Louis came home with an amazing anniversary present for me: A computer!
He’d bought a used computer that could access the internet! I was super stoked! Set it up, plugged it in, started and *pop* there was a sound that anyone who has ever heard it knows – a blown fuse.
I started by taking it all apart to find the fuse. It was not a pop in and out fuse, but an enclosed one soldered to the breadboard in the power supply unit. A few other things on the power supply were burned and tested bad. I considered trying to redo the power supply, but instead decided to use parts from two old computer bases we’d kept in hopes of fixing. I ended up with a power supply and a few other small things picked from the other two bases and voila! It worked!
MessyRange of MessNew Computer!Tools… Some of themIt Works!Innards
The table looked a little messy with three computer innards scattered around.
It reminded me of my Daddy building custom computers in the ‘90s, when I was little more than an observer asking a million questions and occasionally handing something to Daddy. When it worked, I was super stoked.
Now I can access the internet from home again!
It is a slow giant (was originally too fast for the power supply I put in, but I fixed that) but that’s still okay! Nothing has to be super fast for me. The fact that it puts text up on the screen at the same speed I type is a major improvement over the last desktop computer we had! The previous base had lagged a little. I would be typing and it was a few words behind in the displaying of said words or sometimes when I was really into it, sentences behind. It used to make Christina and Becky laugh when my computer did that.
Now, I have a working internet computer that loads everything I need! Another thing I’m thankful for!
Dating Decisions Part 3: Discovering Real Life and True Love
September 20, 2020
Dating Decisions – Part 3
At this point in my story I am a few months into 16, realizing that my focus cannot be on someone else. Jesus is my answer, my hope, my truth, not some guy I will meet “eventually.” That brought more peace to my crazy teenage mind than any other decision I had made since choosing Jesus as my personal Savior.
I determined to stand on the principles of virtue that I wanted to find in my future mate. If I had high expectations, it stood to reason that he should as well.
I had already told God (when I was 12) that I would keep myself a perfect gift for my husband. I did some silly girlish stuff that I kept hidden – like write letters to my future husband as I was journaling. Several, actually most, of these letters were destroyed by inquisitive dogs and siblings long before I was 19. I understood purity to be in the mind, body, and heart. Of all the people I interviewed, none told me they wished they had “tried it out first” but almost every person who had “tried sex out” before marriage told me that they wished they hadn’t. Most of them cited trust issues after marriage as their reason. A few told me it made them feel less worthy or made their partner less desirable. Several did not marry the person they “tried out” with. My Daddy told me that once a boy makes a conquest, he thinks of the girl as dirty, trash, something to be discarded. He said that was why he never wanted to use anyone. He told me “men don’t use women but boys use girls.” The silver screen brought that to life in “Spencer’s Mountain” where they get the cow bred and Dad says to son something like: you aren’t a bull and your woman won’t be a cow. That image stuck with me. Stories about my Daddy’s friends, relatives in our extended family, and from my curious interview subjects led me to the understanding that if someone doesn’t respect your decisions in regard to your personal limits, they don’t truly respect you at all.
That led me to the decision that should I be dating someone and they choose to ignore or press my limits, I would back up and leave. Don’t respect me = deal breaker.
I also decided that I would give them just as much respect as I expected. That was something I already did because I was raised that way, but I made that mental decision and wrote it down just to solidify it. If I couldn’t respect them, I wouldn’t waste their time. A wife is expected to respect her husband.
I started to think of myself as a wife-in-training. I had read a devotional book where the woman writer referred to her students as “women-in-training” and I loved that idea! I’m big on apprentice type learning. Show me, direct me, and I pick up rather quickly. I think that actually learning from someone with real world experience is the absolute best. (Another reason I LOVE the movie “War Room” – if you haven’t seen it, DO IT.) I picked out the qualities that I needed to work on (like patienceand not nagging) and started trying them out on my siblings. Siblings had taught me that I was low on the patience thing. (Truthfully, children have taught me that I’m still, constantly, and will be forever working on the patience thing.) I am a big sister who likes to not allow her little siblings to get in a situation she knows how to prevent, but I had to sit back and let them learn after only one warning. My Daddy boomed a deep-belly laugh when he asked 17-year-old me why I let my little sisters go out in white shirts (in Florida afternoon, Kissimmee = 10 minute torrential rainfall at precisely 3pm) and I replied with “I warned them, but I’m trying to learn how not to nag, so I only said it once.”
My focus was now on myself. I understood that I needed to be a better person for my siblings, parents, and my future family. This was just the beginning.
