May 2, 2005

            Philip and I had quite the Gene Stratton Porter experience today.  We’ve been troubled about the recent tenants that have taken up residence in our prize black walnut, namely, a swarm of honeybees.  We actually saw them swarm a few weeks ago, and were pretty frightened by the sheer numbers—literally thousands of bees filling the air with a grayish living cloud, gradually settling on the trunk and marching upwards in an amazing semblance of rank and file.  We knew that we had to get them out of the tree so that we could treat the problem that had lured them there in the first place, but as the days went by and we saw what peaceable neighbors they were, we were loathe to do anything to harm them. 

            I found a beekeeper in the Market Bulletin this morning, and called him to see if he would like to come and take our hive away.  I could tell by his voice what sort of man he was, a mild, gentlemanly old black man who knew everything worth knowing about life in general and bees in particular.  In slow, gentle tones he explained that he would do what he could to get the queen to come out, for without her the hive would not budge.  I didn’t have to ask him when he could come—“Just let me finish my coffee here, and I’ll come on out.”  

            I called Philip immediately.  “You’ve got to come home right now,” I told him.  “I couldn’t bear for you to miss this!”

            As it turned out, both he and Kevan, who had come to finish our barn job, were here.  Mr. Scott was as mellow and placid as I expected him to be, and spoke in an almost continual low sweet murmur, like the humming of the bees themselves.  He messed about with some paraphernalia in his car, drew out a white wooden hive, a bag of pine straw and an old-fashioned smoker.  I was waiting to see his beekeepers garb, but in vain.  He had filled his smoker with lit straw and mounted the ladder he had propped against the tree before I realized that he had no intention of covering himself in any way.  When I thought how scared we were of the bees when they were swarming I had to marvel.

            “Aren’t you afraid of being stung?” Kevan had to ask.

            “Oh, no,” he grinned down at us.  “These are friendly bees.  They’re such nice little Italian ones—Law, how I wish they were still swarming, or in a branch or something!  Then I could show you how easy it is—I’d just pick up the queen,” he demonstrated with a gently cupped hand, “slip her in the hive, and tap, tap, tap, they’d all file in.”

            To say that we were astonished by his methods and demeanor is putting it mildly.  He assured us that they wouldn’t sting—that the smoke would soothe them and that they only stung when they sensed fear by the vibrations of a rapidly beating heart.  I smiled to myself as I watched Mr. Scott pumping smoke right into the hole in the tree without ceasing his lecture on their habits, and thought that there wasn’t any danger of a rapidly beating heart in that quarter. 

            We began by watching from a safe distance on the ground, but an overpowering sense of curiosity combined with a longing not to miss a honeyed syllable that dropped from this learned, simple man, drew us ever nearer until we all found ourselves standing at the base of the trunk gazing up with shaded eyes.  He said that they wouldn’t sting, and for some reason, with bees swinging dizzily about our heads and tangling in our hair and landing on our clothing, we believed him. 

            “Oh, I wish she would come out!” he said, peering in through the smoke.  “I just love ‘em so much!  But she’s a young queen, young and naïve.  I may not even see her among the others.”

           He told us about the intricacies of hive life, held us fascinated with tales of the hierarchies of the bee guards and police and nurses and drones.  He enlightened us on the mysterious secrets of royal jelly, which is fed by the nurse bees to a nymph that will develop into a queen.  He plucked a larger bee from the trunk and held him out by his wings for us to see.  “This one’s a king.  You can tell because he’s larger and more filled out."

            As the swarm exiting the tree became denser he pressed his face close to the trunk to see if the queen was among them.  Strange, barely perceptible humming sounds broke from his slightly parted lips, and the bees began to assemble near where his hand lay propped on the rough bark, gradually clambering over his fingers and under his palm.  He motioned with his other hand for us to notice their peculiar behavior.  All of the little stingers were pointed up and a thousand tiny wings whirred and fanned in unison.

            “They’re telling me where the queen is—or they’re sending me a false signal,” he chuckled softly, rotating the bee covered hand with easy unconcern.  Catching my fascinated gaze, he leaned toward me, confiding, “You see, I’m a bee charmer.  Yes,” he continued, as if to himself, “a bee charmer.” 

            This was too much for the boys.  Soon Kevan’s hand was on the trunk as well, where a laborer stumbled over his fingers from time to time.

            Philip scampered up the second ladder, which Mr. Scott had placed nearby to investigate marching action farther up the tree.  Nursing the one sting he sustained, Philip craned to peer into the hole where Mr. Scott was listening with a stethoscope.

