A tribute to my Grandmother

Last week we went to Dallas to visit my grandmother who is now 99 years old and whose health is failing. Recently she had a bout with pneumonia and was hospitalized. During that visit they discovered that her aorta was 75% blocked and her time left on this earth was limited. We had not seen her in 2 years, so we felt it was a good time to go see her for what may be the last time.

Lillian was born in 1910 in Ewing, Lee County, Virginia, near the Cumberland Gap. She was the oldest of three children, and had two grandmothers who were Cherokee Indian. Lillian went to gradeschool in the two room Elydale school house, which today is no longer standing. Grades 1-3 were in the first room, and and 4-7 were in an upper room. She had to walk about 2 miles to school. Lillian became a Christian at the age of 12, and was baptized in Indian Creek near her home, the same place where my dad would one day be baptized.

She went to Ewing High School about 6 miles away by car. She graduated in 1930.When she was 21 in 1930, Lillian went to Hiwassee college in Madisonville, Tennessee, training to be a teacher. She lived on the third floor of the college dorm. After one year of college, she got her first teaching job in Virginia, a little way down the country road from where she grew up. She taught there for one year, the Fall of 1931 and Spring of 1932.

She only had around 20 students in a one room school house, which she enjoyed. Many of the children were relatives. The beginners would sit on the front row. Her oldest student was 17 years old. This older boy helped with janitorial duties and building the fire in the wood burning stove. The school had outdoor toilets, and from time to time students would be caught out in the toilets smoking. She would teach school all day, and walk there and back from her home.

It was during this year that she met my grandfather, Dale. One day after she returned home from teaching, her mother was ready to go to church at Bethany church one evening for a revival, and asked Lillian to go. She told her mother, "Oh, I'm so tired, I've walked all the way home after teaching school all day. I don't think I want to go." Her mother said, "Oh, yes you do. There's a young man preaching there." So she told her mother, "I'll go just like I am if you let me sit in the back seat of the church so nobody will see me." They always had large crowds at these revivals. The church had an old pump organ. When Dale wanted to sing a special number, "I Choose Jesus", the boy who usually played the organ couldn't play it, and so the preacher's wife began motioning with her hand for Lillian to come up and play. The preacher's wife and Lillian were good friends. So Lillian went up and played the song for Dale, and that is how they met. She once commented that "he sang very well."

Dale soon became the regular preacher at the Bethany church, and began making house calls at the home of Lillian's parents where Lillian was living. Lillian's brothers, Morrison and Joe (who was sixteen at the time) would play baseball in the yard, and Dale would play ball with them and stay to have a meal with them. Dale would hold baptismal services in the creek behind Lillian's home. One day the sister of one of Lillian's students was going to be baptized, so Lillian let the class out early and they walked down to the creek to witness the baptism. Dale and Lillian began courting by writing letters back and forth.

In the summer of 1932, she went to Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, to take college algebra, public speaking, and music. In the Fall of 1932 she returned to Hiwassee and graduated in the Spring of 1933 receiving a life time teaching certificate. Dale and Lillian were married on early 1933 in Athens, Tennessee, not far from Johnson Bible College where Dale was then in his junior year.

Dale still had a year to complete at Johnson Bible College. But Lillian still wanted to teach school. Because jobs for men were scarce during the depression, a law had been passed in which no married woman could teach. After they were married, Lillian stayed at home with her family while Dale lived at Johnson Bible College.

They then moved a lot, following one preaching job after another. They moved to Rural Hall, North Caralinia, near Winston-Salem, where their first son, James was born in 1935. From there they moved to Champain-Urbana, where they ministered at the Weber Street Church for one year. Next they lived in Ogden Illinois, about 20 miles away, where their second child, Janice was born in 1937. Then they moved on to West Lebanon, Indiana. While there they were approached by a committee from the Second Christian Church in Danville, IL, to take a preaching position in Danville, Illinois After moving there, their third child, Charles Tracy, my father, was born 1939. Sixteen months later, Ernie, their fourth child, was born when Lillian was 29 years old.

They then moved to Mountain City, TN around 1940. From there they moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1941, but only stayed about 7 months because Dale began having asthma problems. Then they moved to Woburn, Illinois, near Greenville. While there, they were asked to take a position at Belleville, Illinois, so they moved to Belleville and ministered there for five years.

