Someone is watching you.
It sounds like a horror movie. Or an old-fashioned hellfire sermon about the
all-seeing eye of God.
Long before I started remembering things, I was part of a
story about my Mom. She was the mother
of five, living in a small broken-down house in Fort Worth, and married to a
firefighter. (Dad would never call
himself a fireman because when he was a boy, a fireman was the man who kept the
engine stoked on a steam-powered train.)
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| My sister Melany and me at McCurdy (I think...). |
My older brother and sisters have many stories about the
house on McCurdy, but I don’t remember anything about it. I was only two when we were able to move out
to the country to live. There are lots
of good stories about the hard times and the fun, the riches of love and
sacrifice. Sometimes I think I remember
some things that happened there because I’ve heard the great stories so many
times.
But this story is a favorite of mine. None of the family knew about this story
until much later when my Mom was told it by someone who’d been watching her at
the time.
About eight years after my birth, my Mom had her last
naturally born child, and we were living in Fort Worth again. The church we attended had a second floor
nursery with windows through which the moms could watch the service and a
speaker system to broadcast the service as well. Next door to the room with cribs was a room
with a few pews as well. I remember
sitting in there with my two year old little brother while Mom took care of my
baby sister in the other room.
One Sunday she was taking care of Camille when another lady
came in with her baby and recognized Mom.
Her older child was Emily, exactly my age, and Mrs. Holt had attended
the same church as we had when Emily and I were babies.
As they caught up on the intervening years, Mrs. Holt
surprised Mom by telling her that she was the reason that the Holt family was
in church today.
Mrs. Holt recalled that she’d lived near us when we’d lived
on McCurdy Street in 1951. It had been a
hard time for her with a new baby. She’d
struggled to get her family up and to church on Sundays.
One life-changing Sunday morning, she’d looked out the window and seen a strange sight. It was
a lady pushing an obviously ancient baby carriage with four older children
walking along beside. All the children
were starched and clad in their Sunday best.
Perhaps the smallest walking children of four and six were grasping the
edge of the carriage to keep up and the older boy of nine was probably leading
the way with his sister of eleven. Who
knew what they were talking about? It
was clear that this woman whom Mrs. Holt had seen at her church was taking five
children to Sunday school without even the help of a husband.
There and then, Mrs. Holt thought if Mrs. Box could get five
kids up and neatly dressed to walk to church, surely she could do the same with
one baby. As she recounted this to my
Mom that day in 1958, she confided that it was on that day in 1951 when she and her family had
turned over a new leaf. They followed
the example of Mrs. Box and started going to church in spite of how difficult
it seemed.
Years later when the baby she was minding in 1958 came to
the University of Texas, I met him and found him to be a young man searching to
serve and please God.
Mother was aghast at this story. At that time her family had been so poor. Dad was a Fort Worth fire fighter who worked
24 hours on and 24 hours off. Every
other Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, he was at work. With only one car, he had to take it to
work. If the family went to church, they had to walk. She certainly didn’t remember this
critical Sunday.
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| All five of us and my Dad. Looks like a Sunday when he was off. |
She did remember how difficult it had been to get everyone
ready and get to church. She did
remember that some Sundays she could barely put one foot ahead of the other to
push my carriage to church and keep a pleasant look on her face. But she hadn’t done it because she knew
someone was watching her. She’d done it
because she was a woman of faith who wanted her children to grow up as people
of faith.
In these later years of my life, I’ve come to realize how
often someone of whom we’re not aware may be watching the decisions we make.
And I pray that what they have seen or will see of my life is God’s love fueling my actions. I hope for this especially
when a situation would make it easy to give up or retaliate or be bitter.
Sometimes our
Father gives us the gift of a Mrs. Holt to tell us years later that when we
acted faithfully in difficult times that we truly helped someone else to walk
faithfully as well.
