This Month at Home continued...

Sweet Memories

In the feature article in Volume 1, No. 1 of Gentle Spirit, our very first issue, written in spring of 1989, I wrote:

"In considering the best way to share with others what we have learned in the past few years about simple, inexpensive living, I've struggled a bit with how much about our family's personal affairs I ought to reveal. My husband and I came to the Lord after some of our children were born, and we have had to reap the consequences of sinful choices we both made before we began to walk with our Savior, whose mercies and grace to us have been beyond what we could ask or hope.

It has been a temptation to me not to reveal some of our difficulties...because in some ways, I guess I would like others to believe that we've always made good, spiritual decisions and have always done things the "right way." ...How I wish that were true! But it is not; we are only sinners saved by grace. As I prayed about what would be edifying to share, I realized that to paint a rosier picture than has been true would be more than dishonest, it would rob us of an opportunity to testify to the true extent of God's graciousness to us as we have sought to obey Him..."

Thus Gentle Spirit began. I intended to share in some unique ways, including in sensitive areas in which others might have been afraid or hesitant to be publically open. The truth was, I was afraid to be open, too — very much so, in fact, knowing the judgment and scorn I might face, the risks I was taking — but I believed it would serve a purpose in encouraging so many of you who were struggling all alone, sometimes feeling condemned and judged, who had little family or church support for your desire or decision to be a keeper at home raising your children.

In that very first issue, May 1989, Volume I, Number 1, I sheepishly described our accumulation of over $10,000 worth of credit card debt, our 17½ percent mortgage and $1,200 monthly house payments, and how we were eventually forced to seek the assistance of Consumer Credit Counseling to pay off our debts so that I could at last leave my career and come home. You read descriptions over the years of our succession of delapidated cars, of how we learned to live without central heating and other amenities, foraging for firewood, food — even craft supplies, shopping at Goodwill and thrift stores. I told you about availing myself, for a time, of the services of the local food bank, of how the children and I stood in cheese lines in the years before I learned to live on a very small monthly income, and about the time we spent weeks making crafts for a craft fair, hoping to supplement our income, and how, to our chagrin and embarrassment, we didn't sell a single item — except to Grama!

You read about my many years as a working mother and sometime-night-student, when my older four children spent most of their time in day care centers. I shared our struggles to pay child support over the years for Claude's son (now an adult) by a previous relationship, our court battles in which the judge decided that although I had six children (then seven, eight, and nine children), I should return to my court reporting career so that Claude could continue to provide substantial support for this son, although he was the only child his mother — who had married and whose income exceeded ours — was supporting, and how ultimately the judge ordered that we pay not only additional child support but retroactive support and the mother's attorneys fees as well as our own, to be immediately deducted from Claude's check by way of wage assignment. I told you how this judge's decision resulted in the loss of our home, and then how God gave it back to us, eventually, in a very unusual way.

And I shared many other, less dramatic but nonetheless personal, intimate things with you over the years — my challenges in learning to master cooking, budgeting, homemaking, sewing, living on a small income with many children. You heard about our miracle Christmas when the Lord called upon me to invite 30 (!!) people, most of them total strangers, to my tiny home on Christmas day in a year when I had almost no food in the house, the furnace was broken, and we had no money, and how the Lord provided so abundantly that day. I told you about the table my sons and I made from what we had in our hand, four unused school desks and two folding closet doors, how we covered the hinges in the middle of the table with a tablecloth and happily enjoyed our makeshift "dining room set" (!) for many years.

I reported my failures and triumphs as a homeschooling pioneer of sorts, having begun homeschooling in 1983, and of the joyous home births of our eighth and ninth children. You followed us through our move from the city to the country, during which time we sold our home and moved in, all 11 of us, with my folks, enduring a flood of our living quarters which forced all of us, along with our office space, into two bedrooms. During that time I gave birth to my ninth child, only to break my leg all the way through both bones four days later, which required hospitalization and surgery. When we moved into our new mobile home on five wild, overgrown acres, it was with a newborn and eight other children in tow and my leg throbbing away in a cast.

You commiserated with me when our oldest son went away to Bible college and promptly grew a ponytail (!) and you rejoiced with me when, at his request, I had the pleasure of giving him a long-needed haircut J . You cried with me through the agony of the miscarriages of my 10th and 11th children in 1992 and 1993. You held my hand as our oldest two sons graduated from home school high school, and as our oldest son married, and I let him go. You watched the magazine in its progression from a crude, photocopied, stapled-together newsletter, typed in my kitchen on a Selectric typewriter and mailed out to 23 subscribers, to a slick, full-color, 68-page monthly magazine with many thousands of subscribers internationally. You read scornfully critical letters to the editor alongside the letters which glowed with thanks and praise.

