My Glimpse of Eternity (6 page)

Scene: In a local department store I spend hours trying to find matching mother-daughter outfits for Brenda and me. I explain the intensity of my search to the clerk: “It gives my daughter a sense of security to dress like her mommy.”

Scene: Late at night in our bedroom. I give the room a romantic aura by lighting some candles. Next comes a spray of perfume. John watches me from the bed with mixed emotions. “Just one time I’d like you to forget the trappings, come into my arms and say that all you really want is me,” he says.

Scene: John and I are talking one evening in our home. He has met a young husband and wife who have had such marital troubles that their infidelities are well known about town. “They’re looking for help,” says John, “and I’d like to have them for dinner and then take them to our church afterwards.” I tell John that the neighbors might think it strange if we identify with people of low reputation, that it would be best for them to go to church directly and have my father minister to their needs.

All of these scenes on the surface might seem fairly typical of family life. Yet as each one flashed before me I was gently made aware of a truth about myself.

My determination to protect my hairdo in the car, at the expense of others, was not only self-centeredness, it was the beginning of a pattern to get my own way.

My early arising to bake biscuits was not to show John how much I loved him, but to impress others with what a good wife I was.

My great search to find matching mother-daughter outfits was not for Brenda’s security as much as an effort to tie my daughter closer to me.

The candles and perfume act was not to make it easier for me to give myself more completely to my husband. It was a bit of fantasy on my part to make our physical relationship seem better than it was and to give me story material to impress others with the romantic quality of our marriage.

My turndown of the adulterous couple was the most devastating scene of all. Seeing my self-righteousness and pride made me want to hide my head under the pillow in shame. How this act must have grieved the Spirit of God. Tears flowed down my cheeks. “Forgive me, Lord. Forgive me.”

The Presence did not have to say a word, nor did He try to soften the impact. I felt awed by the exposure of my selfish, arrogant nature. When the tears of repentance came, there was comfort and reassurance in His manner. And then once again I saw on the screen His Word for me in clear block letters:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

The image faded; the Presence was gone. I raised myself from my pillow slightly to look about my hospital room. The hum of the window air-conditioner was unchanged. The bottle of liquid nourishment suspended behind my head continued to drip-drip through the tubing into my veins. The drain from my abdominal cavity continued to draw off poison into a jar underneath the bed. Everything was unchanged outside of myself. Inside I was different. I reached the call button to ask the nurse for another small piece of ice for my parched lips.

6
The Crisis Point

T
he days went by; the month of July was almost over. Six weeks had passed since the first attack of appendicitis. Yet I was still fighting for my life as doctors tried different drugs to clean out the poison in my system. By now I had gone through four rounds of surgery, and my weight was down to eighty pounds. John and my parents were near exhaustion from the daily bedside rituals.

I learned later that the final crisis was brought on by pneumonia. What little resistance I had left was sharply eroded by this new invasion of germs. Nurse Mary Barton had the shift from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. and was monitoring my vital signs carefully. Both Dad and Mother were in the room the afternoon of the emergency.

It happened around 4:30 p.m. Mary had come in to check the IV equipment because several times when the needle had been inserted, a collapsed vein had rejected the fluids. Little bubbles had formed in several places on my skin where this had happened.

Suddenly she grabbed my hand and took my pulse. There was none. Startled, she looked at the pupils of my eyes. Then she called for emergency equipment. All my parents could do was watch helplessly and pray.

There followed a tense desperate drama as both the doctor on duty and several nurses used emergency measures to get my heart, pulse and blood pressure functioning again. By the time my vital signs were back to normal Dr. Bherne and John had arrived. The strain was too much for Mother. She fainted and a nurse ministered to her. The doctor then pulled my father aside and told him that he felt it would be only a matter of hours before I slipped away. He said quite frankly that death might be the best solution. He suspected that I might have such severe brain damage, plus the extensive assault on other internal organs by gangrene, that I could never live a normal life.