I was still feeling tremendous pressure from peer groups to “date” like my siblings. My study had led me to the belief that dating was a long series of pre-marital interviews. I had been to job and volunteer worker interviews. I knew that the most direct way to find out if a person was a good match for the job or position was to ask direct questions. At 16, I could no longer blame my daddy and say “my Dad won’t let me date until I’m 16” therefore I began being super direct by asking, “do you love Jesus?” About half of those who asked me out laughed in a scoffing manner and (since I was primarily around church groups) respond with, “I go to church.” My reply to that “puffy religious response” was equally “puffy religious” – “no thanks. I can only court after I’m 18.”
At this point, mid-17, I still had an excellent relationship with my Daddy. I would tell him when someone asked me out. Once he told me my standards were too high, that I was expecting perfection. My reply was, “I’m looking for someone at least as much in love with Jesus as I am; the man is supposed to be the spiritual head of the family.” I was super-focused on getting into UMR or FIT at this point (two engineering colleges I was chasing) and my Daddy was big on education which is why I believe he didn’t press the matter really. I told him I wasn’t planning on dating until I was ready to marry. That became a repeated line whenever I was teased by family or my sister’s friends. One guy I didn’t like approached me about “hooking up for fun” and I asked him if he was ready to raise a child. His entire friend group left me alone.
I had devised an entire pre-programmed set of responses to boys and now men because I had yet to be asked out by anyone I actually would have dated. There had only been two young men whom I watched and admired the character of since I was 16 and neither asked me out. I actually had deep discussions about Biblical issues with both of them and discovered more about “Biblical courtship” from the latter when I was 17.
I delved deeper into the idea of Biblical courtship with a book I stumbled upon just before I turned 18. “I Kissed Dating GoodBye” by Joshua Harris – I didn’t agree with all of the book, but there were many bits that helped me to understand the whole courtship thing.
I may have bent your ears too long in this epistle. Oops!
Ready for the biggest decision of my dating steps? Covering that next time…
Learning the focus is on me: Dating Decisions Part 2
September 18, 2020
Dating Decisions – Part 2
My first realization when I started thinking logically about dating came from a series of Christian youth books by Robin Jones Gunn – even “Christian” dating was messy!
I don’t like messy anything. I like clean houses. I like clean living. I like open honest relationships. I hated how, even with people the protagonist wanted to have life-long relationships with, she lied! Or at the least bent the truth! In the books, she always ended up trying to correct those lies and asking for forgiveness, etc. because it was a Christian book trying to teach about doing life as a Christian in our carnal world (and Robin did a great job). I discovered that my idea of “date” was totally 1950s (or maybe even 1800s) and not relevant to the world I really lived in. I found Christian youth of my time (late 1990s) were trying to reinvent what they called “dating” by calling it “courtship.”
I wanted to be best friends. I wanted to get married to a man who was happy doing Pooh Bear’s “nothing” with me and enjoying it. I wanted someone who I was comfortable with. When I looked up the word “intimate” in my ancient dictionary, it said “to know and understand the deepest parts of the soul.” I wanted someone with whom I could be intimate.
The second big decision I made came about at a Christian summer camp where I was a junior counselor. First, a little backstory:
I started seriously working on myself as a preteen. I wanted to be a better sister. The song, “I Want to be Just Like You” by Philips, Craig, & Dean, was my inspiration. I cried so much when I first heard it because I realized my baby sisters and brothers looked up to me. I was actually walking my sleepy 1-year-old sister to get her to bed one night with WKCL on the radio. My mind twisted the lyrics so the he and him was they and them. “I want to be a holy example for their innocent eyes to see…” etc. I cried because I was not a “living Bible” in any sense and I wanted to be that positive role model. When baby Mary was born, I was years into the process of allowing God to change me into a better sister (which later helped me be a better mom).
I would get frustrated almost every time we moved with the hypocrisy and boys I met in youth groups who actively talked about things that shouldn’t be. I got more sexual garbage tossed my way from them than from male coworkers, my Daddy’s younger business associates who thought I was older, and the general guys I met in the feed store! I would approach the various youth leaders (we moved very often and I was always the new kid until I moved a few months later) to address the situation because I did not feel comfortable smacking truth at the various boys. When I started getting mostly, “they are just boys” reactions or laughter or “that’s actually a compliment” (he had tried to touch inappropriately and I moved away and instead he made comments I had to look up the meanings of later), I got seriously frustrated. I would throw my hands up mentally to God and say, “are there seriously any boys actually chasing after You in my generation?” Looking back, I think God just smiled, shook His head at my silly teenage prayers, and would allow me to read an awesome story or see or hear some young man acting out God’s love. It was usually right as we moved away, but always this little drop of encouragement that made me feel like I was not alone in my trying to be a Jesus-following-teenager.
