God takes care of me

I should have been asleep an hour ago, but I've been playing around with these Blogger labels and reading through old posts (you know, to figure out how to categorise them). And then I came across this post from the summer. It was a list of all the things that I felt like I needed, and yet didn't have the money to buy, making the point that I had to work on my discontentment issues.

The list looked like this:

1. I'd buy myself some really good walking shoes.
2. I'd replace that laptop of mine, which is getting cracks in the monitor.
3. I'd buy a good electric piano, with full keyboard and weighted, touch-sensitive keys.
4. I'd get a couch exactly the same as the one we're borrowing right now, and never have to return to futon-as-couch living.
5. I'd buy a whole bunch of new clothing.
6. At Christmas, I'd fly to Texas for my friend's wedding.

Well. Let's re-visit that list, shall we?

1. Very shortly after that, I went to Saskatchewan for that conference. While I was there, my Mom took me shopping for an early birthday present: walking shoes. Really nice hikers. She looked at that list and thought, "Well, at least I can take care of the first one."
2. Well, I've adapted. I don't travel with the laptop anymore, and I've mended the major cracks. We can wait until we can afford a new one. (An external hard drive is higher up on the list, because it's a small fraction of the price of a new laptop, and then I don't have to worry about what happens if the laptop dies.)
3. That summer, a family we know gave us a keyboard. I already had it at that point, but the difference was that I started playing it after that. And then I got up the courage to start playing the piano in church. And now I get to play the piano all the time, and our church is no longer lacking an accompanist. (Actually, someone offered us a nice electric organ, and we realised that we don't have space here for anything more than that keyboard we have.)
4. We still have that couch, and we're all happy with this trade situation for right now. As we're currently storing this wonderful leather couch for someone, I couldn't buy a couch even if I could afford it.
5. I have plenty of clothes now. It helps that I got those shoes, a good sweater for Christmas, and I bought a nice pair of dress pants.
6. That wedding ended up happening in Regina, and I went to it!

A few months later, and none of those are issues anymore. Wow.

Story 6: "Prayer Warrior"

When I was small, I would frequently spend hours reading a book in this little armchair that was tucked away in a corner of my Grandma's kitchen. It was the best place in the house, right between her washing machine and china cabinet. My favourite part about the kitchen was all of its comforting noises: the whirring of the clock on the wall, the hum of the dryer, and the sound of Grandma praying. When Grandma was alone (or practically alone) in her kitchen, she would talk out loud to God.

I'm always reminded of Grandma when I read the Biblical instruction to "pray without ceasing." It really seemed like Grandma was in a constant state of prayer. When we slept in the spare room in her basement, I'd wake up in the middle of night to the sound of someone walking around upstairs. If I was in anyone else's house, I would have been alarmed by the sound of someone walking around in the small hours of the morning. At Grandma's house, that sound was comforting, because I knew that Grandma was pacing around praying. She would regularly wake up in the middle of the night and think of someone who needed prayer. When that has happened to me, I've mumbled a prayer and fallen back asleep. Not my Grandma; she'd get out of bed and pace around so that she wouldn't fall asleep until after she'd really prayed.

A lot of people referred to my Grandma as a "prayer warrior." She took prayer seriously and prayed frequently. She loved dwelling in God's presence.

You know, it was always a comforting feeling to me, whenever I was sick or somehow distressed, to know that there were very good odds that my Grandma was praying for me. That made me feel so safe.

Story 1: Grandma didn't go to India

Grandma told me this story while we washed dishes together, at my parents' house during some holiday. I think it started off with us playing the "What were you doing in this year" game. She realised that I didn't know the whole story of how she ended up a teacher and then in Bible College, and then getting married. Here was her story (some of the details may be fuzzy, because this is as filtered through two storytellers who love effect more than precision):

When Grandma was a young woman, she went to Bible College. After she had attended for a while, she panicked. Everything in her life seemed to be aimed toward being some missionary in India, never getting married, and probably dying of some exotic illness. What she wanted out of life was a "normal" life: a husband, a house, some kids, and stability. And she wasn't going to find it where she was. (Don't ask me how she decided this, as the joke about "Bridal College" was going around as much then as it is now.) And so she decided for herself that she was going to go and find herself a husband and stability. The best way she knew how to do that was to become a teacher and be posted in some small Saskatchewan town.

And so my Grandma went off to Teacher's College. She had a student loan arranged, which had the provision that it would go into effect after she'd been in college for three months. After it went into effect, she was bound to stay in for the full two years. Shortly after she started, some people from the school board came and talked to her class. As the war was going on, there was a teacher shortage, and they needed volunteers who were willing to start teaching right away and to get a temporary teaching certificate.

And that's how my Grandma ended up not going to Teacher's College, but teaching right away. She was thrilled that she got to skip that whole process and get started immediately on her quest for stability.

She taught for a few years. It was both good and bad. She collected a lifetime worth of stories about teaching in a one-room school, and in that time she also made an impact on one young student who would grow up to be a significant scholar and writer, who would write over and over about his teacher. There were also bad times along with that, and she frequently felt troubled.

But, one day, as she was walking home from school, God spoke audibly to her. His message was simple: "Frances, weren't you happier when you were following me?" And her reply was simple: "Yes, Lord, I was." And so she quit her job and went back to the last point where she knew she was following God: she went back to Bible school.

At this point of the story, she told me, "That was the point where I gave up all my own plans for my life. I gave up hope of living a normal life. I gave up my plan of getting married, of having children. But none of that mattered, if it wasn't what God wanted for my life."

She finished Bible College and became a deaconess with the Pentecostal Church. One day, a friend of hers wrote to her from India; she had been teaching there, and they had an opening for another teacher. Would she like to teach in India? Everything seemed to be falling into place just as she had always sensed it would. Grandma accepted, and was instructed to go up to North Battleford, where there was a camp going on where they would raise funds for her to go.

After Grandma left for that camp, another letter arrived at her home: her friend had lost her job, and the people in India told her not to send her friend there, either. The letter missed Grandma at home, but the people at the camp in North Battleford did get the news. When Grandma got to NB, she found that no one mentioned any fundraising. She went home and found out why.

And so Grandma made a decision. Obviously God wanted her to go to India. And the only people she knew who could send her were those people at that camp in North Battleford. "And so I decided that I would go back to that camp, and I would wait there until they could help but send me to India." And so Grandma returned to North Battleford.

And that's where she met a man named Daniel. He was nice and he was balding, which Grandma took as a sign that he was actually older than her. (She was in her mid-thirties by that time.) She decided that he was the sort that she would like to marry. She only found out later that he was actually a year younger than her, but was just balding. (It wasn't until later that she also found out that the first time he saw her, she was scolding people in the kitchen and he remarked to someone, "I wouldn't want a wife like that!" He apparently changed his mind later.)

She and Daniel got married in North Battleford, bought a house and had two children, and lived there for the next half century. Interestingly, she also always had close contacts with people in India, and blessed many through her letters.

"It turned out that God had the same plan for my life that I had," Grandma told me. "But he wanted me to to give my plans to Him, so that He could give them back to me in His time."