Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 19, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Married, with children
Margaret and I met around a gas tank on Dad’s farm in Lincoln, Illinois. She was from Kentucky, and she didn’t realize what she was getting into when she accepted Dad’s offer to walk beans. Now she was being paid, with some cash, some gas, and … a chance for us to meet.
When one finds a worthy wife, her value is far beyond pearls. Her husband, entrusting his heart to her, has an unfailing prize.
Margaret loved to dance, especially country dancing, and Dad did too, especially square dancing. Logan County’s ag extension officer called the dances, and on one summer evening the two of them met in a square and immediately hit it off. Dad laughed at Margaret’s jokes, and she loved his simple style, confident in his own quiet, humble way.
Mom square danced too, but she sat out as much as she danced. Margaret hardly ever sat out, and of course, she was decades younger than Mom and Dad. Over the weeks and months they told Margaret of their son in the Moonies, their worries for him, and their love for him. Margaret had no desire to meet him, but there he was, coming out to the gas tank in his work clothes, ready to lay forms for a concrete platform outside the new cattle barn. Where on earth had he come from?
She brings him good, and not evil, all the days of her life.
We shook hands. Margaret made a joke about the “fun” she’d had cutting weeds out of the beans. On her first morning Dad left her alone in the field with two high school boys who had been drunk the night before. She was the only one not vomiting.
Margaret got the hang of it pretty quickly, being a highly intelligent college graduate, in Lincoln to attend Lincoln Christian Seminary. And every Wednesday night, at the Lincoln Rec Center, she square danced, sometimes with friends from the seminary, mostly with Dad and a few of his friends.
I left the Unification Seminary just before my first semester, fall 1978, hitchhiked to Rhode Island to meet Mom and Dad at my cousin’s wedding. Just as I had twenty years before, I rode home in the back seat, feeling my past swirl up and around my soul. So many adventures, including two marriages and a current love in England, swept up within my memories. Now I needed to rest, recover, review, and start again. I wanted that new start more than I knew.
Blessed are you who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways!
Margaret didn’t need a new start, and she certainly didn’t need me. Our birthdays, both in 1949, were six weeks apart. She had not yet married. She had found a church on her own when she was in third grade of Madisonville Grade School, and she might never have missed a Sunday service since.
After a campfire and hot dog roast at Mom and Dad’s for their Sunday School class, to which Margaret and I were special invitees, and at which we took pains to sit on straw bales on opposite sides of the fire, we were invited to join a Hebrews Bible study with Mom and Dad at another couple’s home. They were established teachers in Lincoln, much closer to our age. Margaret also taught in Lincoln as a substitute. My job, working with dad on the farm, was supplemented by my unwillingness to accept anything in the Bible, especially in Hebrews, that implied or stated that Jesus was anything more than a man. I learned that much from Rev. Moon.
She reaches out her hands to the poor and extends her arms to the needy.
But Margaret invited me to share my precious cassette tapes of Moon’s Divine Principle – his understanding of the revelation he’d had about Jesus and himself. It did not make sense to her, even if it did to me. Rev. Moon offered himself up as the Third Adam, as the Second Coming of Christ, and made a persuasive historical and theological case for this idea. He seemed to be living out his own prophecy in his life with family and church, then in 1978.
However, there is this thing about God with Skin On. That was Margaret for me. I did not return to the Moonies, despite frequent phone calls from my very close friends there, and within a year I said farewell to my love in England and married Margaret. Before that there was a moment in the winter of 1979, after Margaret and I had our first kiss, when Dad said to me in the living room of their new farmhouse, “Well, Dave, you chose a wife and then you chose another wife, and now perhaps you don’t know if you should choose Margaret, or if she would even accept you. But I just want to say, “You should marry Margaret.”
Charm is deceptive and beauty fleeting; the woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
When I proposed, Margaret asked her pastor for help in saying no. I’d been divorced twice and still had a way of expecting everything to go my way. Pastor Al disappointed her, and on the third day Margaret said YES.
So much to that story, and to all that’s happened since, especially now as we take turns helping each other manage our bodies and our lives as we get older. I am so grateful to God for showing me a clearer path, to Margaret for helping me see it, and to Margaret for saying YES.
First and forever to God, and eventually to me.
Thank you, Jesus.
Give her a reward for her labors, and let her works praise her at the city gates.
(Proverbs 31, Psalm 128, 1 Thessalonians 5, John 15, Matthew 25)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
