To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
Amos Bronson Alcott

The answer to old age is to keep one’s mind busy and to go on with one’s life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.
Leon Edel

These are quotes I included in a birthday card and letter I sent my dad. Today is his 94th birthday! I told him these quotes about old age remind me of him. (There are many reasons; my husband told a small group recently that Dad is his hero.)

I hope these quotes cheer him. They cheered me, especially the last one, given the last months in the lives of Tony and Jackina Stark.

I’m just over thirty years behind my dad, but after living in the Joplin area for 42 years and building our “dream house” six year ago, Tony and I were willing to move away and build another one on acres our daughter and her husband gave us in Branson, Missouri, where along with Leanne’s family, we can enjoy the view of a field of cows and a lake.

In this economy, we took a financial hit, but as the commercial goes, “Living near a daughter and her family—priceless!

After two months, I’m beginning to feel like this is home, but I’m finding myself in an extraordinary period of waiting on the Lord, an unexpected period of wondering. I’m praying more than ever the Jeremiah 33 prayer: “Teach me great and unsearchable things I do not know.”

I’ve been absent from this blog for almost two months—because of the move, no doubt, but also because of the waiting and wondering. I began the blog almost two years ago to share things I’ve written through the years with students who have asked for these things in the past and for new readers of my 2009 novels. I haven’t written anything in months (except for these few words), and as I wait, I wonder, will I ever write again?

Well, we shall see.

Meanwhile, as I wait on what God has for me, I wish to do it with dad’s “hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent” heart.

One summer Stacey took Jake and Avrie, her two children (before sweet Cade came along), to see Leanne and her three children before they came on to our house.

Jake, three at the time, and Mariah, two, sat at the bar in the kitchen looking through magazines. They picked up a Compass, the quarterly magazine Ozark Christian College publishes, began to look at the pictures, and discovered something shocking.

Jake and Mariah adore each other, but when they were that age they did not yet understand they were cousins, nor did they understand they were looking at a magazine from the school where I taught for so long.

Mariah could barely speak, but as she turned a page, she saw column after column of faculty pictures. Somehow in that large group of pictures, the two-year-old saw mine, pointed at it, and said, “MY MA!”

Jake looked at her, at my picture, and then back at her and exclaimed, “That’s the Ma I belong to!”

I could hardly believe the sweet exchange and, of course, saw great theological implication. Jake didn’t say, “That my ma, too!” He phrased it with secure emphasis on his place in my life: He belonged to me.

One of these days when we’re retelling that story, I’ll say to him, “That’s how I feel about God, boy. Sometimes when I think of him, secure in his love, I borrow your phrase and exclaim: “That’s the God I belong to!”

Something tells me Jake will know what that means. And Jake and his Ma will smile.

Leanne was very good in high school to take time for the somewhat mentally retarded who had been mainstreamed into the school. She really cared about them, and they knew it. At the end of her junior year, several of these boys asked if they could write a note in her yearbook.

They all wrote sweet entries, but one boy, in particular, really touched her.

He had taken her yearbook to his next class so he would have plenty of time to write. A girl Leanne knew came up to her later and told how the young man sat by her and asked her how to spell every word he wrote in Leanne’s yearbook so that it would be just right. He didn’t want to mess it up.

Leanne will always cherish what it took him so long to write: “Leanne, you are a good person and my best friend.”

Leanne is a school counselor and associate superintendent in a small school district near Branson, Missouri. When she first started teaching years ago now, she called her fifth grade classroom the “positive zone.”  Students learned you did not say hurtful things to one another there. I was not surprised that Leanne’s classroom was a safe place to be.

And when my older daughter Stacey calls, hurt if someone at church has criticized something she or her youth minister husband have tried to do so right, she ends up saying that she will try to understand and respect that person’s motives and point-of-view, for she is, above all else, called to love.

She once matted and framed Philippians 1:9-11, her prayer for her children, and put it in each of their rooms. Perhaps it is still there—My prayer for you is that you will overflow more and more with love for others, and at the same time keep on growing in spiritual knowledge and insight, for I want you always to see clearly the difference between right and wrong, no one being able to criticize you from now until our Lord returns. May you always be doing those good, kind things which show you are a child of God, for this will bring much praise and glory to the Lord.