Depressed and exhausted, Dad decided to drive my mother home, get some sleep and return early the next morning. John, who was now spending his nights at my parents’ home with Brenda, decided he would close his Sunoco station early and join Mother and Dad and the children for a late supper.

Here again, I learned about the events which followed from my parents, especially Dad. And it was strange how certain experiences in Dad’s early life were to affect the present crisis.

During the thirty-one-mile drive back to their home in Clay City, Mother did most of the talking. “I just can’t believe God wants to take a vital twenty-seven-year-old woman from her husband and daughter. She’s needed here, Glenn. Why, Betty has only begun to live.”

“God doesn’t take a young wife away from her husband and child in a cold-blooded manner, Fern,” my father answered. “Often we don’t understand why things happen the way they do until later, but we know that we must trust Him to do what’s best in the long run for His children.”

“But God can heal Betty?”

“Yes. He certainly can.”

“Then let’s keep praying that He will.”

In a few minutes, Mother’s depression returned. “Where will we bury Betty? Do you think John will let us bury her in our family plot—or will he want a plot of his own?”

Once again my father tried to comfort Mother; both were silent during the rest of the drive home.

As Dad walked into his study, his first thought was to read something from Scripture. Then he noticed on his desk five cards lined up in a row—five Father’s Day remembrances received many weeks before from each of his children, four sons and one daughter. Once again he read the words I had written to him:

Dear Daddy,

Happy Papa’s Day to thee! . . . from me! You have been more than a Dad. You’ve been a priest and teacher too. I didn’t realize until I became a parent myself, how much like Jesus you are. You are the son of a carpenter, as He was, learning to work with your hands with wood and shavings . . . even building churches both structurally and spiritually.

There are men who sire children, but are not fathers. There are mothers who are merely incubators. You and Mother have nurtured me, introduced me to God. You were my first church, and this child’s first university.

Your ugliest daughter,

(the only one too)

Betsy

Tears streaming down his face, Dad told me later how he sat there for a long time, praying for the faith to believe that his only daughter could get well. Then he remembered another time years before when he had no faith at all. Glenn Perkins was twenty-two, newly married, and barely making a living back in 1930 as a mechanic in a glass factory. His young wife, Fern, was desperately sick with uremic poisoning. Her fingernails had turned purple. The doctor had packed her in ice to bring down her temperature and felt an operation might give her a fifty-fifty chance to live.

A group of Fern’s church friends and the pastor came to pray. They were so noisy about it that Glenn, a nonbeliever, took off for the woods. Hours later he returned to find his wife standing in the middle of the room singing hymns and praising God. She had been healed.

After this example of a miracle-working God, Glenn Perkins began studying the Bible and attending services. One night he was reading the second chapter of Acts.

“Suddenly the black Bible began to glow in my hands,” he told us later. “It seemed to be on fire. Then the house began to shake. It was the Upper Room all over again. I shouted at Fern: ‘Pray for me, honey. Something’s wrong.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think I could stand it.”

At the next church service my father went forward and accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. When this happened, I was six months old.

Dad then began attending Bible school in his spare time, while making a living as a carpenter. In the fall of 1932 my father was impressed by a visiting preacher named Kenneth Wilkerson, who was starting a new church in nearby Attica, Indiana. Wilkerson’s congregation was meeting above a grocery store. Dad was hired as a carpenter by Pastor Wilkinson to help build a new church, using volunteers from the congregation.

It was a severe winter, volunteers were scarce and Kenneth Wilkerson and my father did most of the construction themselves. It was so cold and money was so scarce that Dad often had to round up sacks of dried corncobs from a feed mill to burn in the potbellied stove to keep them warm while they worked. When the church was finished, my father stayed on to assist Kenneth Wilkerson, teaching, leading the singing, and counseling young people.