*Side Note* (My girls are showing up to be way bolder than I was – Thank you, Jesus! – and they actually drop truth bombs when someone is doing or saying something inappropriate. That I think is awesome because it is a far better testimony than just stepping away and handing it off to an uncaring third party.)
BUT: my focus regarding dating was still carnal. I was looking at them. I was trying to find “the perfect guy” rather than focus on myself. Sure, I was working on being a better me with regard to siblings, parents, and general truth and study, but I had yet to apply it to all areas of my life. In our culture, we are constantly hit with “finding our soulmate” or “finding the one.” We are focusing on us finding a match. If we are leaving eternal salvation up to God, why not leave matchmaking up to God?
Fast forward to summer camp and I’m 16. Part of being a junior counselor was the requirement to attend 5am to 7am workshops (aka sermons/lectures/Bible studies). I’m listening to one of the camp counselors talk about how he and his wife didn’t start out God’s way and it was messy. His entire program was on not dating someone who wasn’t on equal spiritual footing (aka, DO NOT be unequally yoked to a nonbeliever). Of course, he and his wife ended their story as Christians working to rebuild and repair their marriage and family – but his eyes when he spoke of the wasted years fighting and trying to control each other and using their kids as weapons against each other and divorce and coming back together… those eyes solidified what became my second solid dating decision. I had already written it years before in a community youth group workshop to “list qualities you want in your future spouse,” but now it was not just a “what I want” it was a deal-maker or deal-breaker:
My husband will be a godly man who loves Jesus with all his heart.
And my third decision came at the same time:
I will present myself honestly in all my relationships and make sure any potential date knows I love Jesus and serve Him with my whole heart.
Part 1 of Dating Decisions – dissecting real life and true love
September 16, 2020
Dating Decisions (Part 1)
WHOA! What is meant by this title?
Nothing. It’s a history story. Ancient history if you ask my children. I am a writer of stories; why would it surprise you that I would pull stories from my teenage decisions? No crazy thoughts. Take a deep breath, empty your presuppositions, and read: you may learn a little about the psychology behind decision making.
Once upon a time, (No, this is not a fairy tale… it is my truth tale.), I was just understanding love. Real love. I was curious about my parents and other couples around me and in my church. My mom and dad had at this point been married for 13 years. I was 11. I considered them ancient. Now I am older than my mother then and close to my dad’s age at the time – wow, I’ve reached the 11-year-old’s idea of ancient! One of my daddy’s mentors had been married to his wife for over thirty years. My daddy’s parents had been married for over 40 years when my grandmother died and granddaddy didn’t remarry. My mother’s parents had been divorced before my mom met my daddy and two of her siblings had been married and divorced. I had been sitting at a concert at a church with mostly teenagers where the girl asked, “raise your hand if your parents have been divorced.” Everyone in my row raised their hands. Most of the auditorium raised their hands. I had watched “The Parent Trap” from the sixties, but in that movie the parents got back together and all was well. I started to understand that divorce was the norm for most of the children I met. My family, with their short 13 years together, was already 7 years beyond the “normal” for divorce; according to research in the “Focus on the Family” newsletter my daddy received. I began to understand that most of the problems facing my peers were related to their broken families. I realized that my mother broke the chain and her baby sister was breaking the chain. I wanted to be like the couple in one of my churches who stood up on the day they honored families and claimed 73 years of marriage.
Research started.
I read marriage and family books (my daddy had two bookshelves full of them in his office to start my journey). I analyzed relationships in movies, in books, and in history and began to learn how to predict problems based on family stability. Stories of great hardships with intact, supportive families morphed into strong, successful, loving children. What was the binding tie?
In every personal interview I did over the next six years (and beyond, but I’m telling the story of teenage me) the common thread for successful marriage was that both loved Jesus, both were willing to love the other without expecting anything in return, and both went into their relationship committed to making it last. Repair it rather than throw it away. I already had a waste-not-want-not mentality. This matched.
Along came 12. The first boy asked me out. I thought he was sweet. He liked to carry my books from Sunday School for me. He was nice to his baby sister. I found myself already studying potential mates. I was scared of that. I told him I couldn’t date until I was 16. That became my pre-programmed response to all of the offers in the next 4 years.
I was already journaling. I told God I was going to be 18 before I dated. I told Him I wanted Him to be in control. I told Him I wanted to focus on being the best big sister and daughter I could. So began my journey of discovering and morphing myself into what I thought God wanted.
At 16, my Daddy started getting worried. My 14-year-old sister was already dating and my 12-year-old brother liked to whistle at girls. I was deep into studying. I took time to develop relationships with all of my siblings as they allowed. It wasn’t that I wasn’t “interested” in boys. I plain and simple told my daddy once, “I’m not old enough to do anything about it, so why would I play with someone’s heart?” (As a teen, I thought he was shocked with my logic, but now as an adult I wonder if he was also scared of what I meant by that.)
