An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

That next year, we had a couple more pretty significant connections with our friends, Eric and Marie Hughes. One year to the day after Alexis was born, they also had a baby girl. Then they also rented a townhome in our neighborhood.  After a few years, our landlords wanted to sell the townhome and they offered it to us. Laura didn’t want to buy because, from what we had heard at the time, townhomes didn’t resell very well. I wasn’t concerned about that. I just wanted the stability of having something that we could call our own, somewhere we could raise a family and be established. I was excited about the opportunity. Once again, I wasn’t grasping for middle-class status but it felt like an arrival of sorts, a bit of permanence. In one sense, some uncertainty in this life is good to help recognize our dependence on God but it can also be unsettling and I was grateful for the provision. I also saw it as a nice-sized, manageable home. I didn’t want to get something too big, with all t...

With a child now, it was getting harder and harder for me to do classes at Regent. I was torn. I still loved school but it was hard for me to work all day, go home for dinner and then leave my family for an evening  class or research at the library. I was also torn between the time I needed for school and involvement at church. As we grew, the church needed more Care Group leaders. I didn’t have enough time to do that and school so I considered dropping school. It’s good I didn’t because when, in later years, I did try to be a Care Group leader, it didn’t turn out so well.  At the rate I was going, completing school was a mountainous hurdle. I didn’t really care about the degree as much as just wanting to learn and gain the skills to be able to make movies. At the time, Regent sponsored two summer productions each year and my goal was to eventually get a directing spot on one of those. But now I was questioning whether I should just give up the whole film dream altogether for ...

Mercy Ships obtained another ship called the Caribbean Mercy. It was a medium-sized ship, somewhere between the Anastasis and the Good Samaritan. It was coming to visit our area and they needed somewhere for the advance team to stay, which was a couple and their daughter a little older than Alexis. We decided to put them up. Their visit was memorable for two reasons. Their daughter had a very funny way of expressing hurt/disappointment/anger. Any time it happened (which was a lot) she would loudly exclaim E-I-E-I-O!, as in Old McDonald Had A Farm. The other memorable thing seemed to be part of what we called the Law of Visitors. At that time in our lives, it seemed that whenever we had visitors, something disastrous would happen to the house.  One day, someone was walking downstairs and noticed that the carpet was wet. You know that sinking feeling when you instinctively know something like this is going to cost you a significant amount of money? This time it was the hot water heat...

That summer, we decided to go on an Alexis-introducing family trip. At this point, she was a roller. If you left her on the floor for even a short period of time, you might not be able to find her right away because she would have rolled across the room. If there were no walls, you might not ever find her. My family rarely had the chance to all get together but my sister and her family had moved back to Canada from Hong Kong for a few years for her husband to go to school. We thought this would be a good opportunity. Our family had become even more international. My sister had been unable to have children so they had adopted two Chinese boys in Hong Kong. My brother, Samuel had had two girls. They came from Hawaii with my mom and we all met at my sister’s place near Vancouver. It was also particularly fun for my brother’s family from Hawaii to go see snow in the mountains nearby. It was my first time to Canada We also went to see Laura’s family in California, which we did far more ofte...

Our church participated in an annual get-together called Celebration with all the other People of Destiny churches in the northeast region of the U.S. It was held on the campus of Indiana University in Pennsylvania during their Memorial Day break. Although we had very limited money and Laura thought it would be tough for her with a young baby, we decided to go. It was not one of Laura’s favorite memories. We also decided to go with our best friends at the time which turned out to be a story in itself. They were another one of the nine couples from the Care Group who had had a baby within that eighteen-month period. They also had a daughter but some months before us. We all drove together in the same car and stayed overnight in the same hotel room on the way up. Later, we were to find out what consternation that night had brought to the husband. When we got to Celebration, the problems for Laura started right away. Babies often don’t cooperate with their parent’s schedules. At the confe...

I have a love/hate relationship with gas-powered lawn equipment. The townhome had a nice, small, manageable-sized, fence-in yard in the back with a small wooden deck and shed. When we first moved in, I borrowed the neighbor’s weed whacker to tame it. Depending on your point of view, that did or did not work out well. I had never had a yard before so I was new to this. I just weed whacked the greenery until it was all gone. The upside is that, in getting rid of it completely, I wouldn’t have to deal with it for a longer period of time. The downside is that it was literally dirt ugly. At Laura’s insistence, I bought a mower and got my own weed whacker - all second-hand of course. The old adage that you get what you pay for is generally true. That has been a long, slow education for me. Because of my financial history, I have typically gone for the cheapest which usually breaks the quickest. Yet, despite this oft-learned lesson, this old habit has died a long, slow death with me. Sometime...

Chapter Fifteen - Children February 16th dawned cold and rainy. Laura had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for later that day but had had labor pains all through the night. They moved up the appointment and the doctor sent us to the hospital. There was a long wait in the waiting room followed by a long day of pacing, gripping, soaking, drinking, praying, resting, waiting, thinking. Laura decided that she wanted to go natural without drugs so my hand became her focal point…and she had quite a grip! Alexis entered the world at 6:38 P.M. The expression on her face was unusual. It was a frown crossed with a scowl. Laura called it a frowl. While Laura held her, I made my calls around the world to let our families know. Then they came to take her for the clean up, check up, weigh in, measure, prod and prick. I stayed with her throughout. They say a baby’s weight is determined from the father. My birth weight was 9 ½ pounds. Alexis was 9lbs, 9oz. Hours later, when it was all over, I brought h...

We still got together with the Browns from time to time and they invited us over for dinner. Bill had started doing pork tenderloin on the grill which he wanted us to try. We were eating outside on their back deck when I suddenly felt something fly into my ear. I quickly put my finger into my outer ear to get it out but felt like it went all the way in. Later that day, I started feeling dizzy and the nightmare began. At random times, I would just start feeling dizzy and my head would begin to spin and if I didn’t lie down perfectly still, I would throw up. I couldn’t figure out any particular thing that would set it off. I’m not sure if anything did actually get into my inner ear that day and I wonder if at least of part of the dizziness had to do with the darkness in my head that threatened to overwhelm me. But as time went on, I started to come to terms with the situation. I still didn’t know how I was going to support a family but I was slowly learning to just trust God that it woul...