            “The more I hear about bees, the more I wonder how anyone could know much about them and not believe in God,” he said.         
            

            Mr. Scott concurred with a leisurely nod and a wide smile.

            “I mean, I guess you believe in God, being so close to the bees and all.”

            “Ohhh, yes."

            Our queen was elusive.  Even the thirty-foot ladd
er would not reach the congregation where Mr. Scott believed she was hiding, and with dwindling numbers still buzzing about the hole, he sealed it and patched it with dark brown caulk.  I was rather sorry.  I so wanted them all to go away together in his trim white box.  But Mr. Scott reassured me about the scattered hive.

            “They’ll always follow her to a new home.  And if any bees get separated from their own hive, they’ll go and find another.  But they have to knock at the door, and the guards come out, and they say, ‘Please can I join your hive?’  And if they promise to work hard, the guards will let them in.  But they’ll watch ‘em and make sure.  This is a young hive, and they’re good workers.”  I remembered the scores of bees with their little legs loaded down with ‘baskets’ of pollen we had seen.  “They’ll be alright.”

           After enjoying the yard a bit, breathing deep of the ‘oxygenated air’, laughing over Caspian’s attempts to impress, and getting acquainted with the biddies—“Ohhh, I’d just sit out here and watch ‘em all day long!”—he packed his equipment back in the car with an almost nostalgic look around.  He passed Philip his card and we both gasped.

            “Dr.—,”

            “D.R.,” he corrected.  “That just stands for drive—like drivin’ a car.”

            With that enigmatic comment he was gone. 

            And although a search engine turned up absolutely nothing on “Dr. Milton Scott”, I know exactly who we are going to call when we’re ready to set up our own hives.  How could we not now, after spending a charmed afternoon getting to know these miraculous little witnesses of God’s order and wisdom?  And who better to impart the needed lore than a real, honest-to-goodness bee charmer?

Each age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

C. S. Lewis

The greatest tragedy in the life of a book, in my humble opinion, is that of being purchased by a decorator—at a fabulous sum, no doubt—to stack artfully on a table, or to fill a barrister case that will never be opened. How is a book’s value determined but in the worth of its content? It is a sad commentary on the literacy of our day to see lovely old volumes piled up in displays in shopping malls and to know that no one will ever entertain the slightest notion of reading them. To be sure, there are reverent collectors who will pay a great deal of money for a first edition of Little Women, but will it profit them any more than the young girl who received a vision of womanliness and goodness upon reading it for the first time? Indeed, the bounty carried in her heart will so far outweigh the collector’s investment that they are not worthy to be compared.

I have handled a good many books in my time. Working for years in an old and rare bookstore, I was often entrusted with the restoration of a battered volume. I always saw it as such a privilege. The dingy cover was wiped clean with a thin coat of lighter fluid, and the illustrated plate at the front was secured with a careful bead of glue. Perhaps the spine needed a little reinforcing, or an old library card holder needed to be removed. At any rate, it was a joy to me to give these old books back their dignity.

Some had fallen into dereliction by abuse or neglect, cast out and orphaned, their only hoped pinned on the chance of someone looking past their ragged cover and crumbling pages in search of a timeless message, and that was always painful to see. But others had been loved into shabbiness, read into their worn condition by someone who had treasured the worth of their tale. Those books never seemed like orphans to me; they had a mission yet to fulfill, a charge from the one who had written them—and perhaps the one who had loved them—to work their way into another generation in another world and to tell of things that are true and honorable to those who yet have the ears to hear and the eyes to see.

There is a staunch, enduring quality to them, these messengers of a gentler, simpler era, and whether one regards their message or not, one must respect their tenacity of life. I have a weakness for all things old, but especially old books because of their great potential. They are a tangible link to the heart of another time, a time when godliness was venerated and womanliness and manliness gloried in. They are the sign posts directing us to the ways our hearts are longing for in this tumultuous time. What riches might lay within to charm, to inspire, to challenge! They have been the very fuel of my dreams from the time that I first picked up Anne of Green Gables, and was thus ushered into the presence of realities that have since run through my life like a lovely, irresistible song: beauty and purity and the divine glory of everyday life.

