The Older Woman

                 “Let’s pray that God gives us some good fish”, my son said this with a smile, knowing what I was going to say before I even said it. “Don’t forget to hold onto your rod during the prayer”. Giggles from several children as they remember Grandpa’s story about his rod being jerked right out of his hands during fervent prayers for fishing blessings.             “Do you remember?”, my father asks it every single time we pass the old field. “Yes, Dad, God set that field on fire to answer our prayers for gas money. We prayed, with zero dollars in our pockets, and God sent us someone to help who would not say no to compensating the saving of his field.             “Remember when Dennis did not even know it was formula? We told God we had no food for Ruth and no money to buy any, and went to church expecting God to se...

  A Mechanical Device That Can and Will Fail                   Summer sun was filtering directly into our eyes as my sons and I arrived for training. As a person with migraines, I was less than thrilled. I would have preferred to skip it. I do, however, believe all children should learn to handle firearms safely, they are everywhere and knowledge creates wise children who take appropriate actions with dangerous tools. As such when the Boy Scouts offered the firearm merit badges, the boys signed up. I am very glad that I didn’t leave because the lesson was worth the discomfort of the sunlight. Before a single book was opened and way before anyone touched a weapon, the teacher stood up and told the kids the motto he wanted them to live by. “A safety is a mechanical device that can and will fail”. He maintained that people treat the “safety’ on a weapon as an excuse to treat a device that kills as “saf...

  At twelve years old I stood five foot seven- and one-half inches and weighed 80 pounds. It was just as grotesque and boney as it sounds. I was the local missionary’s daughter who usually wore dresses every day and had not yet figured out how to brush curly hair. It was mostly a halo of frizz around my head. Though I was not very old I had been helping with VBS and Bible release time classes for years. Each summer youth teams from New Jersey came to my mountains to help run VBS’s for several weeks. We were sent out in teams of one adult and 4 or 5 teens to run as many as three different VBS’s, in differing times and locations in a week.             Imagine a twelve-year-old, who looked as cool as I did, fitting into a group of sixteen- to eighteen-year-old kids from the city. It is as unimaginable as it sounds. It was a long week for me, ministering to the children that I loved while being a total outsider on my own team. As...