7. Under the Same Auspices
7
Under the Same Auspices
Two days after I knew of Jim’s death I took my baby Valerie and went back to Shandia, our jungle station.
Volume 6 of my journal had encompassed all of the months of marriage. It was a slim volume. Now it was time to start a new one. There was no stationery store where I could buy a notebook, so I pulled out the old loose-leaf I had used in college and turned to the last entry, written in what was then my habitual style, saturated with the English of the King James Bible:
Lord, I do once more acknowledge, with all my heart, that I am Thine. No claim have I upon this life, past, present, or future. I am all, all Thine own. Thou hast said, “Fear not; for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. . . . I will be with thee. . . . I am the LORD thy God. . . . I have loved thee. . . . I am with thee” (Isa. 43:1–5 KJV). Therefore, O dear Lord and Master, Redeemer, Lover, Friend, Beloved, do Thou work out Thine entire will in my life henceforth at any cost, in the time that is left to me on this earth. How short that may be I do not know at all, but I trust Thee. “Thy testimonies have I taken as a heritage for ever: for they are the rejoicing of my heart.” “He shall preserve thy soul” (Pss. 119:111; 121:7 KJV).
When I wrote that on my twenty-fourth birthday (I was now twenty-nine), I had no inkling of the form the answer was to take.
In Shandia I sat down at the desk Jim had built in the corner of our bedroom, looking out through the screen toward the small clearing, surrounded by deep forest. In the adjoining room Valerie was asleep on a little wooden bed with a lumpy cotton mattress. It was the last piece of furniture Jim had made. I began to write on the next blank page of the old, college loose-leaf notebook:
Life begins a new chapter—this time without Jim. . . . I have been reading over some of the first part of this book—it is almost prophetic. They were days when God was teaching me to find satisfaction in Himself, without Jim. But always there was the hope that some day He would give us to one another. He did, on October 8, 1953. Two years and three months together.
If Thy dear Home be fuller, Lord,
For that a little emptier
My house on earth, what rich reward
That guerdon were.
Amy Carmichael1
These words come to me over and over. The peace which I have received is certainly beyond all understanding.
As I went about my work in the house, on the station, with the Indians, I found peace as I looked up to the Father of Lights, from whom comes “every good endowment and every complete gift” (James 1:17 Phillips).
I say that I found peace. I do not say that I was not lonely. I was—terribly. I do not say that I did not grieve. I did—most sorely. But peace of the sort the world cannot give comes, not by the removal of suffering, but in another way—through acceptance. I was learning that the same Lord, in whom there is “never the slightest variation or shadow of inconsistency” (James 1:17 Phillips), the Lord who had given me singleness and marriage as gifts of His love, had now given me this one. Would I receive it from His hand? Would I thank Him for it?
I began to go deeper into the lesson of college days—that of finding satisfaction in Christ, apart from the man I hungered for. That was a gift I could not have received in any context other than the loneliness of being single. Now that Jim was dead, I had to repeat the lesson. It was more difficult this time, for there was no hope of my having him.
Amy Carmichael’s words, “a little emptier my house on earth,” held new meaning now, for I had what I had not had in college, a home of my own, the house Jim had designed and built, furnished with the fairly crude but functional things he had made, every corner redolent of his personality and presence. That house seemed empty now—but empty (so I trusted and prayed) that the Lord’s house might be fuller. Of course I had my baby—a gift unspeakably lovely when she first arrived, even more precious now as Jim’s legacy, the fruit of our love, a heavenly gift of comfort and joy. If I had not been widowed I would never have seen my house or my child in quite that light.
Had I asked above all to know God? He had been answering that prayer all along—in the single years, in the blessings of marriage and motherhood. It was time to find Him in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Widowhood taught me another kind of loneliness. My social life was for the most part limited to Quichua Indian friends. I had never been anything but a misfit with Indians, being so incorrigibly white and tall and foreign, but I was used to that and so were they. We all took it as a great source of amusement. I was not quite so amused to discover, on the rare occasions when I joined other missionaries, that I was now a misfit with them too. In some ways all single people are misfits in society, just as someone who has lost a leg is handicapped. God meant for everybody to have two legs apiece. We don’t notice them when they are both there, but if one is missing, it’s noticeable.
God’s design for men and women was marriage. Sin and death distorted that design. Public education is now seeking to make community rather than family the basic social unit, because “family” in the traditional sense has become an oddity. We still remember what God meant by family: a mother and a father and the children which they together have produced. This kind of family has become so unusual it has had to be given a name—the “nuclear” family, which makes up only a small percentage of what the Internal Revenue Service calls a household.
In spite of this modern shuffling of ancient norms, social gatherings are still often made up of what we (sometimes loosely) call couples. As a widow I never enjoyed being a fifth wheel. I threw things off balance simply by being there, but this was a reality I had to come to terms with. It was nobody’s fault. I would be silly to protest that the married people were supposed to do something about my feelings in the matter. Many of them tried. Everybody was kindness itself in the beginning, hovering over me, offering help of all sorts, inviting me out. Many continued to be kind when the so-called grieving process was supposed to be over, but there was nothing in the world they could do about my not being half of a couple anymore.
So who could do something about it? God could, of course, if he wanted to give me another husband, but I had no right to expect a miracle. Was there anything I could do? There is always plenty of advice around about how to capture a husband. I did not plan to try. What I did plan to do was to accept the place God was giving me. As a widow I was still a member of the same Body. Christ was its Head, and God’s great purpose had not been altered by my having lost a husband. It was a part of the plan.
Like the border collies that my friend Vergil Holland trains to herd sheep, I did not understand the pattern. The dogs have no idea what the master is up to with the flock. They only know one thing: obedience. I felt confused and insecure about my “place” now. There were practical matters which were going to take a good deal of learning, such as how to be a single parent and how to guide the young church Jim had left behind. My duties as wife, mother, teacher, and Bible translator had been well defined before, but the list had lengthened considerably.
Many years ago my father was the associate editor of a Christian magazine of which his uncle was editor. When Uncle Charlie died my father was overwhelmed with his new responsibility as editor. The words my grandfather wrote to him then have helped me greatly: “We are still under the same Auspices.”
God in His sovereign will had given me a new place. I could accept that place, with all its new responsibilities and bafflements, assured that “the Lord himself goes at your head; he will be with you; he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not be discouraged or afraid” (Deut. 31:8 NEB).
That strong promise cheered me on. The Auspices under which I worked had not changed. For each day’s demands, I found that the old rule, inscribed in an ancient parsonage in England, was my salvation: Doe the Nexte Thinge. As I tried to put that rule into shoe leather, as it were, taking each duty quietly as the will of God for that moment, I no longer felt like a misfit.