My Glimpse of Eternity (9 page)

I had been looking forward to her visit, believing my resentment was gone, determined to have a good relationship with my mother-in-law. When the bell rang late the next morning, I opened the door and embraced her warmly. She was cautiously friendly; her brown eyes studied me for a moment, then swept over the room. She missed nothing; new toys for Brenda, a scatter rug from my parents’ home, my new pair of blue shoes.

The moment she entered the living room all her attention was focused on John, who was sitting in a chair in his bathrobe working on the plans for our new house. Her eyes probed every detail of his appearance. Then she launched forth, “John, I’m really worried about you. You look so pale. What’s wrong? Why are you home in the middle of the day?”

As always John ignored her solicitations about his health. “I want you to see the plans for our new house,” he said.

Mother looked them over, then pursed her lips. “I don’t see how you can afford it.” Then staring at me, “You two will forever be living beyond your means.”

The visit was a disaster. Through it I learned that the healing of my emotions had obviously not gone as deep as I thought.

9
The Setback

M
other Upchurch’s visit was a sharp reverse for me. I thought I was free of my resentment toward her. Now it was back. What bothered me most was that I sensed she was probably right about the new house and John’s health, just as she had been right about my spending too much money on things, about holding me responsible for our being in debt so much of the time, and about my being evasive toward her.

But the situation was different now. I cared less about things, more about being a good wife and mother. It was John who was taking the initiative about the new house. I had tried to get John to a doctor but he refused to go. Thus I felt that her accusations toward me were unfair.

While brooding about the situation one morning, it occurred to me that there were several Scriptures that John’s mother needed to read. That was the answer. The Word would convict her of her critical nature. Perhaps I should put them in a letter. I reached for a sheet of stationery, then paused. No, the direct approach was better with my mother-in-law. She always said she liked to “call a spade a spade.”

I marked the passages and placed the Bible by the telephone. A casual call making reference to the Scriptures would be the way to handle it. The first verse was in Proverbs. With my right hand ready to dial the number, my left turned the pages of the Bible to the chapter.

My eyes fell on the verse. Wait a minute! That wasn’t it. Where did that verse come from? I had read through the Bible from beginning to end twice and never recalled that particular verse:

Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips
(Ps. 141:3, KJV).

It was obvious, I had to laugh. “Lord, You’re doing it to me again.” I had intended to point the Word against my mother-in-law; instead the Lord turned it around so that it was pointing at me. What a sense of humor He has!

Then I realized that a telephone call wasn’t the answer at all; what I really had to do was ask my mother-in-law to forgive me for years of unfriendly words, thoughts and actions against her.

We had been saving for ten years to build our dream house, the plans having been drawn up before my sickness. While John was now eager to go ahead, something inside me was resisting. I should have listened to this Inner Voice but did not and we commissioned the builder to go ahead.

Our new eight-room ranch-style house was built primarily with gray Bedford stone—long, heavy, expensive slabs from an Indiana quarry. The design centered around a lavender wrought-iron grape-leaf pattern; we worked it into the trim, shutters, window boxes, porch furniture and on all columns and porch posts. The wallpaper included lavender in the wisteria and lilacs in bloom. Our wall-to-wall carpet was a deep purple; the furniture mostly white. The foundation planting included lilac bushes and wisteria trees.

John regained his vitality following his brief illness, but I noticed his work days were shorter now. He closely supervised the building of our dream house, but did less of the actual work than was in his original plan. When finished, it was beautiful. Yet as we moved in I had no inner joy or elation, and this gave me an uneasy feeling.

One evening the following summer Brenda, now eight, and I were in our new home watching television. The TV picture kept blurring because of thunderstorms in the area. It had been a sultry humid summer day. At sunset the sky was a peculiar yellow-green. I remember wishing that John would close up his business and come home early.

Suddenly at 9:20 p.m. the television picture and sound went haywire as the storm broke overhead. When I turned the set off, a warning system went off inside me and I heard a voice:
You and Brenda get out of this room.

I started to reason with this warning. “I’ve never been afraid of storms or the dark or death.”

But the voice was insistent. The issue was obedience or not. I grabbed Brenda’s hand and we sped from the family room into the bedroom. A moment later there was a sound like a hundred freight cars rumbling and shaking overhead. Looking up, I saw the entire roof separate and blow away from the house. The suction pasted us fast against the wall, bruising my hip. Then I flung Brenda down to the floor and threw my body across her.

The family room we had just left was gone, disintegrated. If I had not obeyed, we both would have been killed.

Brenda and I put our heads under the cherry canopy bed as eight-foot pieces of Bedford stone hurtled about us. The redwood beams broke off and piled up at crazy angles. Then came walls of water in torrents, drenching us, flooding the room so that we had to twist our necks at crazy angles to breathe. A bolt of lightning struck through the debris of our house burning a six-foot circle on the carpet near us.

Brenda was praying out loud. “Oh, Jesus, keep Mommie and me safe. Don’t let Smokey (our dog) get hurt. Or Pumpkin Face (our cat). And please, Jesus, don’t let my goldfish blow away.”