So, our daughters are teaching their children that they are loved and that God loves them even more. As a character in one of my novels likes to say, “Woo hoo!”

Children can be very self absorbed, and even mean to others. I haven’t known a child that hasn’t had such an impulse, and we need to be there to show them the supremacy and necessity of love.

Loving is the bottom line of the Christian life. Jesus said to “love as I love.” So along with teaching our children by testifying and by encouraging them to trust him and test his Word, we also tried to teach them to love.

Jesus said loving one another is an old and new commandment. I guess it is as old as God himself and as new as trying to love each new day. We never wanted the girls to think they would be children of the light just because they had Perfect Sunday School Attendance pins. There is one main question to be answered in life. Do you love?

I knew the “look” my daughter Leanne was telling her sister about. When I was a teenager, I made the mistake of looking at my dad that way. My superior stare said, “You are uncommonly stupid!” Dad, ordinarily a forbearing father, reacted by picking up a loafer I’d left on the dining room table and giving me a whack on the top of my presumptuous head.

Now years later Leanne had chosen to settle an issue with an acquaintance by flashing that same deadly look, and I decided not to ignore it.

“Leanne, come upstairs and talk to me.”

Suddenly running the sweeper and emptying the dishwasher sounded appealing to my ninth grader. I didn’t blame her. Confrontation is the pits.

She dragged herself into my room and looked at me with dread as I told her to come sit on my lap. She hesitated, not because she was almost as tall as I and felt too old for such a thing. She hesitated because my lap was too close for the misery she had begun to feel.

I have held Leanne thousands of times, but never to list the potential consequences of a choice some people may not have noticed or worried much about if they did. She sat on the edge of my lap and turned her face away from me.

I talked to the sliver of her face I could see: “Leanne, this afternoon there’s a girl out there who might feel crummy about herself simply because you looked at her with such contempt.”

Her body stiffened. I hated to say more, but I wanted to try to explain all the reasons why I had to make such a big deal about a look. “Now that girl may believe something about you that isn’t true, Leanne. She might think you’re mean, when the truth is few people on this planet are sweeter than you are.”

I put my hand on her face and tried to get her to look at me. Total resistance.

I had never been denied her blue eyes, but I had one more thing to say. “Leanne, most people know you’re a Christian, and sometimes even a look could eliminate your opportunity to show someone what God is like.”

Now the tears came. And now I would not let her resist my hand as I turned her face toward me so that I could tell her how much I loved her.

Finally she relaxed in my arms: “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m really sorry.” I brushed her tears away and told her I knew she was sorry. Forgiveness was swift and sweeping.

She was downstairs helping me find something to fix us for dinner a few minutes later, chatter and laughter replacing anger, guilt and shame. But I knew she had learned once more that being Christ’s was more than attending church each week as good as it is to worship and remember and learn with others. I John 3:11-24 tells us that loving “with actions and in truth. . . . is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest” in the presence of God.

The girls had several opportunities to put this into action themselves. For instance, they came in from school one day, furious with a little girl who had called them names and tried to trip them on the bus.

By the time I’d heard all the particulars, I wanted to smack the kid myself. For years we had been able to summon it, but there in my kitchen on that autumn afternoon, tolerance had vanished.

I thought I was hungry when we sat down to eat an after school snack, but I found myself making designs in the honey on my plate, too upset to eat, too upset even to say much yet. The girls, however, had not lost their appetites and buttered their biscuits with a vengeance, talking plenty while they did it.

“Enough is enough” was the general motif, and now they would retaliate. Okay, maybe they wouldn’t trip her or call her names, but they would do something. They could at least put her in her place.

That’s about the time Matthew 5:43-47 tunneled its way into my consciousness.

Never one to suffer alone, I finally opened my mouth and reminded the girls of what Jesus said. How are we different from the pagans, he wanted to know, if we love only those who love us? We are to love our enemies.

We couldn’t sit there eating biscuits anymore. We got up from the table and went into the family room to pray. I knelt there with the girls, but they did the praying. Their prayers were simple and real. They told God how crummy they felt and confessed that it was hard not to hate this girl. “Help us care for her,” they prayed.  They expressed how awful it would be for someone to want to do and say such things to other people: “She must be so miserable.” They closed this prayer with one last request: “Please. Help her.”

