Friday, October 7, 2016

The Farmer's Wife

Colonel Blair from Kentucky, city man- turned- Kansas- homesteader sacrificed for his only daughter's education in music at a Wichita college. Zema, my mother, now a  trained singer, won contests across the state. Contests over, she had to go home. To the farm. Not to be defeated,  she got on her horse and set out to be a circuit-riding voice and piano teacher for the folk in the community. My Grandfather Harlan and a bearded old saint named "Brother Henry" started a Methodist church in a little town named "Wilsey", three country miles from the farm. This was Mother's spin about that church:  "I didn't want to, but I went to a revival. A loud evangelist was preaching.  He came down off the platform, took me by the arm and tried to force me to go to the altar and repent.  I ran". Remember this part of her story. It will affect mine forty years later.

Zema met and eloped with Garnett, my Irish father, a railroader in the nearby Santa Fe Trail town of Council Grove. Oh! Good! Now she could turn her horse out to pasture, escape from the farm, dress up and be a lady!  Unexpectedly Grandfather Harlan died!  My parents had no choice but to move to the farm, work to save it from foreclosure and take care of Etta, my grandmother.  My brothers,  Blair and Bob were born a year apart. Ten years later when Mother was forty-one years old she birthed me. There were many of us menopause babies in those days..

Grandma died a long, painful death. Mother and Dad took patient and exhausting care of her, One day Grandma slipped away. She had been the only Light in our home. A quiet Light, but a Light, nonetheless. Dad began to drink. My people-loving mother started clubs for sewing, bridge and quilting.  In an upstairs bedroom is a raggedy quilt with the personally embroidered names of many of those club women. Also in that room,  hanging on a wall is my farm family's first electric light fixture that was on the ceiling of the bedroom in which I was born.

Mother launched yet another gathering that included husbands. She called it the "N.I.P." club,  which stood for "Nothing in Particular". One of the couples in that club also birthed a "menopause baby" Her name was "Janet". Nineteen years later, at a Christian gathering at Kansas State University she introduced me to a man named T.W. Wilson. His best friend was a young North Carolina evangelist named Billy Graham. They led me to Christ and invited me to Northwestern Bible College where for three years, Billy was Interim President. My mother was not happy that I had become a Christian and was following an evangelist to faraway Minneapolis, Minnesota. She did not, nor could she understand. I left her on the farm in Kansas, my heart torn in two..

Pick up the thread of  last week's blog: "My Dad, the Farmer". Would you share the thrill I feel all these years later?  In Palo Alto, California my mother finally understood that salvation is a grace gift from God. Not of works, lest any person should boast. Mother, a hard working farm wife probably hoped that she could work her way into Heaven. If anyone could have,  it would have been my mother.  At seventy years of age she left behind the heavy burdens of raising chickens, fighting a losing battle with farm dust, carrying armloads of logs from the woodpile that fed the hungry cooking and heating stove and lugging countless buckets of cold water from the hundred- foot- deep well to wash endless loads of clothes. She hung them to whip dry in the hot or cold prairie winds. As I write, that one hundred thirty- year- old pump, now motorized, pours a merry little stream of water into my garden pool at my front entryway. Our two sons, Doug and Jeff brought it to me from the abandoned farm. Wasn't that dear of them?

If the Lord beckons me Home before I get to continue this beautiful story of redemption,, my dear parents will have met me at The Gate. Grandfather Harlan will be there too. I have never met him. WHAT A DAY OF REJOICING THAT WILL BE!

But this is today.  Brilliant Malcolm Muggeridge left us with many quotables.  Here is one: "Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream." After listening to yet another political debate,  this hymn of Truth thrums through my mind.

                                        THE SOLID ROCK

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but only trust in Jesus' Name. 

When darkness veils His lovely face, I rest in His unchanging grace.
In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil. 

His oath, His covenant, His blood support me in the whelming flood.
When all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay.

When He shall come with trumpet sound I know in Him I shall be found.
Dressed in His righteousness alone , faultless I stand before His throne. 

ON CHRIST, THE SOLID ROCK I STAND; 
ALL OTHER GROUND IS SINKING SAND.
ALL OTHER GROUND IS SINKING SAND. 

Love, Jo

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