Minutes later, when the wind and the rain stopped, the house was a total ruin. In the garage our new Cadillac car was crushed. The tornado, not even registered at the nearby airport, had destroyed or damaged thirty-six houses in our area.

But Smokey soon wiggled out unhurt from some debris. Pumpkin Face was safe under the crushed car. And to my utter astonishment the glass aquarium was still intact, filled with flecks of debris, to be sure, but all the fish were alive.

When this freakish, capricious tornado struck, I was clad in a sheer white shorty nightgown. As I was helped from the wreckage, a neighbor ran to get me her husband’s terrycloth robe, which became my chief garment for the next two days. All Brenda had on was a pair of white panties, size four. In twenty seconds, the tornado had demolished possessions that had taken us ten years to accumulate.

When John arrived with the sightseers, repair crews, newspaper reporters and television cameras, we viewed the scene with awe. Plastered against one intact wall was a box of Jello sucked from the kitchen cabinet. The Bible was unruffled on the top of the coffee table, one of the few pieces of furniture that remained. The next morning a friend called to say he found our family portraits two and a half miles away in a field. After retrieving them, we returned to our cluttered yard where a reporter from
The Grit
pointed with a smile to an object at the side of our shattered home. There lying in plain view, cover and title up, was a copy of
Gone with the Wind
.

A few individuals pilfered some of our personal belongings, but most people offered help. Our church had a linen shower for us; neighbors loaned us clothing; the insurance company replaced nearly everything, including Brenda’s toys; and we were able to rebuild our home within six months.

For days I went around praising Jesus.
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord
(Job 1:21). He really is a Savior, I thought to myself. What surprised me more than anything else was my calm at the destruction of prized personal possessions. Things did not matter to me so much since my experience in the hospital. The following verse from a hymn truly described my feelings:

A tent or a cottage, why should I care?

They’re building a palace for me over there;

Though exiled from home, yet, still I may sing;

All glory to God, I’m a child of the King!
[2]

Some months after we had rebuilt our home, John began negotiations to buy a group of gasoline stations throughout the country. I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when he admitted for the first time that the long hours of physical work were too much for him. Operating a chain of stations, he felt, would be less demanding.

When in 1963 John suggested that the time had come to move to Florida, I quickly agreed but for different reasons than I had back in 1959. Florida just might be the place for more relaxed living. So we moved to Clearwater Beach on the west coast of Florida, not too many miles from the Gulf Vista Retreat Center, the scene of my “tummy ache.”

John did slow down in Florida, but not through choice. His energy level suddenly dropped again. This time he did go to the hospital for tests. The results were sobering. X-rays of John’s heart showed that the aorta valve was shrinking and the heart enlarging. Doctors suggested a valve replacement operation to correct the situation. They warned him it was something he should not postpone. Reluctantly he gave up his idea of setting up a chain of gas stations.

In March of 1963 John and I both went to Gainesville, Florida, so that he could have additional tests at the J. Hillis Miller Heart Center there. We decided to make this a special “get away time” for just the two of us.

We checked into Arrowhead Lodge, which overlooked the campus of the University of Florida Medical School. Our room was on the second floor. I recall thinking that sixteen dollars a day was pretty steep, but that we were not to concern ourselves with economy. As serious as the occasion was, we were to be “joyful unto the Lord.”

To this day I remember the room with its blue motif, the seascapes on the wall, the rustic brown balcony outside with its round table and old-fashioned parlor-type ice-cream chairs. We spent much of our time on this balcony, watching the student activity on the campus, talking.

The first day I could tell that my husband had a heavy load of fear on his heart, but he tried not to show it. We began discussing the medical details involved with the valve replacement operation. Heart surgery was always risky, but the doctors had assured John that the percentages were in his favor.

While we were drinking cokes together, John thought back to age nine when he had rheumatic fever. He barely remembered it. It wasn’t until five years later that a doctor told him he might have a heart problem some day, but not to worry. When John heard his mother praying one night for his heart to be healed, John began to worry. Then a close friend was killed in a car wreck.

John’s eyes had a far-off look. “One day he was there full of life, then my happy joyous friend was gone. I saw death then as a cheater—a robber of life. He was after me, too. Here was my very real enemy. How I hated him. Then you were near death and I was almost paralyzed with fear and anger at my old enemy. When you came back from death to tell me how beautiful it was, you threw me for a real loss.”

“It’s no loss, John. It’s a gain, a plus. You don’t have to hate death any more. He can be a friend. I know. Trust me, John.”

“I accept your experience, Bets. I believe in heaven. And I would like to feel that death can be a friend. But I love it here so much. I love you and Brenda and my work and the outdoor life. I just can’t believe that the next world will be as good. Tell me again what you saw.”

Once more I told him the story of my death, remembering the details as if it had happened yesterday . . . the feelings of joy and lightness . . . the colors of grass, sky, jeweled walls . . . the glorious music . . . then the intoxication and purification of that intense yellow light. “It was a blinding light because I don’t think I was supposed to see the Person of Jesus,” I mused. “But how I felt His warmth.”

“You said you wanted to go inside the city,” John continued. “Why? What did you think you’d find there?”