Humble Beginnings

Few people can say that they have lived for most of their lives within a 10-mile radius of where they were born. This is true of me with the exception of two brief sojourns to college, which lasted anywhere from two weeks to three months. While it was somewhat limiting, it should have given me a since of stability and security, but security is not found in sameness, it found in the One who never changes.  I presently live less than a block from where my Dad grew up and about a mile from where Mom spent her childhood. They hailed from vastly different families.   Mom grew up in a family where Christ was honored, but Dad grew up in a family where He did not found a place.  Dad eventually trusted the Lord as savior at a YFC rally in the 1940’s and Mom although having the name of Jesus on her lips from early childhood,  received assurance of her salvation in as similar setting as few years later.  The Lord brought the two of them together when they met in a tiny Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Winston-Salem. Mom had wanted to be a missionary, but she had barely passed nurse’s training due to a congenital heart condition and childhood struggle with rheumatic fever.  Their lives demonstrated through the years that God’s ways are indeed higher than ours are, and it is in our best interest to follow Him.  Those years before they met were full of growing up. Life was a vastly different for a family of 10 children and family of one child.  Mom was the third from the youngest … Miriam.   They lived where they could have chickens, but I think the favored pet was a duck named Herman who came squawking every time the chickens got  into the neighbor’s fishpond, which was a fairly frequent occurrence.  Love surrounded the family. Good food somehow abounded for the family …my how Grandma could cook!  Even when her children had children, we all had to come back for Sunday dinner. It was her way of saying,” I love you”.  My dad often joked that he married my mom just to get into the family.  I think it was his first taste of real love. Mom and Jesus began to teach him what love was and how to love other people. When you grow up without love, it is hard to begin to give it.  Neither of my parents grew up in homes that were outwardly demonstrative.  Mom’s parents had all they could do to keep 10 kids fed, clothed and spiritually sane. Dad’s home was too dysfunctional and full of pain. I believe the only love he experienced was from the numerous dogs he owned.  The greatest joys of his childhood were the relationships he fostered with elderly in the community and those crazy dogs. A lonely little boy … a girl with a heart condition that no one expects to live long into adulthood.  Yet Jesus steps on the scene and all is changed. I have heard it said,  and I will reiterate throughout this memoir that nothing is lost in the hands of the Redeemer.