Striving for Balance

Throughout the years I did my best to paint a balanced picture. I never aimed to paint an overly idealistic picture of the lifestyle our family had chosen. The fact was, as you long-time subscribers, especially, well know, our life has been often very difficult for many reasons and full of problems. Having been through many hard things in my (relatively) short life, and thus having come to a personal understanding and experience of brokenness, it was and has continued to be my desire to come alongside with encouragement and help. I have not wanted to say, "This is how you do it; follow me!", as much as I've wanted to say, "Yes, I've been there, too. Maybe I've learned something that might be useful — probably the hard way! Let me help. I'm here. I care. We're in this together."

On Openness, Honesty, and Fellowship

Perhaps I was far too honest, actually. In all honesty, at this very moment, I wish I had been far less open and honest, far less often! But I wanted to be real, a regular, ordinary woman, to avoid the shallow superficiality evident in so much Christian writing which creates and fosters the illusion of Christian perfection, the impression that there are two classes of Christians — those who do it right and are blessed ("God's women of the hour with power", sort of), and those who do it wrong and are second-rate ("Well, if you'd just be as together as we are, you, too, could be as impressive, admirable, spiritual, and problem-free as us!"). The desire to walk honestly, humbly, and vulnerably succeeded in creating an unusual sense of intimacy within these pages between you and I, Dear Reader, along with an expectation of continuing disclosure, that I would continue to be honest and open in the sharing of my life at home as the mother of many children and the wearer of many womanly hats which a number of you also are seeking to wear.

Over the years Gentle Spirit readers have written time and time again to tell me that because of this unusual and distinctive editorial philosophy, you feel you know me personally, as though I am a close friend, as though these magazines are personal letters from my home to yours. I feel that way about you, too. So many of you have written to pour out your hearts to me in intimate detail, and I have poured out my heart to you, too, here, over and over again. You've sent me your family pictures and I've published mine here. I love you for this and I know and am grateful that so many of you have come to love me. It is this kind of sharing which has made us sisters, although we have never met. I would like you to know how much I care for you all, my kindred spirits, my soul-mates. I have been comforted many, many times by the simple awareness of your presence in the earth, although the miles and circumstances have separated us. We have often seen things alike. We have grown together. We've shared so many things in the pages of this magazine — tears and laughter, heartache and joy, encouragement, instruction, and, perhaps, from time to time, the heavy hand of conviction. Sometimes we've even been mad at one another. More than a few of you have written in to cancel your subscriptions in a huff over some issue, only to quietly resubscribe the following month or so, having thought about it for a bit. You missed us, aggravated as you may have been. Well, we missed you, too. I am so much the better for having known you all, though my "knowing" has been limited to what can be conveyed by way of paper and ink.

A Dilemma

Which brings us, my sisters, to this moment, and this issue of Gentle Spirit, Volume 5, No. 11. It has been, in turn, the June-July- September-October-November-December-January and, for heaven's sake, at last, the February 1995 issue. Never have I agonized so over anything I have ever written as I have over this particular issue and this particular article which you are now reading. Last spring I shared with you some of what eventually became the most intimate and painful battle I have ever fought, a battle with temptation, a battle which, as some of you have learned, I eventually lost. I have struggled all these months now to know what to disclose about all that has transpired since that time and how to disclose it in a way which does not stumble or offend anyone unnecessarily, in a way in which my children, especially, and my beloved extended family and in-laws — wonderful people whom I dearly love; the thought of my mother-in-law's sweet face moves me to tears as I write — are protected and spared any more pain and sorrow than they have already suffered. I do not want to hurt anyone. With God as my witness, that is not in my heart to do. I am just not strung together in that way.