And that was the first dating decision I realized I had made.
Sometimes music just hits me. I love to listen to songs of all kinds. One of my newest favorites was from a movie we watched a little bit ago – “Speechless.” Even though as an analyst I understand that wouldn’t have been accurate for the culture, still, it was perfect for the movie and absolutely perfect for viewing children to understand that they have to stand up for what they believe regardless of their culture.
Today, riding home, I heard one I’ve always loved but haven’t really heard in a while. Carrie Underwood’s “Temporary Home.” But today I couldn’t stop crying through the song because I could see real people in all stages of the song. In my mind I saw three little children I knew (the little boy), my sister before she died (the single mom), and my Daddy (the old man) – only my mind altered the words to say “old man, chair at home, surrounded by people he loves…” and the image was of all of us at the last Christmas when we were all together.
I can’t stop crying when I hear this song now. Even thinking about it.
My family is (fingers crossed, prayers for God’s will regardless if it is ours) in the process of trying to be approved for a new home in a development that comes with a nature park as a backyard and friends we already know and love as neighbors all up and down our future street.
Regardless of whether we get approved, any house we live in is temporary.
See, I moved all over the place as a youth. 19 times in 19 years (no, not every year, longest in one spot was 2 years 9 days). I always found new adventure and opportunities in each new place.
But I wanted my children to have roots.
When we bought our house, I counted out 2 years and 10 days on our calendar and circled it with smiley faces. It meant so much to me to be in one place. God taught me a lot when we faced the loss of our company, our house, our stuff, our income, and what felt like our future – mostly by means out of our control. One bank gambling that we’d have a chunk set aside (which we would have if we hadn’t just had to pay all of it to cover one driver when wrecked because she drove without our permission while upset) meant that they would accept nothing less – we couldn’t get a loan for the amount our house was “underwater,” because so many foreclosures around us (almost every property sold in our area in the last 3 years had been a foreclosure) had dropped our property from being worth $150K to $83K. Even the lawyer said there was nothing we could do.
God taught me to let go.
Let go of my dreams of one place my whole life…
Let go of my trees, roses, things I had tended for 10 years…
Let go of our animal graveyard where we had lovely trees planted over each of the foster animals whose last home we had been…
Let go of my little farm I loved…
Let go of things that we’d collected…
Let go of our repaired table that had been Louis’ parents, the chandelier Louis gave me for the first birthday I had in our house, the big-screen TV Louis had wanted since we got married but we had finally saved and bought for him the past Christmas, the beds that had been my brother’s and were now my children’s, dressers that had been mine and Katy’s and were now Christina and Becky’s, dressers that my Daddy brought for Becca when I was 13 and now were my dresser/mirror, Kimberly’s dresser, and our shoe cabinet, the baby cradle that my Daddy had bought for my Mom when she was pregnant with me – it had rocked every one of my siblings, a few of my children, and was their stuffed animal bed now…
Each felt like a stab to my heart then. Now? I couldn’t care less about stuff. I’m thankful we got to keep Daddy’s surfboard, the girls’ schoolbooks, their legos, and when the auction people came out and took our one vehicle they asked how we got around and Louis told them “the bikes” – so they left the 6 bicycles and the baby bike trailer by writing “rusted and very poor” over the “bicycles” on the list. (Honestly, every one of them except for Louis’ had come off the side of the road and were rusted, repainted, repaired, etc. so likely not worth any real money.)
Temporary.
All of those things are temporary.
The only thing that is permanent is our relationships – love.
Any house we buy will be our temporary home. We will fill it with love whatever size it is. Yes, we’re praying for a spot with at least 5 bedrooms where the children can at least break into 3-2-2 because I’d like a baby room for Thea and Lucas and we want a “guest bedroom/Grandma suite” because we look long-term at something we’ll be buying for 15 to 30 years! The big girls want to come back and stay as they go through college and until they buy their own home after their careers are established (and Mom is totally okay with that!).
Temporary Home.
If Daddy had heard that song, I’m sure we would have discussed how true it is. I’m reminded of him all the time. I want to discuss the issues arising in my professional career – crossroads that I’m not sure if I’m making the logical or the heart decision. I miss his advice! I heard another country song I’ve heard dozens of times about visiting hours in heaven… Oh wow, do I wish I could just talk to my Daddy again!
Someday we all will leave our temporary home. What will be left is our legacy – our love – our heart. Those we have touched. The memories we made. I pray I make the right decisions daily so that I leave as much of my heart, love, and truth as a legacy for those who love me.