Indeed, such verities are all the more precious in our modern-day world for their scarcity, but they are still there, and to find them we must often only follow the pointing finger of a bygone author who had the gift and the foresight to entrust them to their pen. After all, what did Louisa May Alcott do but portray the beauty of virtue? Gene Stratton-Porter proclaimed the power of moral courage, and Lucy Maud Montgomery glorified the commonplace. There is no comparison between such classics and the drivel that is passed off as literature on the girls of today. There are those who would rather have a bright new paperback, no smudged fingerprints or underlined passages to mar the pages, no one else’s name in sweeping script inside the front cover. But to me, it is the marks and pencilings, the very name itself that give a book a life of its own. The faded gilt, the sleek, heavy pages, the sweet, slightly dusty smell—all of these things are wine to the soul for the lover of old books. Yes, give me the old ones, the classics, the timeless and the noble—but give me old copies of them.

“For wisdom is more precious than rubies,
and nothing you desire can compare with her.”
Proverbs 8:11

When I was fourteen, God turned my world upside down-or, more accurately, set it right side up. My parents had become Christians a couple of years before, and the devotion and zeal with which they approached their new-found faith had had a marked influence on me. I had started to take my own walk a little more seriously, spending time almost daily reading my Bible and praying at times for things I wanted very badly, paltry trifles though they were. But, for the most part, I went about my merry way, which really wasn’t all that merry, truth be told, making little, if any, application of the things I had read in the Bible, and making my own personal happiness the very business of my life.

Chief among the desires that I cherished was a passionate yearning for popularity, and the high road to that glittering god of adolescence was, I believed, a spot on the cheerleading squad. From the first day of middle school it was painfully obvious that I didn’t fit in. I still wore the trim little plaid woolen jumpers, crisp oxford shirts, and penny loafers that my mother had dressed me in since elementary school (three long months ago!) and wore my hair long and pulled away from my face with satin ribbons. All of the other girls wore make-up and big earrings and tight-fitting clothes; but it wasn’t until I turned around in class one day and caught one of my best friends making fun of my ribbon-bound braid that a reckless determination arose within me to be just like the rest of them, whatever the cost. That was the beginning of a dark period of opalescent lip-stick and teased hair, and cheap, ill-fitting garments that stuck gracelessly to my thin little-girl frame.

My appearance was not the only sacrifice that I made to this shining idol. There were others, more subtle, perhaps, but more dangerous, laced as they were with the sly cunning of self-deceit. With every ‘little’ choice I made, every coarse joke I laughed at, every true desire that I shamed into conformity, I grew more and more distant from myself-and from my God. I was eleven years old then, and daily in contact with girls who whispered of smoking and ‘making-out’ with boys; but as that year passed, I learned to listen to their chatter without the slightest sensation of the wide-eyed shock that had characterized my early days in junior high. No amount of conformity, however, could change the fact that this shy, slightly awkward little girl-who had felt the ache of beauty in her soul and had heard the call of God-would never fit in, unless she put her own nature to death.

Nevertheless, I was resolved to be a cheerleader or perish in the attempt. If hard work could win a spot on the squad, then it should be mine. I could hardly wait until the end of seventh grade when I could try out. In the end, I was chosen for the team-with much different results than I had anticipated. In being selected, I had inadvertently bumped one of the ‘in’ girls off of the squad, and thus invoked the wrath of her whole set. It was a dreadful, painful, self-conscious year of petty slights, ill-concealed ridicule, and open scorn. Of all the cruelties of nature, few can surpass those of teenage girls. I had some pluck, though, if I do say so myself, even if it was misplaced. With all that I endured that tedious year, I was ready, even eager, to try out for the high school squad. It would be different in high school; I would get another chance to find my niche in the popular crowd. After all, there was no other choice. What joy could life possibly hold if I continued to be relegated to that wistful host outside of the charmed circle?

During this period, unbeknownst to me, my parents were weighing a very serious question. At nothing less than God’s initiative, they had begun to investigate a new and rather radical method of education called home-schooling. By January of that year, I was aware that it was a very real possibility for Elizabeth and Zach, my younger sister and brother, but it never entered my mind that they could be considering it for me. Apparently, it hadn’t entered Daddy’s mind, either, for when Mama pointed out to him an algebra book in a catalogue that she thought might do for me, he was taken aback.

“Now, wait a minute-I think that this will be great for Elizabeth and Zach, but not for Lanier. She’s going into high school. How can we expect to teach her all of the subjects that she’ll need?”

Mama stared at him for a moment, too dismayed to speak.

