Homeschool News & Views

Issue 93, November 9, 2008

From Homeschool Helpers

In association with Pass It On Ministries

By Dan L. White

Listen to this article.

From Christianpost.com:

“Christian right leader Dr. James Dobson said he is currently in a grieving process over the presidential election result, which he said is a huge setback for the pro-life movement.

“I want to admit that I am in the midst of a grieving process at this time,” Dobson said on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast on Thursday. “I’m not grieving over Barack Obama’s victory, but over the loss of things that I’ve fought for, for 35 years.”

In particular, he pointed to Obama’s commitment to abortion rights and advancement of the homosexual agenda.

“[H]e’s going to appoint the most liberal justices to the Supreme Court, perhaps that we’ve ever had,” Dobson further predicted. “So, there are many reasons why I’m struggling today over the likely path that the nation has taken.””

In the election this past week, California passed a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. They had already passed a law doing that, but the Supreme Court of California disallowed the will of the people and voided that law. So the people of California have now passed a constitutional amendment, which the judges are not supposed to be able overthrow, because then they would be overthrowing the very constitution which they are supposed to judge everything by. That’s legal absurdity.

However – the Democrat homosexuals are protesting widely, harassing churches of different kinds. They are not at all prepared to accept the law of the people. Republican Governor Schwarzenegger is personally urging the court to disallow this constitutional amendment, which tears at the very core of everything this nation is built on. If a constitution itself cannot be relied on for law, then there is now law. We will be under a liberal tyranny.

Arizona and Florida also passed measures this election against gay marriage. That makes a total of 27 states which have done that, either passed a law or a constitutional amendment by a vote of the people against homosexual marriage. Even though a majority of the states have outlawed gay marriage, it seems certain that the Democrats will now try to force man/man and woman/woman marriage on America in the immediate future.

What a total mockery of marriage that is. That’s marriage the way Satan would have it.

Margie and I have been talking for some time about a Godly marriage. Our own.

In some ways we’re quite opposite.

Margie has brown, rather horizontal eyes, and a skin color which tends toward olive. I have bright blue eyes, big and round, and a reddish complexion. Her hair was always fine and straight. Mine was fairly coarse, and my hair made waves all over the top of my head Margie had a thin build. I was kinda chunky.

Beyond those physical differences, there are personality differences. I do everything like a squirrel, quick and twitchy. My hands are quick at sports, like basketball or tennis, but I don’t know how to slow them down, so I spill things constantly. When there is a crashing sound around the house, everybody knows that it’s just me, knocking something off. I read fast, and may not put down a book until I have read it through, in a couple of hours. Years ago, a good friend in West Virginia said about me, in our West Virginia accent, “White does everything like he’s fighting farr.” Meaning I’m like a firefighter, always fighting to put out the blaze, even when there ain’t one.

I think big. I focus on deheads, not details. Since I don’t pay much attention to details, I often get lost. Even if I don’t know where I am, I remember faces very well. Once, on a trip, I talked to a gas station attendant and learned a bit about him. Months later I was in the area again, that same attendant was still there, so I told him part of his life’s story. He could not at all figure out who I was or how I could have known so much about him. Then I told him I was his long, lost brother.

If I do everything in a hurry, then Margie does everything in a slurry. I would define slurry as a very slow, unhurried pace, the way one would go if, indeed, one was standing in a slurry. Not that she doesn’t stay busy. She does stay busy, always doing a little of this and that. I have watched her walk from the house to the barn, a distance of about 200 feet. Even on such a short walk, she often makes side trips, to pick up a stick or do something at the shed or just to look at the garden. She seldom goes straight from point A to point B.

She delights in packing stuff away very carefully, each item going into a specific place, and sometimes the things are packed in so very well that’s it’s well nigh impossible to get any of those things back out. She likes working with little details, and can take picky instructions and go through them one by one. Yuk. She reads slowly, and marks frequently. She never gets lost. Somehow she can get us back to someplace we were at once, five years ago. She won’t remember who was there, or what they looked like, but she can get us back there.