After this, Dale began a church planting ministry out of Collinsville; he started 7 new churches, with the help of the Mississippi Men's Fellowship. They lived in the housing project behind the First Christian Church in Collinsville, which he helped to start. He started two churches in Iowa, three in Missouri (Owensville, Columbia, O'Fallon). Part of the time he lived out of trailer and worked the fields. He taught "singing school" at Mulberry Grove while the lived there when Tracy was in first grade.

In the late 50's Dale settled in Collinsville, and stopped travelling as much, as he was getting older. Lillian started teaching again when Tracy and Ernie were in highschool while living in Collinsville. Dale also enrolled himself in McKendree College, Lebanon, Illinois, and was certified as a teacher, teaching 18 years. Lillian finished her A.B. degree.

Dale did preach for a while at Beardstown after his son, Tracy, and his wife, Cathi, left there to serve in Barbados for a year. After Beardstown, he began teaching in East Saint Louis, while Lillian continued to teach in Collinsville. During this time Dale preached at his last church, the Holly Oaks church near Collinsville.

After he stopped preaching, Dale and Lillian attended the Collinsville church part of the time, the Chapel Hill church and the Holly Oaks church.

After Dale died in 1987, Lillian contined to live in Collinsville. She later sold their home and moved to an apartment.

Lillian was a school teacher for a total of 20 years. Lillian taught bible study classes at various churches for 19 years, including Edwardsville and Collinsville.

In her later years Lillian has enjoyed reciting poetry at public gathering, and even at her 99th birthday was able to recite them with clarity.

She and her husband, Dale, leave behind a great legacy, having planted dozens of churches, having mentored many Christians in their faith and having been a positive Christian role model to their 4 children, 11 grand-children and 22 great grandchildren and 2 great-great-grandchildren as well as many others whose lives they have touched.

Too Old to Start Something New?

Six months ago our family returned to the US and started a new phase of our lives. It has been trying at times, but one of those things you just do because you have to, like breathing. As part of our new life, it has become necessary for me to go back to "work" as a nurse in the US, at the age of 44. I have been working as a nurse in Africa, but it had been over 13 year since I had worked in the US. There was a lot to catch up on, but I'm slowly getting up to speed. For four months now I have been working in the Emergency Room of a small rural hospital.

Funny that I ended up working in the ER. I never thought I would want to - always thought that would be too stressful, and after 15+ years of striving to survive, let alone thrive, in the African continent amidst disease, cultural challenges, language barriers, horrible roads, corruption, evil, unending logistical hassles, sometimes living in fear and trying not to, not to mention bullets occasionally flying and racial tensions mounting, caring for the burned, the sick with tropical diseases, the insane, and those severely wounded from a war and strife filled region, and trying to live something of a normal life for me, my husband and four children, you think I would run as far away as I could from Emergency room care. I thought I would. Crazy enough, each time I applied for a job after returning to the US, the ER was what was available and what I was "suitably matched" to do. Hmmm. Well, I stopped fighting it and was hired in an ER. It has not been that bad. I thought I would struggle more with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ironically the ER has been thus far rather mild compared to some of what I witnessed in Africa, and I am thriving in the atmosphere of a team, where I am not alone in deciding the fate of the individual, if there is any deciding at all, where there is access to the best of medical care and hope is not completely lost, and where most people come in for less than emergencies.

It is a far cry from Africa. There is nothing more grim and disheartening to bear witness and feel deeply the grief of those doomed to their lot in life without hope in the "Dark Continent", those whose bodies are eaten away day by day by the grotesque tumors that are slowly claiming their bodies without any hope of escaping them, those whose only water source is poluted with countless microbes that kill them daily, those who live and fear daily the autrocities of evil war lords who terrorize without accountability, giving into fatalism and accepting it as normal and unavoidable.

