One Page at a Time
When we headed out Monday morning for the GHC homeschool convention in Fort Worth, our first stop — after our brief stop for car reliability assurance — was to the home of our friends Garth and Terry who are helping us with this convention.
I told you yesterday that the Suburban was packed to the gills. Making their travel things fit inside with all the convention boxes and paraphernalia was like putting a puzzle together.
Our first stop on our actual journey was the assisted living facility where Mother “vacations” when we need to be someplace else. We were a bit crowded for that first leg of our journey, a mere two hours out of the total of fourteen. Here are driver Garth and co-pilot Ray holding our antique lap desk and Mother’s clothes bag with a week’s worth of clothes. His head made a handy rack for his hat.
Mother, Terry, and I are packed in the back with our boxes behind us. Terry and I took turns sitting beside the poles that hold up our signs. We had to do the limbo every time we stopped. Too bad you can’t see our feet — who needs leg room?
When we got to Ashland City, ladies on the front porch welcomed Mother back. Here she is at her home away from home which also serves as the model apartment for the facility when it is not being rented out to my mother and others who come for brief visits.
We pulled into our hotel for the first evening just after sunset in a little town in Arkansas.
Garth and Terry’s older daughter lives there with her husband. Ray and I first met Holly when she was one year old. Ray and I watched her grow up, we listened as her parents made the decision to homeschool her and her sister, and Monday night we had the privilege of visiting her and her husband in their pretty newlywed apartment. Holly’s husband works full-time at the local Christian university where she is a full-time student. We listened with joy as he told us about his behind-the-scenes tech work on lighting and sound and such for campus events and she told us about their ministry to fellow students whom they feed and serve every Sunday, providing them with an off-campus oasis, both on Sundays and when they need special attention.
Today Garth and Terry are reaping the rewards of a job done, of decisions turned into action, and of time on their knees. It’s been a sweet story to watch.
Like every family story, Garth and Terry’s has had twists and turns with both easy times and hard ones. Remember that no matter what the twists and turns are in your own family story, God cares about every page and He is the one Who knows what the rest of the story will be. Our job is to stay faithful one page at a time.
I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,
always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all,
in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now.
For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you
will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
Philippians 1:3-5