There are people who stay put. They like their hearth, the change of season from their living room window, and the perfume of the roses wafting through the screen door. Then there are those with itchy feet. My mother was of the former temperament. Sixty-four years in the same house suited her. In our nearly fifty-five years of marriage, my husband and I have moved at least twenty-two times not counting all the weird domiciles we’ve inhabited as short-term missionaries.
The water is wide
I cannot get o’er
And neither have I wings to fly
Give me a boat that will carry two
And both shall row,
My love and I.
I sang this folk song while in high school performing for senior centers. It was the 60’s and life seemed to be about travel, ships, planes, and cars on Route 66. I still hanker for a change of vistas.
My love of adventure was inherited from the frontier peoples in my family. Ships to a New World in the 1600’s to covered wagons in the 1850’s, my family was on the move. Today there are adventures around the corner where the Wilderness Trail collides with traffic cones on a nearby road. It makes my feet do a tap dance to see where that path, cut by an ancestor, leads. In case you need to know, it travels through Harrodsburg to the falls of the Ohio in Louisville. And we have satiated our curiosity by traveling along it all the way to the knobs (ah, another cultural oddity) to where the Ohio tumbles over the fossil beds of Jeffersonville Limestone and where Lewis and Clark met before their adventure west. My husband and I revel in history, geology, and the variety of cultural groups we discover.
What do we search for on life’s journey? It is doing God’s will. Our quest has taken us from Thailand, Africa, Europe to China with many U.S. stops. The adventure has had us teaching marriage conferences, practicing medicine, creating costumes for theater productions, teaching quilting and being a flight surgeon during a war. Each part of the road of life had lessons our hearts needed to be better listeners to God’s whispers.
The world behind me,
the cross before me . . .
No turning back.
Though none go with me,
still I will follow.
I have Decided to Follow Jesus by S. Sundar Singh
Blame it on the Jesus Movement in California in the early 70’s, but when I came to Christ, it was all or nothing. In 1982 we were asked to go to Kenya and work at a mission hospital for two weeks. The physician who asked us was Dr. Richard Bransford. It was in Dick’s Bible study that my drunk husband came to the Lord. Mentoring him in the faith over many years, Dick challenged us both to walk steadfastly and consistently with the Lord. His earthly journey is finished but he, like all the faithful worshipping at the throne, are witnessing our hesitant steps.
“This seems a hard saying to many: ‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24). But do not fear, for the cross leads to heaven. In the cross is health, in the cross is life, in the cross is protections from enemies, in the cross is heavenly delight, in the cross is strength of mind…” — The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas A Kempis, compiled and edited by James N. Watkins
I would rather be a wanderer following the footsteps of the Master than live in a palace where everything is available at the touch of a button except the joy of obedience.
Have bags will travel should be Jeanette-Marie Mirich’s life’s theme. She moved twenty-two times before settling in her first home. An Oregonian by birth and who graduated with a B.S. degree in education from Portland State University, Jeanette has swum in the Ligurian Sea, collected shells and sea glass along the Indian Ocean, Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean Oceans, Straits of Malacca, Gulf of Mexico and the Andaman Sea. Her peripatetic lifestyle is courtesy of the U.S. Air Force and her husband’s medical training.
Passionate about needs in the third world after living in Thailand during her husband’s deployment, she has accompanied her husband on dozens of medical mission trips. Mother of three, Grammy to thirteen exceptional grandchildren, she travels from her Kentucky home to an Oregon cabin, scribbling poems and short stories as well as writing novels.
I shouldn’t have made the promise when Harry was dying but…
You know how it is. You want to please when the person you’ve always loved is hooked up to plastic tubing looking peaky.
Delilah Morgan, a woman of honor, is unable to ignore her promise to her husband, Harry, which leads to trouble, with a capital T. The beautiful, unassuming Delilah plans to mourn in private after Harry passed, but he had other ideas—specifically, leaving his wife in good hands and protected from the elite of their small Kentucky town. However, he neglects to include his wife in his plans.
Harry has selected local judge, Lyle Henderson, the heart-throb of most of the women in town, to court his widow. The judge acquiesces to Harry’s wishes until Henderson’s life spins into a maelstrom after the discovery of bodies in his long absent wife’s car. The police and FBI begin to suspect him of murdering his wife and her apparent lover.
Determined to clear the judge of murder, Delilah resolves to hunt down the true story. Their adventure nearly costs them their lives and leads them on what Delilah suspects is a wild-goose chase toward love. In reality, their wanderings reveal what sacrificial love can encompass.