Yet the contrasts in what people fight against to survive is astounding. I come from 15+ years of working in a country whose mothers lose half their children on the average before the children reach adulthood, some of whom have died right before my eyes. I come from a world where men, women and children die daily from tetanus, rabies, bacteria, malaria, amebas, typhoid, Schisto, Hemorrhagic and Yellow Fever, to name a few, of the diseases resulting from the war of man against nature and microbes, where people fear what they cannot see that can really kill them, where natural selection has left only the strongest to survive (no, I don't believe in Evolution, by the way), where no hospital has ever seen a neurosurgeon or heart surgeon, and where the average life expectancy is 42. Most people don't live long enough to ever experience heart disease, lung disease or the miriad of other co-morbid conditions experienced by the vast majority of Americans today resulting from indulgence, addictions, sedentary lifestyles and poor health habits. In the US the strong and the weak alike have the privelege to survive and escape the onslaught of most microbes through the invention of vaccines, antibiotics and eradication programs, yet end up killing themselves by overeating, underexercising, and indulging in everything from food to drugs and alcohol. Even sadder, the youth of this nation who should have the greatest potential of ever realizing their hopes and dreams more than any other generation or culture end up committing suicide, lost and misguided without God. All too often ER's around the country see people suffering from anxiety, mental illness and out of control. It begs the question, have we done any better? Has all that we have achieved in this country made a difference?

I believe the answer is no, not without God. God's presence in a person's life is the only person that can help them make sense, wherever they are in the world. We are all going to die, the only difference is how we die and when, and whether we have hope or not for something beyond this meaningless life. Having that hope while still living on this earth is the only thing I believe that can really allow us to truly thrive. I have been all too close to death myself, and to losing my own mind from witnessing and experiencing some of the atrocities, desperation and evil that exists across the Atlantic. Only by God's grace was I pulled up from that darkness and given something to grasp a hold of, something to find hope in.

I noticed that there weren't too many other nurses older than me working in the ER. One colleague commented that most ER nurses burn out at 45. Hmm, I just got started at 44. The stress is certainly there, but it is a change from where I have been, a merciful change, and God willing, I will endure whatever comes my way during this next phase of my life.

Squeezing in Schooling Into Our Day

Now that I'm working several days a week, I am finding it increasingly hard to get work done . Many activities compete for my few hours at home. I have to juggle desk work, teaching kids, paying bills, laundry, cleaning house, meal planning, meal preparation, organizing and sorting, and planning. Today I really felt the crunch. I had to take the kids to buy new clothes at the Goodwill store, since especially Joshua is growing so fast, and then try to cram 2 days of school into one, since I'm working an extra day this week for a friend in exchange for a weekend day off. So today Joshua and Katie pitched in and helped teach Gabriel while I doubled up subjects with Aisha.

God's little reminders sometimes hit hard

Yesterday I started the day thankful to finally have four days off of work, and finally able to spend time with my kids homeschooling and catching up on a bunch of other things. However, I ended up losing most of the day to an unfortunate turn of events that I believe now may have been preventable if I had just stopped and prayed about it.

Early into the morning Jim was checking our bank account and noticed an unknown charge on our credit card. Hmm, I thought it sounded vaguely familiar. I wondered if it was a promotion deal I was going to sign up for about two weeks ago online, but backed out of. I knew that I had not signed up for it, and had "abandoned ship" so to speak before I got in too deep, but not before they got my credit card number, apparently. A guy from their company even called me the next day to see if I wanted to complete my application and finish signing up for the deal. I made it very clear that I wasn't interested and wanted to cancel any service that they might think I signed up for. And that was the end of it...or so I thought. Apparently not, since there was now a charge for $79.90 on my credit card.

So I called the phone number on the charge and tried to inquire about how do get the charge credited to my account - after all, I never even received a product of any kind that I knew of. However, the only person I could get in touch with at that number was a whole plethera of foreign telephone operators in the Phillippines who said it was too late, that the 7 days to cancel had passed and that I was bound by the legal terms of and conditions of what I had agreed to. Hmmm. Sounded fishy to me, since I clearly remember backing out before signing on, and telling the guy on the phone I didn't want the service. After calling them back dozens of times and getting hung up on while on hold waiting to talk to their manager, who apparently was "on break" for over two hours, I started getting really angry. Each time I spoke with someone, the tone in my voice got more desperate, more irritated. No one would give me any information as to how I could dispute the charge, talk to a manager or get the charge removed from my account.

While all of this was going on, my husband was browsing the web for the name of the company - and he not only found it, but found hundreds of complaints from people who had gone through an almost identical ordeal to mine. Now we were both fuming - an injustice had been done, we had been scammed and we weren't going to let it just roll off our backs. Jim got on the phone and insisted this time, but to no avail. I continued to browse the web for information, and finally found a different phone number to call, this time in the US. The lady, this time not foreign, was not any more helpful, and even though she was a supervisor, was not helping us out at all and said it was "impossible" to credit the amount to us.

