Before I get to how my blog vision picture relates to my story, I think it’s good to provide a prequel. The things that happened before my story even began set the stage for what was to come. So here are the obligatory background details.

We begin with my maternal grandparents in Missouri. My gramma, Geraldine, was born in Kansas City in 1928 and grew up in a tiny little town called Dadeville. Grandfather was born in 1927 in another tiny little town called Fair Play. Both towns were about an hour or so north of Springfield and about 40 miles from each other.

I can’t pretend to know a whole lot about the status of my grandparents’ immediate families’ faith histories. I have, however, done a TON of family tree research over the years and have found faithful people over and over again. For one example, I have discovered that Grandfather’s maternal grandmother came from a family in Missouri – the Mitchells. My 6th great grandfather, Morris Mitchell, was a Revolutionary soldier and went on to raise a ginormous family of faith. Many of them became preachers. They had a whole campground near Aldrich, Missouri, where they would meet & hold revivals – and now it is the family cemetery. I’ve had the privilege of visiting here twice and it is one of the most beautiful, serene places I have ever been. I have become convinced that the prayers of these ancestors (and those like them whom I haven’t discovered yet) are partially responsible for who I am today — surely they prayed for their descendants!

The Great Depression took its toll on both families, especially Gramma’s. She told me stories that sounded like they were straight out of The Grapes of Wrath. When she was about 9 yrs old, her parents traded their house and their 60 acres of land for a car and moved their seven kids out west in hopes of finding prosperity. Grandfather’s family did the same thing, but he was a bit older when they made the move. Despite growing up in towns so close together, Gramma & Grandfather didn’t meet until they were set up on a blind date in Porterville, California, when they were about 25 years old.

Gramma and Grandfather wound up building a relationship out of that blind date and got married in 1954. Mom was born in 1955 and my aunt Leila arrived in 1957. They all lived on a 2 ½ acre ranch in Lindsay, California. Grandfather was a trucker & Gramma cared for the ranch while Grandfather was on the road.

From Mom’s recollection though, Gramma & Grandfather didn’t necessarily raise a God-fearing family for those earlier years. She said that Grandfather’s sister Helen would come by and pick up the girls to take them to Sunday School at a local Nazarene church. After a while, they started coming home talking about what they learned at church and asking questions, which probably helped sway Grandfather to turn back to his Christian roots. Eventually, he started going to church with them, and Gramma followed. They were both baptized on the same day: Easter Sunday, 1961.

Grandfather started to struggle a little after that. And isn’t that always the case? The enemy can’t stand when people start heading the right direction. Grandfather began wrestling with the idea that maybe there wasn’t a God because he couldn’t see any proof. Then he would wrestle with guilt over the doubt.

I read something he wrote once that described an incident in which he had sat in his house going back and forth, playing mind games with himself–thinking things like, “If there’s a God, then let that glass of water be turned to wine right now.” When it didn’t happen, he was suddenly filled with fear that he had tempted God, had gone too far, and now God was done with him.

He finally decided life wasn’t worth living if God wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Gramma was in the kitchen doing chores when he came in off the tractor and yelled, “Geri, call the hospital and have them send out a straightjacket.” Gramma didn’t know how to handle the situation. She responded with something like, “No, I’m not going to do that, you just get on in here and stop this silliness.” Instead, he grabbed the keys to an old car he had just bought and took off. Grandma later found out that he had driven to several area hospitals asking for help, but they all refused him, since he didn’t have an obvious medical problem.

Later that afternoon, she got a phone call from a man who said his name was Morris. He told her that Grandfather had walked to his house with his head bleeding pretty good so he was going to drive him to the hospital. My grandma rushed over there and learned that Grandfather had parked somewhere near an irrigation ditch and began slamming his head against the concrete walls, intent on killing himself. When he decided that God wasn’t going to let him off that easy, he stopped and walked to “Morris’s” house. The doctor stitched him up and gave orders for an ambulance to take him to a hospital in Fresno. Grandma and Grandfather’s brother, Howard, followed behind. Again, the doctors refused to admit him, so Gramma just decided to take him home and take care of him there. She prayed with a pastor of their church and got him on some medication. The doctor wrote it off on his file as a “severe nervous breakdown.”

