Make this commitment daily
To keep God within your heart;
Because commitments made only once...
Sometimes have a faulty start!
©Edna L. Ingram.

WHAT WERE WE THNKING!!!

WHAT WERE WE THINKING!!!!

When Wendell was 5 1/2 and Cara Lynn 3 1/2, Bobby and I decided that I needed to go to college and get a degree. So I decided my major (English and Literature, my loves since high school) and went and enrolled for the summer term.

We didn’t have to have a baby sitter that summer because Bobby kept them all summer himself. The sitter situation was going to have to be for Cara Lynn…when the fall semester started. He took them to the barber shop every morning and it worked out fine. That summer was good for them. They have memories that are very special to them, that they would not have had if I had not started back to school.

Bobby took them to the store next to the shop and had the butcher (his uncle owned the store) cut them each a piece of bacon and he put strings on it for them, and they went out behind the store and barber shop and ‘crawdad fished’. Bobby said they had crawdads running all over that barber shop! :) They still talked about that summer after they were grown.

But that is as far as God let it go. That fall after Wendell started to school, and before I enrolled for the fall semester… he woke up one morning and his stomach was very swollen. We took him to the doctor and they ran tests on him and a couple of days later we heard the bad news. He had nephritis. We were devastated! This is a disease of the kidneys and the body loses its protein into the urine as waste. So there was a period of time that Wendell didn’t grow. (He made up for it later. LOL )

The doctor told us that it was in the acute stage and if it went into the chronic stage that he would not live but about 6 more years. He had to stay in bed for 3 months…and that was the end of my college career, which was a bad idea to begin with.

Wendell took a ton of penicillin (for about a year and a half) and recovered completely. During the three months of being bed-fast, Cara Lynn would stand his toy soldiers up on the end of his bed and he would shoot them off with his little gun. She would go stack them back up for him to shoot down again.

When a family really wants to put God first and take the best care of their family…and are ignorant in how to go about it….God knows how to step in and take charge of the situation….and I am so glad He does. Wendell’s illness turned out to be a great blessing over time, like so many other unpleasant things that have happened!

We knew that a mother needs to be home with her children, and that children definitely need a full time mother, but after seeing results of some families, we know it even better now.

Bobby told me that some mothers would not have let that illness of their child stop them from pursuing what they wanted to do. How can that be?

What they don’t realize and what I didn’t realize is, that in doing such, we are trading pure gold for flimsy tinsel. That is not a good trade off. That is why I feel so strongly about writing about the home and family. I’d rather our children grow up to be faithful to God and putting Him first in their lives, with fond memories of their mother being about them…than to have all the degrees and money this world can offer. I don’t know what we were thinking at that time. I am glad they had that summer with their dad though.

LATE NOTE: When I told Bobby that I was writing about this and we were discussing it, he said we were not going to have a baby-sitter for our little girl. He was going to keep her with him instead of doing that. Well…I love and appreciate him for that but even that wasn’t what God wanted for our family, evidently. I am thankful!