“Honey, you don’t understand!” she said desperately. “It won’t work. It’s got to be all of us, or it won’t work! Otherwise it will pull our family apart rather than build it up. Lanier has got to be a part of this, too.” I’m sure that Mama’s own conviction that they were losing me lent weight to her words. “I honestly don’t know how we’re going to tackle all of those high school subjects, but I am convinced that if God is calling our family to this, then He will show us the way.”

She wisely said no more on the matter, at least to Daddy. To be sure, she said a great deal to God about it over the ensuing months, and God, in turn, began to speak to Daddy. By the end of the school year, he was as good as convinced, and the decision had all but been made, when a trivial incident became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. One afternoon, he turned up at my school, intending to surprise me by attending the pep rally scheduled for that day. No father that ever lived could be more proud of his children or more supportive of their efforts and interests than mine. He rewarded every hard-earned achievement with such a liberality of praise and affirmation that the actual attainment of the goal paled in the light of his smiling approbation. All three of us knew the joy of that smile; under its influence our best efforts ever flourished.

His displeasure can be imagined, then, when he entered the gym to find the other cheerleaders mid-way through their little display, and me, watching them alone from a bench on the sidelines. I felt so awkward and stupid there by myself, in front of the whole school, as it were-but at the sight of my Daddy’s figure in the doorway, I smiled in spite of myself. Mortification fled before the indomitable comfort of his presence. I was not alone.

In a moment he was beside me with his arm around me whispering, “What’s going on?” I whispered back that the girls had decided among themselves that I wasn’t ‘ready’ to perform the routine, and had put the alternate in my place moments before the pep rally began. My own stinging sense of injustice melted into his as he sat there for a moment with his mouth set in a firm line.

“Let’s go,” he finally said, rising abruptly and taking my hand.

I remember driving away with him, a happy sense of freedom rising within me. I felt wildly, as I had many times before, that I never wanted to come back to that hated place. I did hate it, with all of my scramblings and schemings for its elusive bounty of popularity-or, perhaps because of them. I never knew any real happiness there; and when I was honest with myself I knew that the one place on earth that gave me the kind of security and joy that I was searching for was my own home among the people who loved me for exactly who I was.

But I was going there now-with Daddy. It was Friday afternoon, and a whole weekend stretched between now and the grey Monday when my parole would be up and I would have to return to prison. Daddy probably bought me a milkshake on the way home. I don’t remember exactly, but it was just the kind of thing that he would do. And we came in the door laughing, leaving the cruel world and its insults and hostility outside.

Not long after this incident, a family counsel was called, and the three of us made our way to the den with vague forebodings. I had known something was in the air. Like the distant rumble of an approaching thunderstorm, snatches of overheard conversations and catalogues left open on the dining room table had heralded the coming disaster. But even I was stunned when the storm finally broke-for it broke with such force and finality that all of my hastily erected arguments and alternatives were swept away before I knew what was happening.

We all sat open-mouthed as my parents related the plan for the coming year. There was such a curious mixture of excitement and firmness in their voices as they told us how God had led them to embark on this strange adventure called home-schooling, and I knew that an unwilling protest or an insolent remark would be worse than fruitless. So I tried another tack.

“What if we don’t want to?” I wheedled. “I mean, what if we would rather go to Christian school, or something?” I could still be a cheerleader there, if I had to.

Daddy’s smile vanished. He lowered his eyebrows and looked at me with that steady, searching gaze that always made me squirm, and which, I imagined, could have wrung a confession from the most hardened of criminals before his bench.

“Ah, sweetie,” he said, without taking his eyes from my face. It should be expressed that in our house, ‘ sweetie ‘ was not a term of endearment, and when prefaced with a calculated ‘ ah ‘, one knew, unmistakably, that one had erred. “I’m afraid that you don’t understand. We’re not giving you a choice. This is what God has led us to do with our family, and your Mama and I are committed to seeing it through.”

I stared at the floor and bit my lip in frustration and anger. Home-schooling ? Were they crazy ? I had never even heard of it before they had started whispering about it last fall. Maybe it wasn’t even legal! Hope glimmered faintly for a moment and then faded. Daddy would surely have looked into that. Oh, this was terrible! Did they even care that I was going to have absolutely no friends now?

I stole a look at my younger sister, Elizabeth. She was sitting in stony silence, with her little mouth set very much like Daddy’s could be. She was three years younger than me, and my opposite in many ways-a passionate student, and the sun around which her fellow fourth-graders revolved. I knew that she was stricken to the core, but she would save her tears for the solitude of her own bedroom.