After he had healed up a little, Grandfather wanted to give his testimony in his church. He was eager to tell people how God had protected him from suicide. While he was up there, he mentioned the fact that part of the reason he had struggled so much was because he considered that particular church to be more of a “social club” than a real church. They didn’t really study the Bible with eagerness or seem to love God with all their being. He wanted the people to know that there was more to God–a deeper spirituality– than what they were all experiencing. Later that night, some offended leaders of the church came over to their house and asked him not to return.

In their quest for a new church, the family attended some Penecostal-type churches in the area. One night they went to a tent revival meeting that was run by some visiting preachers. The revival was in town for about 3 weeks and they went every single night, marveling at the healing miracles that occurred there. Grandfather begged God to show him if what he was seeing was real. On the last night of the revival, the preacher pointed in Grandfather’s direction and delivered a very specific personal message that no one could have known involving the churches he had been considering & the one he came out of. My Grandfather was amazed because he had told no one there what had happened and which churches he had gone to. He went up to pray with the preachers after the revival and eventually got invited to go with them to Mexico to help with the revivals.

In 1964 or 65, Grandfather decided he wanted to resign from truck driving to do God’s work full-time. He went to the revivals in Mexico for months at a time. After a while, he got tired of having to drive the distance between deep Mexico and California. In 1967, he talked my Grandma into selling everything they had out there to move to a small town called Canutillo, Texas, just outside of El Paso, near the Mexican border. Gramma told me he had sent her a picture of a trailer he was trying to buy, but when she got here she saw a worn out old thing that was falling apart. She said it leaked so bad that “when it rained, you might as well sit outside.” But she was ready for the new adventure. Grandfather would go to Mexico on six month visas and would come back after they expired. Gramma would go down on weekends with the kids.

My mom later told me stories of what happened while they were there. The stories she told me about those days in Mexico and their early days in the ministry are what planted the seeds of faith in my heart when I was young. They also kept my beliefs alive throughout the years when they fell under attack.

One story that caught my attention when I was young, in Mom’s words:
From around 1968-1970, a preacher from Minneapolis named Bro. Demming went to Mexico with Grandfather several times. There about 3 churches in the Chihuahua area that Grandfather preached at weekly; and at random times, he would hold services in one of the huts on a remote ranch outside of town. None of the poor people who attended these churches ever had telephones so news was spread by word of mouth. One time, Bro. Demming had come into town, and he and Grandfather headed out to the ranch for a service. Since no one ever knew when they were coming, someone from the ranch would go tell all the villagers that the preachers were there, and to come to the services. That particular day, it was raining cats and dogs when Grandfather and Bro Demming got there. The lady who came with them lived in town but had relatives at the ranch. She prayed that God would be with her, and took off in the rain to tell everyone that it was church time. After she returned and she finally got inside out of the rain, she noticed that she was not wet. Her hair, clothes, etc. were totally dry! Of course she started praising the Lord, and testified of it later in the service

As a child I could just picture this woman, running outside in the rain without getting the slightest bit wet. Such a simple, seemingly insignificant thing … but it was apparently the most amazing thing to me, since it is one of the only stories I specifically remember.

She told me of the preachers laying hands on the paralyzed and having them move again. The greatest, most important one she told me though, she tells like this:
“It was one day about 1968 or ’69, when I was thirteen, that Bro. Demming and Grandfather had just returned to our house from one of those trips to Mexico. That afternoon, we were sitting in our trailerhouse, listening to them tell of all the wonderful things that God had done while they were down there. For example, Bro. Demming had prayed for a boy with stunted growth whom the doctors claimed would not grow any more. As he prayed, he lifted the boy up toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. He heard the people shouting, and thought they were just praying too. When he finished and went to put the boy back down, he wouldn’t go all the way; he had grown several inches instantaneously! Of course the people were overcome with jubilance. Anyway, hearing these stories, we were all feeling the Spirit of the Lord very strong, and Bro. Demming all of a sudden said, “I feel like praying for someone’s teeth. Do any of you have bad teeth?” (Two years before, on my last visit to a dentist in California, he had told us that I had a tiny cavity on the inside of one of my front teeth, and that it would need filling eventually, but wasn’t imperative at the time.) So I piped up, ” I have a cavity”. Bro. Demming looked at it, and told my parents to watch while he prayed. He had me stand there with my mouth open, while one of my parents held a flashlight beaming on the tooth. Then he prayed. I could hear them oohing and awe-ing, saying “look at that!” My mother described it as a little bead of liquid silver coming out of the cavity, then flattening out and sealing the spot. It all happened spontaneously and unexpectedly. It now amazes me, because at the time I just believed God could do it and I wasn’t concentrating hard trying to have “faith”, as preachers tell people to do sometimes when they seek healing. It was truly a gift that I did not pray for or “earn”!”