My problem in deciding what and how to share this chapter of my life is just not your usual, everyday editorial problem. In fact, I know of no other magazine editors who have invited their readers into their homes, hearts and thoughts, month after month, to know them and their families intimately, to share in hard as well as good times, failures as well as triumphs. Instead, they maintain privacy. There are many good and valid reasons for this, not the least of which is the protection of one's family. More than once I have been warned about the perils of openness and transparency by my peers in publishing. But as I have described, over five years ago, when I wrote the first issue of Gentle Spirit, I chose a different path, in part because I knew the depth of the need women have to know they are not alone in their day-to-day struggles at home, in part because I wanted to be honest about my own weaknesses and shortcomings. Most of us find we are not really very encouraged hearing of the exploits and victories of those who share only their strengths and gifts. We know our own struggles only too well. But we are encouraged — given courage, armed with courage — by the stories of ordinary people, even broken people, people who have made wrong choices or who have been beaten down by the storms of life, who nevertheless, with God's help, have overcome specific challenges and difficulties in their lives, sometimes at great personal cost. These people give us reason to believe there is hope, even for simple folks like us. There is sweet comfort in the vulnerable and humble sharing of our humanity, in the "coming-alongside" kind of fellowship which reflects the love of the Comforter, Himself.

An Impossible Choice

So as I promised last spring, and as is true to the distinctive philosophy which has guided me over my years of publishing, I intend to be faithful and to share what has happened over the last few months with you, my Sisters in the Lord. I do not really want to share these things. Telling the story is much more difficult and problematic now than it might otherwise have been because several individuals whom I trusted and regarded as friends reported their own version of my story, some publicly and nationally. In every case but one, these reports were based strictly on the word of (often uninvolved third) parties — and those reporting made no attempt to speak with me first. I generally knew nothing of these reports until readers wrote to me and brought them to my attention, often many months after the fact.

This has created a difficult situation for me. I essentially have two choices: (1) to respond with my own story, knowing it is possible that I'll appear to be merely justifying or rationalizing my actions, pointing fingers of blame or accusation, throwing up smoke screens, lashing out vindictively, or defending myself, something I do not now nor have I ever had a desire to do; or (2) to maintain silence, which would in all likelihood be viewed as an admission that the publicized reports were true and complete, which is sadly not the case. I am not willing to leave my children a legacy of distorted and/or untrue reports published nationally about their mother which I allowed to stand unchallenged. I also feel a responsibility to name the monster that (nearly) devoured me, hopefully sparing others from being similar devoured. I am thus in a "condemned if I do; condemned if I don't" situation. I would have preferred to tell the story myself in my own way and time, and because I'm made that way and I promised to do so, I would have. As is so often true in this earthly life, I must now do the best I can with the situation I have, with what is in my hand, trusting that the Holy Spirit will guide us all into the truth and that God will graciously and mercifully intervene to cause even those who are at odds to be at peace with one another, knowing all the while deep down that in the end, what and whom people believe and why will depend upon many factors, none of which I can control or even much affect or hope to influence. I can only fervently pray, as I have for many months, that the Lord will help me as I attempt to accurately and truthfully tell my story. May His heart in the matter be made completely evident by and by to all who read my words. With His help, I will do my best to tell the truth.

No Room for Bitterness

I would like to say before I begin that I am not bitter against anyone, although I am honestly quite angry with some of the people who have involved themselves for the actions they have taken which were, I believe, most destructive. However, I would like to believe those involved thought at the time they acted or spoke that they were doing what was right to do. As one pastor I knew and appreciated always said when he heard criticism of others, "People can only operate according to the grace that they have." When we are in the midst of a crisis, we do not always see things clearly. We err. Love does, in each and every case, believe the best about people, the Bible says. It bears, hopes, believes, endures all things, and never fails. I have spoken much about love over the past five years and have sought to emphasize the importance of attitudes of meekness and gentleness of spirit. If in recounting my story, I fail to love, if I lack gentleness and meekness, if I behave spitefully or vindictively, then I have failed most miserably and utterly. I know this and approach you with fear and trembling as I recount one of the most painful chapters of my life.

Changes

Over the past few years our family experienced some uniquely hard times. We moved from our house in the suburbs on a small lot to a mobile home on five overgrown, wild acres. We were inexperienced in country living and had to start from scratch, the hard way. We put in gardens and fruit trees, had a barn built and a greenhouse, got chickens, goats, bees, and rabbits. Our 1800 square foot home is small for 11 people to begin with, especially 11 people who are home all day, from morning to night, working and being educated at home, and it was made much smaller by the fact that one bedroom of the four available served as an office. We were 20 miles from the nearest town of any size and isolated in our new rural surroundings, away from friends and family and far from amenities we had come to take for granted. In the nearly four years since we moved to our new home, our family underwent tremendous changes. Our older son completed two years of Bible college, then married. Our second son graduated from home school high school as well, tried his hand at a career in fire fighting for a year or so, moved away from home, and was married last summer. I've had two miscarriages since we moved here, one early in my first trimester in November of 1992, and another more serious miscarriage in October of 1993 which required hospitalization and surgery. I lost a lot of blood at that time and wondered whether I would ever regain my strength. I got behind and couldn't seem to catch up. A heaviness of spirit, an oppression of some kind seemed to set in. And the shock of the miscarriages after so many healthy pregnancies left me with a deep, pervasive sadness I couldn't seem to shake.