Zach, on the other hand, was the very essence of enthusiasm. Despite the difference in our ages, I suspect that we shared the same distaste for traditional schooling, and it was an unspoken, even unobserved bond between us. While I had been reprimanded by teachers for daydreaming in math class and drawing crude sketches of princesses in my social studies notebook, Zach’s trouble had manifested itself in a general rambuctiousness-perfectly normal in a boy his age-which had occasioned several notes home and conferences with annoyed teachers. What Zach really needed was exactly what he was about to get: a sound education with enough freedom and sunshine interspersed with spelling tests and multiplication tables to satisfy the inherent longings of a healthy, robust boyhood.

“Won’t it be wonderful?” Mama was saying. “On cold mornings we can do our lessons in here by the fire-”

“With hot chocolate?” demanded Zach, as if it were one of the terms of a contract.

“Yes, of course!” Mama laughed. If Elizabeth and my sullen countenances troubled her, she didn’t let on. She seized upon Zach’s interest and talked as if we were all wildly excited. “Think of the books we can read together-and the field trips!”

Zach accepted it all with the enviable abandon of an eight year old, and went his way with a light heart that summer. Elizabeth and I were not convinced, however, and I have every reason to suspect that she cried herself to sleep at night for weeks. I tried to be hopeful: they would get tired of it, or it would be too hard, and then they would come to their senses. I even pictured myself trying out clandestinely for the junior varsity cheerleading squad the following spring-I could see the surprised but proud looks on their faces as I told them that I had made the team, and could hear their vanquished concession to my all-important happiness. How could they resist? For you see, I was still quagmired in the state of believing that my happiness was the main objective in everything-I, who didn’t even yet know what true happiness was!

It is with some shame that I confess that I left my friends in school with a very dubious idea of what I was doing in the next school year. If they happened to cherish the notion that I was going to a private school ( very private!), I didn’t see any necessity in disillusioning them. The only one that I discussed it with was my best friend.

“It’s only for a year at the most,” I told her. “I’ll be back in tenth grade.”

“I think that your parents are crazy,” she replied.

“I do too,” I muttered.

The courage of my mother and father cannot be underestimated. Relatively new Christians, they had embraced obedience with an uncommon devotion; and if this new life led them into uncharted territory, it was with a steady eye of faith that they scanned the horizon. To be sure, there wasn’t much to be seen, even from that hilltop of satisfied obedience, for the homeschooling movement was still in its early stages, and there were few provisions and little company in the land that stretched before them. I couldn’t help but notice that virtually the whole of our town thought them insane. This had caused a genuine uproar. Heaven only knows how many curious comments Mama smiled graciously at over her grocery cart, or how many well-meaning cautions from baffled colleagues Daddy laughingly brushed aside.

Even their closest friends were skeptical. Their pastor tried to talk them out of it. My loving and godly grandmother had dire forebodings: “You won’t make it a year,” she told them grimly. But to me, in retrospect, the most admirable facet of their courage lay in not being afraid of their own children. Our resistance did not deter them in the least. In not giving us a choice in the matter they did the very best thing possible. My parents did not allow us to presume that we knew what was best for ourselves, and in so doing, taught us all a great lesson about the wise and loving dealings of God with His children.

So that was how it all began; and thus, with my arms folded and a sullen look in my eye, I embarked on a golden pilgrimage.

If the first step was taken grudgingly, even against my will, then all the more credit goes to God for nudging me and tugging me into the path where my joy was to be found. My first impulse had been to ‘lay low’, and by feigned compliance, store up my parents’ favor for the time that I should really need it the following spring, when I would launch a full-blown campaign to be put back in school. And so I was docile enough on that bright September morning as we all sat around in the den, hands folded over crisp new workbooks, faces turned expectantly towards Mama. How overwhelmed she must have been at that moment! And how bravely she lifted her head and smiled back at us, the cheerfulness in her voice masking any fear she may have felt.

“Let’s just begin with a prayer and thank God for this wonderful opportunity that He has given us,” she said with shining eyes.

I am sure that, even as committed as they were, Mama and Daddy scarcely imagined the vastness of what they had undertaken. What valor and faith would be required of them! And yet, if they ever were weary and burdened-and I know that they had to have been at times-we were never, never made to feel that it was directed towards us. I never heard the slightest word of complaint from my mother over the sacrifices she had made to educate us at home. But neither do the noblest soldiers show off their battle scars or seek sympathy for the privations of camp life. There were skirmishes and struggles, to be sure, but my parents cried out to God in the midst of them, and found that they were not worthy to be compared with the blessings and benefits of the life that they had been called to. Mama and Daddy had disentangled themselves from anything that would hinder obedience, and Elizabeth, Zach and I were the ones who were blessed for it.

