A certain evangelist in town organized the restaurants into giving the ministers in the area a breakfast once a month at a different restaurant. Of course, they had to be big enough to seat about a hundred people, but he pulled the plan together. At one of these breakfasts I sat next to a man I had never met. He had his notebook open to a page where he had written the initials S.I.D.A. This is French for A.I.D.S. I leaned over and told him I knew French, so if he ever needed someone to speak to a French person, I’d be happy to help him.
He whispered back that S.I.D.A. is Spanish, and he didn’t know either French or Spanish. We laughed, but he took down my phone number. This was my first encounter with the possibility to speak French to someone, and I wondered if this was why I had taken the intensive French classes just before moving back to the States. I also learned from this minister that he was the head of the A.I.D.S. program in town, and that he was not only gay, himself, but he also had A.I.D.S. My only encounter with someone H.I.V. positive had been a young woman in France who came forward for prayer during one of my prayer lines. She sent word back to me some months later saying she was completely healed, but the doctors didn’t believe her about the prayer line and were insisting her original diagnosis had been false.
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A friend of mine looked at Noelle one day and said, “You would be perfect for my son. I’m going to have him write to you.” He did. He returned home from the Orient with his Marine unit, came to see Noelle on Valentine’s Day, and soon after they planned a wedding.
Between the wedding and a heavy counseling schedule for Dan, I gave up all efforts to minister or to raise money. It seemed prudent since all the doors I opened slammed in my face. I wrote, instead, working away at J.J.’s computer, as we gave him a new one for graduation, an upgrade he needed for law school. Noelle chose a cowboy theme for her wedding and reception, as that’s what the groom fancied himself to be. He wore a black cowboy hat and black boots; she wore white cowboy boots under her stunning white gown. The last good thing that could be said about their marriage happened to be the fun wedding and reception. It ran downhill from there. The groom turned out to be a woman-hater too, not a homosexual, but a decided enemy to Noelle, despising everything about her. The Lord told us to move back to California where we knew people. So, in May, in time for J.J.’s graduation from Bible School, we wrapped up our business in France and returned to California. We wanted to set up base in the gold country, having always wanted to live there, and after a few frustrating days of finding nothing to rent, Dan pouted, “See? I told you we shouldn’t come back. If the Lord wanted us here, we’d have a place to live.”
The next day, I took a drive, just Jesus and me. He told me where to go, arriving at a community I didn’t know existed, a little town called Cool. There I stopped by a Realtor’s office, and since I always try to check a person’s spiritual pulse, I discovered her to be a born-again woman. She said it would be a joy to find something for me. She called the next morning saying the Lord had wakened her in the night telling her the exact house to put us in. The builder had been unable to sell; she called him first thing that morning and convinced him his best option would be to rent. So, we moved into a tree house, imaginatively hanging down a cliff, suspended decks on both levels, surrounded by forest, peeking through the trees at the snow-capped mountains of the Sierras. Noelle came bouncing in and plopped down on the sofa. Jordan, like a tin soldier, marched through the living room and sat rigidly beside her. She took his hand. He had the air about him of “Oh, sure, right, yeah, that’s what we should do, hold hands.”
I said, “Well, Jordan, this is rather surprising news. What do you want to do about this?” Giving an excellent impression of a puppy dog he looked like he should have his tongue hanging out dripping saliva. “We should get married, don’t you think?” Noelle chimed in, “We want to get married. I don’t want to go to France.” Wanting my husband to help shoulder these problems, I told him about the measles shot and its ramifications. He reacted by saying, “Let it drop. These things don’t really hurt anybody.”