One of Kenneth Wilkerson’s sons was a boy named David. He was a mixed-up youth, bored with the church and skeptical of the spiritual convictions of his parents. Then the Holy Spirit touched David Wilkerson and revolutionized his life. Later, when David was led by God to come to New York City to minister to disturbed teenagers, this marked the beginning of Teen Challenge and formed the basis for
The Cross and the Switchblade
, David Wilkerson’s internationally bestselling book.

Although he could barely provide for his family during those depression years of the thirties, my father could not deny the call of God on his life. As he sat at his desk praying for me that bleak summer night in 1959, feeling strong assaults on his faith, Dad remembered another occasion when the Lord used him in a dramatic way.

It happened in the middle of a snowy night in the early thirties. Dad suddenly awoke. One unsuccessful effort to go back to sleep made him realize that the Lord had awakened him and wanted him to do something. Mother was sleeping serenely beside him, and everything in the house seemed to be in order.

Then he was given a message in the form of a clear, strong inner directive. He was told to go down to the business district of west Terre Haute. Someone was there in desperate need. This was a time when Indiana was hard-hit by the depression.

At first, Dad was not sure that he had heard correctly. Would he not feel foolish dressing and going to town in the middle of the night? What if he found nothing but snowy, deserted streets?

Kneeling down by the bed, he asked for verification of what he thought he had heard. Immediately, he felt God’s presence and lines from a hymn were dropped into his mind:

Rescue the perishing,

Care for the dying . . .

By then Mother was awake. He explained what had happened, got dressed, bundled up, and started for town.

As he strode along briskly, trying to keep warm, he wondered what he would do if there were several people on the streets. How would he know the person he was being sent to help? He concluded that if God would send him on an errand like this, He could surely be trusted to handle such details.

When Dad got to the main street there was but one person in sight, a man leaning against a lamppost, his head down. With a quick prayer, asking the Lord to protect and guide him, Dad approached the stranger. “Is there any way I can help you?”

The man must have seen kindness and compassion in Dad’s face for the story came pouring out. “My wife and I have quarreled because I can’t make a living for my family. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t find a job. I’m useless, worthless. I’ve been trying to decide whether to lie down in front of the early morning fright or kill myself with this gun in my pocket. But I
am
going to end it all.”

He paused for breath, his eyes searching Dad’s face. “Sir, I’d like to ask you, what would you do if you were me?”

Promptly came the answer. “Sir, if it were me, I would turn my life over to Almighty God who loves me and who has promised to supply all my needs.”

The two men talked earnestly for a while, then knelt down on the snowy sidewalk while the desperate man handed his life over to Jesus. He then went home to his family and began a new life.

Dad told us later, “I’ve scarcely ever felt such joy as at that moment. It seemed that all of Heaven was shouting hosannas. I know something of Jesus’ great joy when in our extremity, any of us allows Him to be our Savior and gives Him the chance to save us from our problems.”

My father went into the fulltime ministry soon after that experience and became a loving, patient, sensitive pastor beloved by his flock.

When John arrived, Mother and Dad rounded up Gary and Brenda and at eight o’clock the five had a subdued meal together. The children had questions which no one wanted to answer. What was there to say? Everyone was taut with fatigue and discouragement. John’s silence and the haunted look on his face especially troubled Dad, he told me later.

Then Dad asked everyone to hold hands around the table as he prayed: “Lord Jesus, we love You and praise You for the good things of life You have given us. We thank You for Betty, for trusting us with her these years. We relinquish her to You now, knowing how much You love her too. Be with her now, Lord, as she struggles for life. Mend her body, soothe her mind, heal her spirit. Forgive us for our lack of faith and our weaknesses, Lord. We want only to serve You. Amen.”

At 3:30 a.m. Dad suddenly awoke. A look at his watch told him it was too early to get up. But when he tried to close his eyes, he felt the same inner prodding he had years before on that snowy night in the middle of the depression.

The Lord was asking him to get up and go now to the hospital. Betty needed him!