Hardly a week had passed before I had to admit to myself that it really wasn’t as bad as I had feared. There was, in fact, a new little happiness welling up within me that was both mystifying and delightful. Mystifying, because it had finally begun to come to me when I had stopped grappling for it; delightful because it was sweeter than I had ever suspected. The change that came about in my attitude-truly, within a matter of days-was such that it can barely be traced; so natural and easy was it that I didn’t even realize that it was happening. Suffice it to say that at the beginning of that first week I was inwardly defiant, and that by its end I was more satisfied than I had ever been in my life. Gone were the strivings for approval, the endless agitation of insecurity, the wearisome business of conformity.

It was in those early days of sweet content that one of the greatest blessings of this bright new journey came to me, namely, my friendship with my sister. Looking back over all the joy that those years held for me, it is striking to see how inherent a part of it all she was. I have been extraordinarily blessed in friendship, and agree most heartily with Helen Keller that “my friends have made the story of my life”; but within that sacred little circle of influence there is no friend who has loved me more truly or understood me more perfectly than Elizabeth . One of the first times that I ever experienced that sympathetic illumination that ever characterizes great poetry was upon reading Christina Rosetti’s fantastically beautiful ‘Goblin Market’-when I came to the final stanza, my heart leapt up in recognition:

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands

Indeed, there is no friend like a sister, for the dividing of sorrows and the sharing of the burden of joy; for the unblinking cognization of all one’s weaknesses and the unstinting appreciation of one’s leanings towards strength; for reproof, praise, consolation each in their proper hour. Each soul needs another soul to understand it completely, to comprehend perhaps better than they do themselves the meaning and matter of their personality. Someone that you don’t have to explain things to-this is a blessing indeed. And who better than she of one’s own blood, who carries within herself the traits of a shared lineage?

My friendship with my sister was, and is, in its purest sense, the simple complexity of counterpoint: a combination of two related, independent melodies into a single harmonic texture in which each retains its linear character. ‘Two independent melodies’; yet incomplete without the other. Complimentary strains flowing side by side in the perfection of opposites united, brief dissensions resolved into but sweeter harmony. That ‘harmonic texture’ has been for me one of the loveliest songs I have ever known.

We reveled in freedom and friendship that autumn. On the crisp, sparkling days of September and October, we often packed up our lunches and our books and headed down the street to Mrs. Smith’s at the bottom of the hill, whose wooded sanctuary of a yard we were most welcome to picnic and play in. We would spread our blanket by the happy little brown creek, among ferns and jewelweed and mistflowers, and give ourselves over to the pleasures that the day so graciously offered us. Already the idea of school cafeterias and long grey hallways was so remote it would have seemed utterly foreign had we even remembered it. But that was more than another life for me, it was another person altogether. This girl here, sitting in the gold September sunshine, laughing as merrily as the stream that chuckled by, reading poetry out loud merely because it was beautiful and she was beginning to understand it, this was who I was meant to be.

We gradually learned to laugh at the ubiquitous ‘socialization’ question. How abundantly the Lord replaced my previous strivings with true friendships that flowered effortlessly within a moments’ recognition of a kindred soul! His goodness in this area has been almost heart-breakingly sweet. He gave me a lively band of like-minded friends with whom I made some of the happiest memories of my youth. And He sent alongside me a smaller, but infinitely dear company of heart-friends whose very lives spurred me on to a deeper union with Christ. These are the young women with whom I shared many of the burdens and perplexities and yearnings of my young heart-and they are the ones who gathered around me on my wedding day, a gossamer host in pale pink organza, and prayed for me with the loving insight that only such a closeness can give. I feel certain that much of the fulfillment of my present life is due to the example of godliness and contentment that they so faithfully set before me.