I thought, “It hurt you enough to drive you into homosexuality. What will it do to my daughter?” But I didn’t say anything for fear of an eruption. His perversion had become forbidden territory to investigate. As time passed, my daughter’s rage and my confusion ruled our relationship. What could I do to clean up this mess? I went to my prayer group for help, asking them to pray for my daughter without divulging the exact nature of the problem; my friends were also learning about spiritual things like I was. One by one they came to me and said we needed to pray for her in her room. During our second year in Bible School, we enrolled our daughter in a private Christian school. The popular, teased-hair crowd at the public school had shunned her long parted-in-the-middle California hairstyle, and that left the disenfranchised who grabbed her. Noelle’s loneliness worried me. I wanted to get her out of that venue before she encountered the drug scene, or entered the sex rat race, so mid-year I tried to move her to the private school. Noelle didn’t want to suffer another initiation and appealed to her father for help.
“Maggie, Noelle doesn’t want to change schools now. Wait till fall. “Look. We should have put her in the Christian school from the beginning, but we didn’t. I believe when you see you’ve made a mistake, you should alter it immediately.” We were late in applying for school, and no housing could be found. Our eight suitcases and nine carry-ons were stuffed in the Citroen we bought on our arrival, and our humor ebbed every time we wedged ourselves into it. Someplace to unpack became imperative. But it wasn’t to be. We ended up moving eight times in three months as we lived in “gites” (summer rentals created out of carriage houses or threshing barns, or other unused buildings) and moved according to availability. One of them dated back to Joan of Arc, or so the mounted plaques said.
The city of Tours contained a fifteenth century town square filled with tables, smoking Frenchmen and foreigners enrolled in language school for which the town bristles with pride, boasting to have the purest accent in France. We spent many pleasant hours studying and drinking coffee while sitting at the obligatory white tables scattered in the square. In those three months, our nervous little family calmed down, united, and learned some French. We returned to Montauban ready to work. We returned from that summer brimming with purpose and goals. Nancy and I found a map of France small enough for our hands to cover perfectly over the nation. We prayed every day with our hands on France. It seemed a light hovered over the city of Tours, and we figured Dan and I would one day settle there. In the meantime, we focused on France and all it would take for us to move there. We sold our house, we broadcast our intentions to astonished family and friends, and prepared to move after finishing Bible school.
At the end of our first year attending Logos, the school required that we choose a major for the second year. Our friends had been telling Dan he should be a pastor, so I decided to start calling him “Pastor,” as in “Pastor, dinner’s ready.” Or “Pastor, don’t forget to walk the dog.” At the end of July, following family camp, the kids and I left for Oklahoma to find housing and to buy Noelle a horse, a manipulating bribe to get her to move. We traveled in a crew-cab truck pulling a fifth-wheel trailer that we bought to facilitate our journey and for projected weekends exploring cowboy territory. I felt like a cowgirl bounding down the highway, bouncing about in my stallion cab. Upon arriving, the three of us bumped down a dusty dirt trail to meet a tall horse-trading Oklahoman. He hailed us, leaning on his split rail fence, a sprig of wheat stuck in his teeth. As the dust settled from our entrance, we climbed out of the cab, and he drawled, “Howdy!” Our first Oklahoma hello.
He touched his hat in greeting, but when we, according to California custom, offered our hands to shake, he obliged with a leathered paw. He said, “So this little lady wants to get herself a horse.” The day of the funeral, Dan did not close the restaurants, saying Bob would roll in his coffin if he did. I think the nieces and nephews were offended, but I had no say in the restaurants. However, only a skeleton crew stayed on the job. Most employees came to the funeral.
The relatives met at Bob’s house before proceeding to the cemetery. The sister-in-law and his children adamantly refused to have a church service in order to honor Bob’s non-belief. Crowded with family there was no room for me in the limousine, but my daughter, gifted with mercy, sat next to Bob’s wife, holding her hand, caressing her arm. Dan sat in the front with the driver, and I took the family car. |
Marty
Delmon Writer
Evangelist Teacher Writing has been in my blood, so to speak, but when I surren-dered my life to Jesus Christ and He told me to write, all my trepidations rolled away and I began in earnest! After all, if God Almighty says it was His idea that I be a writer, who am I to stand in His way? My hope is that you not only like what I write, but that your life is moved by it, and that your party to Jesus and with Jesus turns your life into days of Heaven on Earth.
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