I could hear Jim getting more and more angry as he talked with her, so I took the phone again and gave it another try, hoping to explain things more clearly so she could understand. While I was doing this, the other phone rang, and it was a friend on the line. Jim explained to him that we couldn't chat right now, we were in the middle of an ordeal of getting out of a scam that had begun that morning and was now dragging out late into the afternoon. The friend said he would pray, and Jim hung up. As I talked to the woman on the other line, she kept interrupting me, saying there was nothing I could do. Then Jim turned to me and whispered to me "Bob said he would pray". A few seconds later the women's voice on the other line went silent, and she let me talk. I was able to clearly state what happened, and to my surprise, she said in a subdued tone that she would refund the whole amount. Tears came to my eyes as I took down the information, thanked her and hung up. We got a confirmation email today that the charge would be credited to us.

It took me a whole day of adrenaline, frustration, a few more gray hairs and perhaps even a few years off my life to realize and be reminded that a prayer could resolve this mess much quicker and more easily than my angry voice crying out injustice ever could. God forgive us for the times when we forget to let go and let God.

Today I learned that a dear woman, Cindy Adams, that I have come to know via the internet, the MOMYS yahoo group and her blog, has lost her battle with Colon cancer. She is the mother of 10 children, 9 of which were adopted from various countries. Her life and view of adversity has so inspired me, and her passing has impacted me deeply. Please visit her website at:

http://faithfulpromises.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-week.html

All things Nature

One of the hardest things about leaving Africa for me was leaving my garden. Over the years it had become a place of rest and solice, away from the stress and craziness of cross-cultural ministry. Learning to tame and and marvel at the tropical lushness and beauty of Africa's rainy season, and at other times nurturing, watering and sustaining the life of living things in the 6 months of Africa's dry season gave me such a great wonder at God's perfection in every flower that came out of the dust when the rains began and thrived, and a great respect for God's balance in nature when despite my best efforts things sometimes didn't make it. When we left, I dug up what I could, potted it and moved it to a shady spot in a colleague's garden where it could be cared for until someone else could take charge of the plants and carry on and enjoy God's miracles.

Now back in the US, there is something inside of me driving me to find little ways to bring life out of the dirt. I have already begun to nurture numerous potted plants in my room, and the back porch of my mom's villa where we are temporarily staying. And little by little we have begun to plant some flowers on our farm and tame the wilderness that it has become after decades of resting fallow, and the woods which as far as we can tell have never been lived in except for animals.

Nothing Sacred

I have been working now for about a month. After so many years of living in a foreign culture and being out of American culture, or just being among God-fearing Christian Americans most of the time, and the rest of the time speaking foreign languages with people of foreign cultures to my own, I have been plunged back into the "real world" of the secular culture whenever I go to work each day. I am saddened by the state of people's lives who don't have Christ as their hope. I know it will be a struggle to fight against synicism and apathy that is all around me. I pray for the strength not to lose hope in people and in God's ability to transform even the most hopeless of lives. I know He can and has for me and for so many. I am amazed at the choices people have made in the American culture, a culture that offers more than any other for realizing one's greatest potential. I am saddened by how others waste money and giftedness, settling for less than their greatest potential. I am reminded of the lyrics of Billy Sprague's song "Nothing Sacred" which resounds more than a decade later as a true picture of the sad state which our society has become:

"People need true love, but chase infatuation,
they need a hope, but live on short supply,
People need wisdom, but get more education,
People need forgiveness, but settle things eye-for-eye.

People need identity, but are satisfied with titles,
They need true courage, but bravado looks sincere,
People need a living God, but seem content with idols,
People need destiny, but settle for careers,

And the soul remains unsettled,
and the world a wilderness,
In a time where nothing's sacred,
and souls settle for less.

People need faith, but place their bets on science,
They need a refuge, but stay out in the rain,
People need eachother but rely on self reliance,
People need a Christmas, but settle for a holiday,

People need dignity but survive on ego,
They need the truth, but will take an alibi,
People need a savior, but much prefer a hero,
Most long for heaven, but have settled for the sky.

And the soul remains unsettled,
and the world a wilderness,
In a time where nothing's sacred,
and souls settle for less.