2001-12-15 - 10:53 a.m.

an awful feeling

An awful feeling--------

I went to r the other day. Don't go there much anymore. To the library there or the Youth Ranch to look at the used books, and perhaps to pay the Internet server. We lived there for 8 years, and they weren't happy ones. The kids were in their preteens and teens and 2d was born there.

Those were years of poverty and deprivation. Hard work and dreams dashed over and over. Cars that wouldn't start in the winter, furnaces that quit on coldest days, weeks of being without margarine, or milk, months of no income, living on notes from the bank against spring earnings, secret sins that separated one from You. There were good times too, but mostly I remember the despairing winters. That song, If We Can Make It Through December, was so true and that wasn't the first time I have lived through times like that.

Many of my childhood years were like that, the first few years of our marriage were much the same. Then the dry years of first moving down here, the horrible winter desperation. You have been so good to us. The desperation was always tinted with the knowledge that You were there in our lives, giving us strength to livethrough tough times as well as good. I shall have to look up the Scripture about taking good and bad from Your Hand.

Anyway as I was driving back from r, the whole ambience of those times fell over me, and I felt those sad days again. I'm glad I have a short memory and am easily distracted. That didn't last long. You were always there, it was bearable and even tolerable. I learned great lessons I could never have learned in pleasant paths. You could see down the years to the death of 1s, the crooked paths of 1d, and the heartbreak of 2s. You were building walls and bulwarks of faith for us. I could not live without You. And I can live forever because of You.

EE's devotional

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