette co-op’s Speech and Debate Club tournaments, and Robyn made an arrangement with Sam (one of the students in my Drama Class) to do a Dramatic Interpretation project from a scene in The Taming of the Shrew, to enter in the Tournament. At their request, I coached them in being a believable husband and wife. Little did I know that Sam would one day become my son-in-law, in the same way Lisa had earlier married the slave cast as her husband in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Robyn and Valerie found themselves cast in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and gained some experience in singing opera style in a play.  In the end, the torch was passed to Robyn to direct plays for the next generation of homeschoolers, such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Ramona.

Vivan and Valerie in Cyrano de Bergerac, directed by Robyn

After she married Sam, the Lafayette troupe was under their leadership. They found a venue far superior to anything we’d ever had, renting out the old Mars Theatre downtown (Long Center for the Performing Arts). We’d previously only seen it used for much larger productions like Lafayette Ballet’s Nutcracker. But they got some special deal that they were instructed not to divulge, and were able to make it work ...

… Until Covid hit.

In the spring of 2020, Robyn and Sam’s production of A Tale of Two Cities was canceled the week before it happened, because like everything else, it could be a super spreader event.  And there are legitimate concerns with places even during a normal flu season.  Unless you have understudies for every part, somebody’s always sure to be sick, and when putting lots of people in your crowd scenes, or having the cast huddled together backstage waiting to enter, flu spreads through a cast like wildfire.  They share headset microphones, belt out their parts in the direction of the audience, practice stage kissing, and hold hands across the stage for a curtain call.  

Meanwhile, parents who are obligated to see their kids and grandkids in a play will come (like I have done several times), even when they are really sick and sneezing, and inadvertently expose all the audience members in the immediate vicinity to their plague.  Face it, there’s traditionally enough contact in a play to sicken a whole bunch of people! The Long Center just didn’t want to have that liability with Covid.

Simultaneously, Sight and Sound Theater in both Branson, Missouri, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, canceled their productions just before they opened last March.  Queen Esther was sold out months before and widely anticipated after two years in the making.  We were thinking about going to Pennsylvania for our 45th wedding anniversary last year, but that wasn’t going to happen.  They finally did begin showing Queen Esther last summer, but with greatly reduced capacity, and everyone has to have masks.

Dance recitals were canceled in 2020, too, along with the obvious ones like graduation ceremonies and proms.  Movie theaters canceled their scheduled shows, like I Still Believe, the one about the life of Jeremy Camp, just before they came out (another production we thought we might see during our mini vacation).  And when theaters finally were able to open to a reduced capacity, they had nothing to show but “oldies,” most of which could be rented on YouTube or Amazon at home, because Hollywood wasn’t producing anything new,  Going out for dinner and a movie became nostalgic, a thing of the past.  

A notable exception was Counter Column, which was a movie filmed in 2019 and released in 2020 by a homeschool family from Brookston, Indiana.  It had record sales, at least in our area … because it was a great movie and there was not much else playing!  We found out that homeschoolers with a commitment to excellence could do truly great things!

Waiting for the start of Counter Column

And then, progressing beyond canceled performances, we began to see performers canceled, and certain songs and plays.  President Trump’s cameo appearance in Home Alone was somehow erased, Disney’s Song of the South was deemed racist, and … well, you know what I mean.  I’ll try not to rant about “cancel culture.”  That gets more ridiculous by the hour.

I have told our granddaughter Rori that in 2021, it would be good to put things on our calendars, but to just do it in pencil.  Her school’s band concert was canceled the night before, early in the school year, because of Covid, so we grandparents could only see a recording of it.  Will they really be able to pull off her 2021 dance recital?  Robyn and Sam played in The Importance of Being Earnest by Lafayette’s Chancel Players, but in a Zoom meeting style.  That didn’t have quite the same effect, unfortunately.

But Robyn and Sam are busy with plays now, and they’re going to try again, but they’ll be back in churches as before.  They both have the ability and the love for drama that so fascinated me when I was young.  

Again, there’s still the desire on the part of the parents to see their child learn to study a great work of literature like a classical play and find the treasure buried in it, to commit meaningful material to memory,  to concentrate without being distracted, to speak confidently in front of a crowd, and to collaborate on a project as part of a team without having to knock someone down and fight over the ball.  A young lady may be more concerned with having a beautiful Victorian dress and a young man may only be there because his parents want him to be, but the world of Drama is well worth passing on to the next generation.

After all, isn’t all the world a stage?