We never looked back, and the years only grew sweeter as they slipped by. How could I recount it all: the fireside readings of Shakespeare; the plays staged in the dining room for an audience in the adjoining living room; the indispensable daily tea times wherein matters of consequence to our young hearts were treated with all due solemnity? Friends came to life from the pages of the worthiest literature; godly aspirations were tended with the utmost care; every opportunity was granted me to pursue the desires of my heart-desires undeniably placed there by God Himself. It would take a book to tell of my happiness in all of these things. From this vantage point, twelve years after my actual high school graduation, my heart is more overwhelmed than ever at the goodness and faithfulness of God. I thank Him, and I thank my parents for risking all on His sufficiency to give me a chance to live so abundantly . Because of Jesus, my girlhood was a splendor of birdsong and star shine; of tears turned rainbow-hued by the light of His countenance; of dreams materialized beyond description. I can only pray the same for the children that God might give me someday.

On my twenty-first birthday I did a very sentimental thing.  I wrote a letter to myself on my best stationery, sealed it solemnly, and dated the envelope July 27, 2005.  Ten years later.  With a fluttery feeling about my heart I laid it reverently on the bottom of my new hope chest and piled on top all the lovely birthday gifts my friends and family had given me with which to feather my future nest.  And there it lay amid sandalwood-scented treasures, a gentle taunt from time to time when the search of some item would send me rifling through to the farthest reaches.  That is, until a few of weeks ago. 

I remembered it with a start the morning of my birthday.  It hardly seemed possible that ten years could have passed since that sweet starry night when I had knelt on my bedroom floor with a heart full of happy memories and maiden hopes and composed a missive to the self I was yet to be. 

I made quite an event of unearthing the letter, perusing each item in the chest with a tender eye: hand-painted slippers that had danced at my best friend’s wedding; baby clothes and unfinished bonnets; retired gowns laid lovingly by; my bridal veil; cards of lace bought on our honeymoon.  At the bottom was the letter, just as I had left it, and I lifted it out with a trembling sigh.  A preserved moment of my girlhood set by to shed its stolen fragrance upon a ‘wise old lady’ of 31!  It may as well have been from one of my ancestors, so great was my awe of it.  I almost hated to open it and break the charm. 

I don’t know exactly what I expected, a bit more longing, perhaps, more speculation about my future.  But with tears raining down my cheeks, I read of contentment and joy, of my love of my home and my dear family.  And the references to my future husband rang with a matter-of-fact confidence in the one man in all the world I knew that God would bring into my life one day.    

There were some rather pert questions, and, to my surprise, a goodly portion of advice.  I hope that you know that nothing and no one can give you what Jesus can.  I pray that you have allowed Him to do as He pleases with your life.  And now I wept with joy at God’s mercy, for if the intervening years have shown me anything, it is that my relationship with Christ is the most precious treasure there is.

 
I have always had very high ideals about love and romance.  As a little girl they were more of the ‘knight and lady fair’ variety; I am not ashamed to admit that by God’s grace such dear notions carried themselves over into my teenage years.  When I came to know Christ, and began to understand how much He loved me, it seemed the natural thing to ask Him to guide me and have His will in all areas of my life—including matters of the heart.  But as much as I wanted romance, as eager as I was to give my heart to the right man, I didn’t like what I saw in most of the typical dating relationships around me.  There was no commitment, no assurance that there was a serious end being considered.  I wanted to be wooed, courted, sought after.  I wanted my heart to be protected, and I wanted to go to my husband having saved every sweet thing for him, without a lot of scars from previous relationships.  And so, with a deep desire to live pleasing to God and with a loving thought of the man that was somewhere waiting for me, I made a choice.  I decided not to date until I was at an age and in a situation where marriage was a real possibility.

I asked my father to be involved, counting on his experience and wisdom to screen potential suitors, a task which he was only too willing to undertake.  I wanted his counsel, his blessing on any young man that tried to win my heart.  And in the years that lay between maidenhood and marriage, I enjoyed the safety of a watchful love that made a fence of itself about the green pasture of my youth. 

As I approached my twenties, however, I began to wonder if Daddy would ever have a chance to render his services.  To be sure, the mere fact of his looming presence, genial as it was, had served to scare off young men I wouldn’t have considered anyway, but at nineteen I couldn’t fathom what the big holdup was.  I was ready.  I knew how to plan meals and cook and sew.  On the top shelf of my closet was a tidy stash of china and linens.  My journal fairly ran over with longing.  I could not see any reason under heaven why God would delay.

Another four years would pass before the man I already loved came into my life.  But they were good years, rich and full and overflowing with tokens of God’s love.  I really believe that beneath that sweet burden of desire I learned to live as I never had before.  Life was an adventure and waiting on God a calling that was ripe with opportunity in and of itself.  I can honestly say that if my journal had not caught every tear and sigh I would find it hard to recall the anguish and doubt of unfulfilled hopes; when I look back on those days it is with a sense of tender awe at the companionship of God. 