I couldn’t believe what was happening. We were experiencing “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” My young daughters were embracing God’s truth, and just as Jesus said it would, the truth was setting them free.

No matter how hard it would be for them to love and forgive this “enemy,” it would be infinitely easier than bitterness and resentment and revenge.

When Stacey and Leanne got up from their knees, peace had replaced turmoil. But more than healing had happened. They had trusted in and lived out this truth of God’s Word, and as a result, they came to know God more fully.

God’s Word is Truth, and it, beyond all other things, provides guidance and comfort.

They need to know its relevance for their lives. It should both comfort and confront us so that we can be conformed into the likeness of Christ and know the peace and abundant life that come from obeying Him. Test his word in your life and tell you children about it, and help them test it in their own lives.

I had several opportunities to do this. One night when I tucked Stacey in, I made pretty short work of it. When I leaned over and quickly kissed her goodnight, she asked, “Are you all right, Mom?”

I assured her I was fine. But when I turned out the light and started to walk out of her room, I stopped. I wasn’t fine, and I decided this might be a good time to take back my socialized response.

I returned to Stacey’s bed, nudged her over, and sat down beside her. “Actually, Stacey, I’m not quite all right. Something happened at church tonight that bothered me a lot. But I’m in there ironing right now, and talking to God about it, and I will be all right soon.”

Then I told her a little bit about a problem so petty that I couldn’t believe I was struggling with it at all. That night one of my favorite speakers was preaching, and I could not wait to hear him.

But, as the schedule would have it, I was supposed to work in the nursery. Inspiration would probably have to wait. But then I had a brainstorm. The idea was so clever I really thought the Holy Spirit must have given it to me.

Leanne, my daughter who has loved babies since she was one herself, could take my turn in the nursery. Sure, she would miss youth meeting, but could missing one out of every thousand hurt? I didn’t think so. Leanne headed for the nursery, and I found my pew.

I thought everything was perfect. I could not have guessed that when Leanne entered the nursery, a lady insisted that she leave. Because she had been in the nursery during church that morning doing her regularly scheduled duty, this lady said she should not miss any more church by being in there again that night. Nothing Leanne told her made any difference, not even the fact that her mother had asked her to do it. She had to go.

When I asked Leanne how the babies were on the way home from church, I couldn’t believe what had happened. I thought all kinds of ugly things, like how often Leanne had attended functions at the church all these years compared to how often her child attended. “I’m so sure this one hour could matter!” And there’s also the fact that it was my decision to make. How dare someone question or usurp my authority over my own child!

The minute I got home, I went to my room and set up my ironing board. When I felt like this, I needed something to iron. I could do twelve pieces in fifteen minutes. And it was while I was ironing that Stacey called me into her room to tuck her in.

So there I sat, telling her of my struggle. I wanted her to see that doing the right thing, feeling the right thing, is not always automatic. I also told her that when I went back to my room, I would think more about God’s ways and his will, talk to him some more about my hurt and my weakness, and then I would, by his grace, put all this bad feeling away. I would forgive this lady (whom he loves very much, by the way) because God forgives me for all my foolishness. Jesus could not be clearer about this. Those who would be forgiven must forgive (Matt. 6:14-15) and do it with the lavish generosity of the Father (Matt. 18).

Because my husband and I have shared some of our struggles to be like Christ, our children have learned that loving and forgiving aren’t easy—but required. And they’ve learned several other things about being God’s beloved.

This took place during a season that began the day Leanne and her husband Scott were told by a fertility specialist that they would never have children. Up to that time, this was clearly the saddest day of our lives. She had loved babies since she was one, and I had imagined their little arms around my neck since the day Leanne married Scott.

When they stood in our entry and tried to explain to me what the doctor had said, they leaned against the wall for support, and at one point cried in my arms.

But even as they were wiping tears from their faces, I heard each of them talking about God’s goodness and a plan He must have for them.

Some days were so sad for Leanne that she didn’t want to get out of bed, but she turned over each painful day to God. Friends asked her how she could be so happy when it seemed the desire of her heart would never be. She told them she tried to live out Phil. 4:8-“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things.”

