A Halfmom begins - continued - yet again....

It was a wonderful book, read over 20 years ago. Edith Schaeffer described life as a tapestry, something beautiful and intricately woven on one side, and a mess of tangled and clashing threads on the other. God sees the beautiful side, the one He's weaving as He draws us to Christ and molds us into His likeness frequently intertwining us with all the others He is acting on behalf of in the same way. Sadly, we are so blinded by worldly eyes, we rarely get a glimpse of that side but rather the tangled mess that doesn't look very beautiful or holy at all and certainly not connected or planned in any way.

While the analogy is a wonderful one that will always be with me, Edith and Francis Schaeffer gave me so very much more. In the divine providence that is God among the twisted, knotted and seemingly random threads, I was provided with a vision of what life and searching and yearning to understand could be like in L'Abri. Now, I would love to tell you that I have finally been there, to the original site in Switzerland, but I have not. What God provided instead was a wonderful older couple who lived there and then brought the teaching and method back to North Carolina and through twists and turns, eventually ended up in a small, rural Georgia town. I read, I listened, I studied and for the first time in my life, I really thought. I could ask questions and receive answers - no questions seemed to bother them, no scolding for my chronic "whys" and "wherefores", just gentle but firm answers.

I remember the day, the place, the time, when my thinking on one particular issue changed - like a microscope that suddenly comes in focus with sharply magnified clarity. The man said, "but Susan, that is not the issue at all. The issue is who do you believe God is? Do you not understand that you limit Him just because you do not understand who He is and what He can and will do for His people?” In one moment of perfect clarity, I understood how many decisions I had made in my almost 30 years based on my own wisdom, which, because it didn't represent God's, was no wisdom at all.

And all I wanted from that point was to be part of such a place, to make such a place where others could ask hard questions, a place where there were answers, a place that was safe where you were chosen and loved. I wanted it to be like their home and like L'Abri - and a dream was born. For 12 years, the dream tried to live on, through marriage and step-parenting and youth and college ministry and bonfires and more cooking than you could imagine, and late into the night talks and tears, though divorce and misery and sin and graduate school until day by day, I lost sight of the dream, gave up and let it die.

Perhaps, even as a reasonable needlewoman who has seen this principle worked out so clearly on canvas and in my life, I had forgotten, again, that God is God and I am not…