Going Home

My family and I had the opportunity to take my father to his childhood hometown.  After his father had died, his mother tried to raise a bunch of children on her own, but found herself penniless and desperate.  My father and his sister ended up in a children's home, and his little brother was adopted.   As we drove through the town, he remembered the peak of poverty when rats the size of small dogs ran through his house and he had only bread and butter sandwiches to eat.  As I walked the streets of my father's hometown, I watched his reaction as he set foot for the first time in over sixty years in his hometown.  I think the culminating moment was when he laid eyes on his father's grave which he hadn't seen since he was twelve years old.  Listening to the stories of poverty and pain, I couldn't help being amazed at how good God is.  Why?  Because under the circumstances my father was raised, he should not have had much of a future.  His sister even mentioned how amazed she was about how well he turned out.  What happened to change my father's life?  It was really like a Hallmark movie.  My father's mother met a man through the personal ads in a paper and wrote to him.  He married her and became the father and stable force my dad so desperately needed.  This, however, was not the changing force.  His new step-father brought him to the hometown where my mother lived.  They were in different grades, but sometimes talked.  My dad then moved to another town with his family.  After my dad graduated from high school, he joined the Navy to see the world.  While fighting in Vietnam, my dad remembered a young woman he sometimes talked to in his old hometown.  He began writing to her, and eventually proposed- through the mail.  God was very important to my mother.  She agreed to marry him if he would start going to church and change his life.  He did.  God was the changing force in my father's life.  Some may say it was to win a girl. As I watch my father sing hymns and read his Bible, I see that what started as a way to win a girl became something real and important for him.  We all have different stories about why or how we started our relationship with God.  The importance isn't the amazing story you can tell everyone.  The importance is that you start that relationship.  God can take hopeless situations and turn them around.  He can place key people in your life that change the course of your life forever.  So this fourth of July, as we celebrate freedom, let's  remember that with God, you may be born into poverty, but God can bring true freedom.

Have a great week high-heeled warriors!