Claude left IBM in April of 1991 and so was at home full time. Roland lived at home as well in the year before he married, and Jocelyn spent most of her time here with us, getting to know the family. Our house was always full, and managing meals and laundry, homemaking, homeschooling, house cleaning and raising children would have been more than a full-time job in and of themselves.

The Demands of Publishing

Given that fact, the demands of publishing Gentle Spirit began to become excruciatingly difficult, even for someone like me, who requires little sleep. The youngest of my nine children were clamoring to "do school", Naomi was still breastfeeding frequently, Jenni was preparing to graduate and involved in beekeeping and master gardening, and there was all the homestead work to do. With Roland and John busy with their own lives and schedules, the bulk of the hard work of gardening and animal tending fell to me, Jenni and Little Claude, but mostly to me.

I continued to do all of the editing and a major portion of the writing of the magazine, publishing each and every month over five years up until last May. It was also my responsibility to do nearly all the typesetting, to handle advertising and any correspondence which required a written response, and to speak on occasion. I tried to limit my speaking to every few months since I had begun to speak nationally, which required that I travel, but I would frequently find myself agreeing to speak more often than that, despite my good intentions. I'm a soft touch. I always have been, I guess. I enjoyed speaking but found it exhausting, requiring a week's preparation before and a week of recovery afterwards.

I bore much of the responsibility for the ongoing administrative and clerical work of the magazine along with my editorial duties. I supervised and participated in all of the grueling mailing out of monthly issues (until we hired professional mailers) and back issues twice or more monthly. At least once every month, my faithful Jenni and I would be up all night as the rest of the family slept, painstakingly placing labels on envelopes, writing little notes of response, sorting the mail, tagging it, bagging it up. Jenni was — and continues to be — my right arm. She is a work horse, capable of pushing herself long past most human limits when there is work to be done. Her tender conscience would never allow me to finish a job alone if it was within her ability to help me, even if it meant staying up until dawn or all night long, as was frequently the case.

Columnists, Advertisers

I was primarily the one who worked with the columnists and advertisers, a job which became quite challenging and which was frequently frustrating and discouraging. A few of the columnists over time became contentious, a couple bitterly so; they disagreed with some of the decisions I made about what to publish and whose work to publish; they disagreed philosophically and theologically with one another and with my editorial decisions. Small "turf wars" developed in which these columnists — who were persistent and vocal — began to ask for more and more control over what articles and letters found their way into the magazine. By way of example, I'm thinking now of one exhausted morning when our family was staying with friends in another state, where after speaking at a convention, we hoped we could relax together. Instead of sleeping in, however — in my household, an unheard-of luxury and reserved strictly for vacation times — I was awakened at 6 a.m. by a frantic, weeping columnist who had somehow obtained our friends' unlisted phone number and called objecting to a letter to the editor in the latest issue. Three hours later I was still on the phone, attempting to explain that I could not possibly submit all letters to the editor to all of my columnists for their consideration before publishing each month, explaining that the letters section was intended, at least in part, to be a forum, a place for the publication of views which differed from the editor's and columnists' views. Nor was that the last phone call we received over that period of several days. There were several similar calls, all intense and emotionally draining for everyone involved. I returned home from "vacation" a wreck, desperately desiring a time of solitude in which to sort out my thoughts.

The advertisers, too, sometimes engaged in turf wars, asking that we refrain from publishing competitors' ads. Increasingly, several of the columnists and writers were behaving more as business people than writers, hoping by way of the publishing of their articles to establish home businesses or to expand those they were already running. I began to feel compromised, as though the tail were in many ways wagging the dog. I did not want Gentle Spirit to take on the appearance of a series of paid advertisements! I did not want to feel obligated to publish articles I did not feel were appropriate strictly because the success or failure of the business being advertised seemed to hinge on whether or not a writer's ads and articles appeared in the magazine. Each month I received calls long after the published deadline asking that I publish ads that were not typeset or camera-ready or asking that we make last-minute changes in the content of ads already typeset, asking whether we would publish the ad free "just this time," asking whether we could wait for payment or make some kind of exchange in lieu of payment. What happened to the early days, I began to wonder in frustration and exhaustion, when I typed out simple magazine articles in my kitchen and crudely illustrated them (I am no artist, as you know!), out of an overflowing heart of love for sisters like me, laboring at home? When and how had things become so complicated? How could people who seemed so devoted to the Lord behave as they were behaving? What was I doing wrong? What was the remedy?