Margie and I got to know one another as college students working in Jerusalem, digging at the temple mount in 1970. After that summer, our group of students was touring Europe. Margie and I walked around Bruges, Belgium one pleasant August night. We had become emotionally involved, and we were having a serious talk about us. I think that was the first talk we ever had about us.

She brought up the point that since we were so different, perhaps we didn’t belong together. The big point of difference we focused on that night was –

Country music.

I liked it. She didn’t.

You must remember that was back in 1970, way before the Dixie Chicks and audio fornication. Country music then was like Merle Haggard or Buck Owens, or the crossover hit I Never Promised You A Rose Garden.

We walked and talked in the August air in Bruges. We passed our hotel, and I was so engrossed in the subject that I didn’t know we had passed where we were going. I told you I always get lost.

In the succeeding months, we were still together, but we were told by others, including a respected minister, that maybe we really didn’t belong together. However, by that time, we thought we did, Merle Haggard notwithstanding.

We got married in 1972, and then things changed.

What changed?

She got to liking country music. I got tired of it.

And we both laughed and realized such things were too trivial to ever be of much concern.

Fast forward to more than thirty years later. And believe me, when we lived those thirty-plus years, it did seem like fast forward.

Margie was not thin any more. I was not chunky any more. I was chunkier. Her straight hair, which was rich brown, had turned grandma white. My hair, which lay in waves all over the top of my head, had waved goodbye and was gone. Margie wore glasses and I had become half deaf.

We were in a theater at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. We were watching a light musical about the Civil War, the blue and the gray, Missouri having been in the middle of it, with numbers of its neighbors fighting on both sides. These theme park shows are far from Broadway classics, and are intended to keep folks mildly entertained for 30 or 40 minutes, when they get up and rush to the next bluegrass or western show. They’re not something anybody gets wrapped up in at all, but the innocuous enactment of the war affected me. Even in a light, weak presentation, the idea of such a terrible catastrophe as the Civil War, where one Missouri Ozarks county attacked the one right next door, got to me. I knew it was kind of silly to be so affected, and tried to talk myself out of it, but I could not. War is the epitome of the enslavement of human nature to itself. Humans hate war, it is horrible, and they cannot stop it. The Kingdom of God is the only answer. I sat in my seat and quietly cried.

Margie was not sitting next to me. We were in a group of people and she was sitting several seats down the row. The show ended. The folks with us got up and began jabbering about the next show, looking at the schedules, planning our route. The lines of people filed by, exiting the theater, getting on with their theme park excursion.

As we stood up, my eyes red and teary, I looked down the few seats to where My Beloved was. She stood, turned around from the direction we were going, and looked back at me. No words passed. Our gazes locked. She looked in my eyes, all red and teary, and I looked in hers --

All red and teary.

As far as I could tell, there was no one else of the hundreds of people in that theater who cried over the theme park show on the Civil War. But sitting apart, I did, and Margie did.

We were seats apart, but we were spiritually together. I, who had liked country music when she hadn’t, and she, who had liked country music when I hadn’t, were united spiritually.

That instance of spiritual unity is not an isolated example. We have seen it happen over and over. Nobody else around may be thinking what we’re thinking, but I know what I’m thinking, I know what she’s thinking, she knows what I’m thinking, and she knows that I know that she knows what I’m thinking, because she’s thinking the same thing.

And I’m not talking about things like whether or not the horse is out or who should feed the dog. I’m talking about the weightiest spiritual matters of life.

In our three-plus decades of marriage, we have had a good marriage. We never really had major problems with each other. There was no great period of adjustment. We never had big battles over control. We never had affairs or periods of disinterest or disillusionment.

We definitely had a good marriage. But that changed over the decades.

You see, we went from a good marriage to a spiritual union.

This is one of the most amazing things I have experienced in my life. We are spiritually melded, welded together with love, but not just human love for each other, but the love of God, binding us to Him and to each other. We are each our greatest spiritual advisors.

We have seen this. We have experienced it. We know it.

I doubt that people who have not experienced this can even believe that such a spiritual union exists. But it does, and going from a good marriage to a spiritual union can be a fruit of forsaking the routine panic lifestyle, as Christian homeschool families do.