            “So Lanier, do you have a boyfriend?” a well-meaning lady at church asked one morning.

            “No, she’s ‘waitin’ for her dearie’,” quoth my mother in breezy incomprehensibility.

            I gave the woman an uneasy smile and explained, “It’s a song.”

            “Ohhh.”  She never asked me again.

It was a song, one I very nearly wore out in those days.  But it voiced my desires with such happy confidence:

                        Waitin’ for my dearie, an’ happy am I
                        to hold my heart till he comes strollin’ by.
                        When he comes, my dearie, one look an’ I’ll know
                        That he’s the dearie I’ve been wantin’ so.
                        Though I’ll live forty lives till the day he arrives,
                        I’ll not ever, ever grieve.
                        For my hopes will be hi
gh that he’ll come strollin’ by;
                        For ye see, I believe
                        That there’s a laddie weary, and wanderin’ free,
                        Who’s waitin’ for his dearie:
                        Me!   

I will never forget the night that I met Philip.  A mutual friend had invited him to a gathering of my crowd, and as I walked in the room all I saw was a tall, dark-haired young man in a blue oxford shirt.  Our friendship began that night—and my battle.  For falling in love was harder than the waiting had ever been; and so beautiful, even in its perplexity, that I’d not change the slightest detail.  Over the next nine months, within the context of my very lively and high spirited crowd, I got to know this wonderful man that would eventually be my husband—but it was under a torment of uncertainty.  For Philip was such a gentleman, so careful in his manner towards all of the girls, that I had not the slightest reason to suspect that he regarded me with any special favor.  

            “He’s like Mr. Knightley,” my mother said over tea one day, always eager to draw a literary allusion.  “‘The last man in the world who would intentionally give any woman the idea of his feeling for her more than he really did.’” 

            I nodded miserably, for I had already made the connection in my own mind to Jane Austen’s impeccable hero. And I was as heart sore as Emma Wodehouse ever had the romantic imagination to be.

I went to England with my best friend and thought about Philip every day.  I relished the Inklings’ haunt in Oxford because of the talks we’d had about C. S. Lewis.  I saved up vignettes that I hoped he would laugh over.  And on top of the Wallace Monument one wind-swept Scottish afternoon I told Rachel that I thought I was in love.  It was as much a confession to myself as a confidence in my friend, and it made things both easier and harder.  I had drawn a line in the sand.  But I was more vulnerable than ever to what lay on the other side.

A brief previous experience had erased any fanciful notions I had that relationships were easy.  Along the way, it seems, I had added the experiences of friends, the books I had read, the speakers I had heard to the original simplicity of the ideals God had given me.  I had subtly shifted my confidence from the unfailing, if bewildering, providence of God to my own ability to keep myself pure, thinking naively that if I did things a certain way and followed a few rules that everything would unfold easily and naturally and without pain.  I knew now that the main thing, the only thing in all of life, was whether I was willing to pursue God through heartache and joy alike, or if I was going to take my life in my own hands and try to shield myself from any hurt that God knew would make me better.  For we can take the reins just as surely by following rules as we can by doing whatever we please.  A passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves issued a daring challenge:

            “We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.”

The pain of this love was a merciful tool of God that spring.  Amid picnics and bonfires and snatches of conversation at the coffee shop my heart was sifted to its very depths.  Leaning hard on God in utter weakness my hopes were laid before Him one by one.   But by the first of the summer I could bear it no longer. 

           Take him away, Lord, I prayed, just take him out my life if he’s not the one You have for me. If the answer is ‘no’, just go ahead and tell me. 

But the answer was ‘yes’, a ‘yes’ that resounded through my little world with a shout of triumph and joy; that fills my days yet with a song whose beauties I am only beginning to discover.  Six years ago the dearest man on earth made me his wife, and God made us one.  The desert of waiting became a fruitful field; the wilderness blossomed as the rose.  And I can only say in praise of the Lord that ‘they will never be ashamed that wait for Him’.          

Before I opened the birthday letter I had smiled to myself at the astonishment with which the 21 year-old Lanier would view my present abundance and blessing.  But now I’m not so sure that she would be all that surprised.  This, this beautiful love that I share with Philip and the home we have been blessed to build together is precisely what she saw in her girlhood visions.  This is what God Himself had given her the heart to hope for.