All the Way Home?

But I was more than concerned simply for the connection between the writing of columns and the advertising and how that connection might appear to a reader, though. Increasingly I was seeing the unfolding of a most disturbing phenomenon which violated all I had hoped Gentle Spirit would stand for. The longing for a home business was increasingly propelling homeschooling moms, sometimes with many small children, into establishing home businesses, hoping that they would be successful enough that their husbands could quit their jobs to come home. Sometimes the businesses did achieve moderate success and the husbands did come home. But because the woman had built the business, because it had prospered by way of her particular talents and gifting rather than the husband's, more often than not, these women were finding themselves trapped: now they were not only keeping at home, often with heavy workloads and small children, they were also becoming the primary support of their families, the CEO, with their husbands and families dependent upon them, and not the other way around, even though the husband was often described as the overseer of the business. I observed so many instances in which young mothers were literally at the breaking point, working from dawn until dusk, day after day, to get everything done, and often failing miserably. Any crisis— and in large families there are always crises — was a catastrophe, every interruption an emergency. More than a few of these families spent many weekends of each year traveling from home schooling convention to home schooling convention, selling their products at booths, presenting workshops. Quite frequently they were not at home at all in the traditional, biblical sense, although they believed they were "all the way home"!

The strain of attempting to combine so many roles is always debilitating and the guilt is tremendous particularly during the years of bearing and nursing babies. With so much to do, nothing can be done well — not homemaking, not homeschooling, not being a good wife or mother. The inevitable result of this kind of overextension is exhaustion, poor health, loneliness, prayerlessness, defeat.

Me, Too

The sad thing was, I knew that despite my very best efforts to live with integrity what I wrote about, to make keeping at home the center of my life, the very same thing was happening to me. My entire family, including my husband and grown sons, now looked to me as their source of support and employment, though I rationalized that my husband , because he was home, was in charge, and my columnists and advertisers in increasing numbers were looking to me, too, via Gentle Spirit, to keep their businesses functioning by way of continuing exposure. To operate in that kind of capacity had never been my intention! In fact, I had frequently prayed it would never be so! When Gentle Spirit began as a tiny newsletter (some early issues were as small as eight pages) with 23 subscribers, I never envisioned heading up the publication of a national magazine mailed out to thousands of homes. I had spent many years as a career woman before I left it all for home, that was the focus of Gentle Spirit, and I was singularly unenamored with attempting to have it all by combining a demanding career with motherhood. I wanted to raise, nurture and teach my children, to be a godly wife and mother and at the heart of my home. I knew I was not equal to the task of shouldering the burden of provision indefinitely for a family of 11 (and still growing), nor did I believe that it was biblical that I try. On the other hand, all things considered, I could see no practical option but to press on another day and then another, hoping for the best. I would pray the pressures would ease the next month or a few months down the line, when our computers were better equipped, when this or that event occurred, when we could hire outside people to do this or that. I would pray and wait and trust the Lord. Towards the end, each and every month I would find myself before my computer for 48 or more hours straight, without sleep, laboring to finish the month's issue, then putting in additional, sleepless 24-hour stints as required to keep up with the mailing out of back issues, alongside all of the regular, everyday work which had to be done.