She lived a life of praise. In fact, she told me about an experience nearly a year after her diagnosis. She read the events of those saddest of days in her journal and didn’t shed a tear. But when she put her journal down and began to thank God for the blessings that were hers, including his friendship and her hope of eternal life, she began to cry.

I thanked God in my heart for such a child and told my daughter that she had demonstrated spiritual maturity.

Leanne was quite ready for God to change the desire of her heart, but instead he brought an eight-year-old boy into their lives. She had written in her journal that if God ever brought her a child, she would name a girl Mariah, because it means “God will provide” and a boy “Sam” because it means “Asked of God.”

Leanne had trusted God would work things for her good, but she had no idea he’d bring a darling little boy “who needed a family” into her life. Or that his name would be Scott, her husband’s name, and that even while she was meeting Scott she would be pregnant with Mariah and that two years later Sam would complete the family.

Not surprisingly, they have known sorrow since Scott was so sweetly adopted into the family. (Life in this fallen world is seldom easy.) Scott, unsure of what he wanted to do following high school, joined the army and was gravely injured in Iraq, losing both legs below the knee. I believe it was Leanne’s trust that helped them all survive, and eventually thrive, during his long recovery.

There are so many ways to teach children to trust God. Showing them they can tithe (begin by showing them how you did it when it didn’t seem possible), telling them of needs God has supplied, showing them they can do things with the help of the Holy Spirit they thought they could never do.

By doing this you’ll equip them for the hard times ahead and equip them for challenge and growth. When Stacey was in high school, she wrote on an application for a mission’s trip words that cheered a mom who wanted to equip her children for spiritual battle:

     In one word, I would say Jesus is my peace. I feel so confident that no matter what happens to me, however tragic, I will be fine. I will be more than fine, because Jesus is with me and would never give me more than   I could bear. I take great comfort in that.

And I have taken great comfort in children who learned to trust the One who upholds them in his strong right hand.

My younger daughter Leanne learned this in Sunday school and other formal settings, but she learned it best seeing scripture become reality in her life. Her first memorable lesson took place in the fifth grade.

As I turned out Leanne’s light one unsuspecting night, she burst out crying. Actually she was sobbing.

Not being too awfully busy or just plain crazy, I turned the light back on, went to her bedside, and asked her what in the world was the matter.

Leanne couldn’t talk yet, so I held her until she could stop crying, washed her flushed face with a washcloth and waited.

Finally she could tell me the source of such pain. Her best friend at school had told her earlier that day that she didn’t want to be her friend anymore. In a fifth grade class with 21 girls and 8 boys, there were always problems, but this was serious.

The “ringleader” of the class had decided she wanted Leanne’s best friend to be her best friend. So Leanne was alone—all the more so since she, weirdly enough, had been instructed not to play with any of the other girls either.

Alrighty then. Now it was my turn to talk. And talk I did. I said every wonderful thing I knew to say.

I told her how we couldn’t make other people do what we wanted them to do or be what we wanted them to be. I discussed the difficulty but importance of turning the other cheek. And I elaborated on the ugliness, futility and self-destructiveness of any sort of revenge.

Then I tucked her in again and reached for the light once more, thinking how lucky Leanne was to have a sage for a mother.

That’s when I heard another sob, less hysterical, but much more pitiful. “But Mama,” she said, “I don’t want to lose my friend.”

Oh yes, well, there’s that.

And standing there in the dark, I remembered all the “But I don’t want to’s” of my own life, and knew Leanne needed more help than I was capable of giving her. When I sat beside her this time, all I said was a prayer to the one who could and would help us both:

Dear Father—many time I have knocked and knocked and knocked, and I do not mind. I trust your timing. But if it’s in your will, please answer this request now. Please
somehow give Leanne joy and peace in what for her has become a scary and hostile environment. I have no idea how you will do it, but I trust that you will. And I thank you for this problem, because Leanne is going to see for the first time in her young life, the power of her God!”

At 3:15 the next afternoon, Leanne literally burst through the front door with joy all over her little face.

“This,” she announced, “has been the happiest day of my life!” She told me that everything was fine. Her friend still didn’t speak to her, but a new girl named Krista needed a friend that day, and they played all day and had a great time. “Actually, Mom, I knew everything would be okay when you left the room last night.”