She showed me that filling. To this day, the fillings she has had in other teeth have all fallen out and had to be replaced. The one that God put there has stayed put for over 50years. It is this story that has brought me back to my faith several times. People can explain away theories and concepts of the Bible, but they can’t explain the filling in my mother’s tooth–so there has to be a God.

However, there is also a devil, the enemy of our souls – and he continued to fight dirty. Grandfather began to get frustrated with the missions in Mexico. The other preachers were able to heal many people. Yet he had only been able to successfully pray for one miracle….a young girl who had been paralyzed from a bout with polio was able to walk again after he prayed for her. He didn’t see any more miracles as a direct result of his praying after that and he couldn’t understand why. He blamed it on the people in Mexico. He reasoned that they weren’t listening to him and that’s why things weren’t happening.

He was also upset with Gramma. While he had been in Mexico, she refused to take the kids out of school so that she could move with him down there. She wasn’t following all the things he thought they should do. After he came back from Mexico, he made it clear that he wasn’t there “as her husband”, but he just had things to take care of.

After that, he took off hitchhiking across the country with only a Bible and a change of clothes. He wanted to prove that one didn’t need money to serve Jesus Christ. First, he went back to California to try to “convert” his family. Later his brother would tell Mom about that visit. He had stopped by there and they were excited to show him their newest baby girl, but he wasn’t interested in her at all and he let them know. He told them he was only interested in saving them from Hell, so they showed him the door. As a side note, I’ve met that side of the family and they were truly faithful, so I’m not sure what he was trying to convert them to. He continued to hitchhike, venturing all the way up to the Canadian border, where he intended to go. He was turned away for whatever reason, so he turned back and made his way out east.

In Louisiana he was stopped for vagrancy and was sent to the state hospital. He wouldn’t identify himself, saying only that he was either “a” son or “the” son of God. I’m not sure which, because I get mixed stories. The only way they got his true identity out of him was by telling him that if he wouldn’t tell them who he was, they were going to give him some shock therapy to zap him back to reality. They were already trying to dope him up. He would raise him arm as though he was taking the pills, but then he’d let them roll down his sleeve. I guess he got spooked by that and told them who he was. He started writing letters to tell Gramma what had happened. She had been in California, though, and didn’t get those letters until she came back 3 weeks later. She got back on the road and drove all the way out there to pick him up.

For a time, he stayed on a bad kick….insane legalism ruled his life. He wouldn’t wear anything with “loud” colors (and to him dark maroon was a “loud” color). He ate nothing with sugar in it because it was a sin. Caffeine was a sin. Gramma said he snapped out of it (well, some of it anyway) awhile later. He drank a cup of coffee, poured some sugar in it and said, “Devil, that’s for you.” But extreme legalism was something that he would struggle with for as long as I would know him in my youth.

He found work in the construction/ranching areas of life, but was soon unhappy again and returned to his wandering around. He returned to Mexico, carrying only a Bible. One night, authorities found him under a bridge where he had basically collapsed after a 40 day fast. They tried to get identification out of him but he had burned his ID’s because he thought that God had told him that since he was a/the Son of God, he didn’t need them. Because he was preaching without permission and had no ID or visa, he was put on a plane back to America. People laugh when I tell them that, but yes, my white grandfather was deported from Mexico. From there, he moved all around New Mexico in a little trailer.

Meanwhile, back at home, sometime during all of that, Gramma was invited to church by a lady at work and she began taking her girls. It was a Spanish Pentecostal type of church. My dad’s family was very heavily Catholic, but he had a few family members that went to this church and he followed them there. He played guitar for the band. He saw my mom at a service there in late 1972 and started flirting and sending messages via other people. Soon they were dating.

Grandfather was still doing the here-today/gone-tomorrow thing and didn’t know what was happening half the time. But when he found out about this, he didn’t approve of the relationship. He had originally wanted Mom to stay single and possibly follow him to Mexico. He grudgingly told her that he understood that the Bible said it was better to marry than to burn in passion. But if she just HAD to get married, he wanted her to allow him to go out and find a husband for her. Despite all of that, she still went ahead and married my dad.

And so the stage was set for my entrance into the world and the environment that I would come into. I was born in 1976–when they were both 19 years old.

It is here I made my appearance on this path in my picture.