Letters

During this time, we began increasingly to receive letters which were critical and even quite hostile to the format and some of the points of view expressed in the magazine. A number of these letters were forthrightly judgmental; i.e., the people whose photos were published in the magazine "looked like hippies"; the plain appearance of those in some photos was an offense to those who preferred more modern attire; the clip art (from the early 1900's) was immodest; why did we publish photos of women wearing jewelry or who had short hair; why did we publish photos of women with covered heads; why was my head sometimes covered in magazine photos and sometimes uncovered; why did I focus so much on rural life; why did we promote vegetarianism, why did we promote meat-eating; why so much on gardening, why so little on gardening; why so much spiritual stuff; why so much practical stuff; this columnist has overstepped her bounds as a woman and is preaching instead of teaching; that columnist is overly dogmatic, let's hear more from that one, let's hear nothing from that one. On and on went the cacophony of complaints which, when juxtaposed against some of our columnists' and advertisers' demands, and set against a background of sleepless nights and days full of labor, resulted in a state of unending weariness for me. A kind of despair then began to set in, a creeping, grasping, ubiquitous sorrow. I had failed to heed the warnings of the older women in my life who had expressed loving and sincere concern for me. Despite my best intentions, once again, I was doing it all. I was traipsing cross-country, speaking and shaking hands, and spending my time at home writing and running a business. My family needed all of me. My home was where my heart was. Despite the best of intentions, I found myself trapped within the very lifestyle which at first had appeared to be so biblical. I was doing all the "right" things — bearing children, homeschooling, keeping at home, gardening, cooking, and running a home business — yet finding I had little or no time to devote to my family, which was the very reason I had come home in the first place.

Brokenness

Finally I began to enter into spiritual brokenness when certain letters began to trickle in a year or two ago. There were some things I had not shared in the pages of Gentle Spirit, one secret, in particular, which I kept, as you'll understand, for very good reason. It is an important part of my story. As a young woman of 19, I was briefly married to a brilliant and impressively self-educated man, a political activist at the time, as I was, and a college student. As it turned out, this man, who had been married before, was a convicted felon who had served four years in the penitentiary for murder in the second degree.

He was also a compulsive gambler and a brutal batterer who beat me many times during our marriage. A bright, promising engineering student, University of Washington professors lined up at our door, offering him scholarships, financial aid, and the promise of excellent employment if he would stay in school. Nevertheless, he dropped out to earn his fortune in gambling. I supported him and eventually our two babies, Roland and John, by working as a waitress, often holding down two jobs at once, and at one time, three.

When he left for a gambling trip to Las Vegas and did not return for several months. Knowing one day, a beating I received would might be fatal, I took the opportunity to gather my sons, then one and three years old, and move to Tacoma to be near my parents. When my husband finally returned, he found me, and kidnapped our sons. I did not see them nor hear from them for two months. My parents and I papered the coast with posters which read, "Have you seen these children?" typed beneath their photos.

When he finally contacted me from another state, my father and I purchased airplane tickets, flew out the next day, obtained court orders, and, accompanied by police escorts, I was reunited with my sons. I was 22 years old. We flew back, and he followed us, stalked me, and attempted to take my life by beating me with a metal pipe as I left for business school one morning. I sustained severe skull fractures, including fractured eye sockets, and I required plastic surgery on my right eyebrow and forehead. It was believed additional surgery would be required to insert metal plates beneath my eyes to support my eyeballs. Doctors doubted I would ever be able to fully open my eyelids or that I would regain range of motion in my eyes. But my mother and a few of her friends in Bible Study Fellowship prayed for me, and to the amazement of all of the doctors, I did recover, I did not require additional surgery, and my eyes and fractures were eventually completely healed. My first husband was tried for assault with intent to commit murder, assault with a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to life in prison with a 20 year minimum to be served concurrently with his previous conviction for second degree murder.

That makes me, among other things, dear readers, a divorced and remarried woman, brief though my first marriage was. I have always been taught and have sincerely believed that God forgives even divorce and remarriage. I had repented and sought forgiveness, and once I remarried, with all my heart, I applied myself to being a godly woman, to reclaiming the wreckage of my life, though sin had taken its terrible toll and left its mark in so many ways. Through the years I did not share my story with others in my life unless there was a specific, very compelling reason to do so. For one thing, the story was sordid and unedifying. For another, it was not safe to recount it. As we all know, even two life sentences do not, in this country, mean a man will spend his life in prison. In fact, my first husband was paroled in 1988, over my written pleas and letters of protestation to the parole board in our state. My immediate and extended families were visible in our community and I worried for their safety. God did finally grant me sweet peace during a visit with friends who lived in a Christian community in Oregon, and although my fears certainly were not unfounded, I was able by faith to ut them aside and to trust the Lord. Within six months of his release, my first husband made an attempt on another woman's life. He was then tried and reincarcerated. Since that time, he has made yet another murder attempt, a crime for which he received at least one additional life sentence which was upheld on appeal last year. It is now unlikely he will see the light of day, at least not any time soon, and so I am able to enjoy relative peace, especially since our sons are now grown men, married, and on their own. I have not seen this man nor had any contact with him since the attempt on my life 20 years ago.

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