In my heart I thanked God for helping Leanne begin to understand and rest in Hebrews 13:5: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

When she was 24, Leanne proved her faith genuine and her trust in God mature. I’ll tell you about that next week. (By the way—Leanne, who will be forty this July, just reconnected with a friend from grade school and junior high. They’ve been having the best time. Her name is Krista.)

One Saturday afternoon when I has taking the girls to meet friends at the mall, they told me a story that affected me so much that I pulled the car over to the side of the road and cried. An analogy was about to explode from my heart onto my stunned daughters.

They had told me about a segment in a program called That’s Incredible that they had seen on television the night before with their dad.

The parents of a boy diagnosed as hopelessly retarded were advised to put their son in an institution. The parents refused, and in this case, the love of parents nurtured even such a severely handicapped child.

When the boy’s mother died in 1979, his father took full responsibility for him-dressing him, giving him his shots, and helping him with the smallest tasks such as crossing the street. But that wasn’t what was incredible.

What was incredible was his one, and only one, great ability—to paint. Despite the fact that he was born with cataracts inside both eyes, blocking the light and causing him to paint just a few inches from the table, he paints enough, and well enough, to have had eight one-man shows in one year alone! Some artists don’t accomplish this in a lifetime.

It takes him only three hours for a small picture and two, three or four days for larger ones. He is unbelievable at details and can remember and recreate scenes he’s seen long ago. In order to get the exact color he remembers, he often uses layers of color.

I had been thinking about priorities at the time.

That boy’s story and my somewhat illogical thought that sprang from it deeply touched me. That’s why I pulled the car over, and with tears streaming down my face, told the girls what I was thinking and feeling: “Girls, I should just pray that God would make me something like that boy. I wish he would give me one amazing ability, if I had no others—the ability to praise Him!”

I suppose that was too emotional, but for some reason the girls were not shocked or upset. God was real and our love for him real when we, sitting together in a car on a warm Saturday afternoon, desired to adore Him and never let Luke 13:34 apply to us: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”

We talked about such things. And I think it made all the difference.

The girls have become mothers who testify. Stacey’s favorite Christian theme is the freedom Christ gives, and Jake was already beginning to understand that when he was only four. Stacey, who doesn’t cry often, was driving down the street, listening to Steven Curtis Chapman’s Christian song, “Free.” Jake, after asking what it was about, said, “Is this song going to make you cry, Mom?”

I believe Stacey was testifying when she said, “It might, Jake.”

One story we talk about took place when Stacey was not even two and her sister was only a few months old.

Stacey had been throwing up for days because of a stomach virus, and she developed a twist and block between her bowels. It could have killed her if her dad, home on Saturday, hadn’t noticed the slight swelling in her stomach and if she hadn’t had a very astute and observant pediatrician.

We took her to the hospital for a life or death operation. But before they could do the procedure, there were the preliminaries to be taken care of.

A nurse came into the room and asked me if Stacey were potty-trained.

“No,” I gasped. Hello, I thought, she’s not even two!

The nurse explained to me that if she were not, then they would have to catheterize her in order to get a urine sample and to prepare her for surgery. I couldn’t stand that. I knew what catheterization was, and my mind could not conceive of such a tiny child having to have that done.

So with little hope on anyone’s part, I asked them to bring me a potty chair and to leave my baby and me alone for just a little while.

I felt like a baby myself as I knelt on that cold tile floor and unfastened Stacey’s diaper. As I sat beside her and held her on that contraption, I prayed, “Lord, please, unless it’s part of your will that I can’t see or understand (I John 5:15), please don’t let her have to be catheterized on top of everything else.”

So mundane. Such lack of eloquence.

Yet almost instantly I heard the sound that told me my prayer had been answered.

My eyes widened and my mouth dropped open in traditional amazement. And, in that moment, kneeling on that hard, impersonal floor, I was aware that my baby girl and I were in the presence of God. Whatever would happen, that knowledge meant everything.

I have said that he made himself known to a naive young mother that day. In that moment, I remembered his name is “I am.” Those moments come.

Tell your children you can understand why Abram fell on his face before God when the Lord made himself known to him (Gen. 17:1-3). Then they will know every word of the Bible is preserved that we might understand God and the relationship he wants to have with us.

Testimonies can also come in the form of analogies. I’ll tell you about that next week, and then I’ll move on from testifying to trusting!