My Oh My: A Journey of Faith through Marriage, Parenting, and Miracles

By Ambassador International

With drama, depth, and humor Lee Wyndham reveals details of her authentic relationship with an extravagant, loving God of grace, a God who sometimes trumps his own established laws of nature to perform incredible miracles. Proud of her Southern roots, accent, and expressions, Lee is a survivor of life’s summits and valleys—a divorce, a second marriage, four daughters, the business world, the classroom, and a rare, life-threatening open heart surgery. The hauntingly beautiful melodies cascading straight from the depths of Lee’s heart will motivate you if you already know Jesus Christ and will engage you if you haven’t already accepted his leadership on your own odyssey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ambassador International
• Release date: Oct 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781935507963

Book preview

My Oh My

A Journey of Faith through

Marriage, Parenting, and Miracles

by

LEE WYNDHAM

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

This is my Story; This is my Song

Journey of Faith...As a Wife

Journey of Faith...As a Parent

Journey of Faith...In Miracles

Journey of Faith...In Survival

Journey of Faith...As a Grandparent

Journey of Faith...As a Witness

Appendix

Resources

Acknowledgements

About the Author

My Oh My

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© 2012 by Lee Wyndham

All rights reserved

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Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN: 9781935507932

eISBN: 9781935507963

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THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. Public Domain.

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Cover Design by Matthew Mulder

Page Layout by Kelley Moore of Points & Picas

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AMBASSADOR INTERNATIONAL

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Greenville, SC 29609, USA

www.ambassador-international.com

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AMBASSADOR BOOKS

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The colophon is a trademark of Ambassador

DEDICATION:

For my loving husband and our family

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For the Carpenter Sunday school class

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For my fabulous friends

THE HONEST TO GOODNESS TRUTH is that I am an ordinary Christian who has been led by the Holy Spirit through many extraordinary experiences. God has not only lovingly watched over me on my faith journey, he has invited me into a personal relationship with him through his Son, Jesus Christ. He invited me, and I accepted. The biblical teachings of my childhood have become the road map of my adult faith as I have faced and overcome disappointments, challenges, and fears. I am a sinner who has been saved by his extravagant love and grace.

I am a survivor of life’s journey. I survived the seesaw of hope and sorrow. I survived a young and challenged union and divorce. I survived an extremely rare kind of open-heart surgery. Inside my heart, I carried a ticking time bomb, a tumor that was two centimeters larger than the size of the left atrium in my heart. I survived the loss of close loved ones. I stood beside my friends and family members as they withstood the blows of unbearable, tragic losses. And still they stood.

I survived a marriage partnership of forty-seven years, and still counting, and the joys and challenges of rearing four beautiful daughters. My husband, our children, our grandchildren, and friends fill my life with happiness. I intend to live up to their expectations of me. I intend to be worthy of their love.

My teaching career and my students were blessings in my life. I taught to make a difference, and on most days, I did. I could see the potential in each and every student, and they could see it in me. I tried to be a dream enabler for them, always using words of encouragement.

Now my creative drive finds expressions in words. I write to make a difference; I write so that my soul will be clearly visible to you; I write to tell you who I am and what I stand for; I write to entertain you; I write so that I can breathe freely. With my words I want to peel back my layers to reveal what I feel in my spirit, sharing those experiences that molded me, those obstacles that chiseled out my living, breathing faith.

In spite of all the blessings I have received, I must confess that I have strayed away from God for periods in my life. Usually unintentionally. My priorities just shifted as distractions lured my soul away from the light. When I went to look for God again, he was right where I left him. He hadn’t wandered away. I had. And by his grace and power, he spun me around, restored my wandering soul, and shifted me back onto the right path, back into the purity of his light. I realize that I can’t ever become worthy of God’s love. But thank goodness I don’t have to. He has accepted me with all my flaws and sins, sins of omission and of commission, and he will accept you too.

I’m grateful for the miracle of each brand new day; I cherish the moment. My faith gives meaning and purpose to my existence here on earth; my faith colors my view of life and my view of other people. Opportunities to grow spiritually just seem to spring up everywhere. All I have to do is listen to his voice and then respond to his call.

God isn’t a million miles away. He is right here. He hasn’t deserted our planet … not yet.

Please walk beside me as I reveal personal stories about my spiritual journey of faith through the valleys and summits of my life. This is my story. This is my song.

WHETHER YOU TURN TO THE RIGHT OR TO THE LEFT, YOUR EARS WILL HEAR A VOICE BEHIND YOU, SAYING, THIS IS THE WAY; WALK IN IT.

ISAIAH 30:21 (NIV)

MARRIAGE IS A PARTNERSHIP ORDAINED by God but made on earth between two imperfect people. Perfect people don’t exist; neither do perfect marriages. Lord only knows, Ted and I have been working on ours for a long time, and it’s still far from perfect. Let’s face it: men and women are very different creatures. Thank goodness. And if we are to live together harmoniously, we must embrace and accept our differences and our imperfections.

In my childhood I had the opportunity to observe several good marriages as I stayed in relatives’ homes. My mother’s two older sisters and her brother had very fine, compatible mates. Aunt Edna was married to Heyward Benton. Aunt Dora was married to Frank Ellison. Uncle Bill Bailey was married to Aunt Lorene. I also spent a lot of time in my Uncle Sherwood Herndon’s farmhouse. He was Daddy’s brother and was married to my Aunt Janelle. These couples were my role models. I observed closely what a loving marriage was all about. I also spent time and was influenced by four other sets of aunts and uncles. These couples never seemed to have any disagreements. They expressed their love for each other openly. I felt safe and secure in their homes. Every child needs to know what the inside of a good marriage looks and feels like. I watched and learned.

My first marriage was a marriage of convenience. Our union, performed by a justice of the peace, a probate judge, was doomed from day one. Clark Huck Evans was a wonderful, generous, fun person, but we had very little in common. Not only were we separated by an ocean because he was serving overseas in the military, we were separated by our value systems and our ambitions. The only time we actually spent together as husband and wife was a two-day honeymoon and a three-week leave from the Army after we had been married about a year. Huck, who is now deceased, was emphatic that he didn’t want me to continue in college; he thought that college was absolutely a waste of my time. I decided he was a waste of time. I pursued a divorce at the age of twenty. He didn’t answer the pleadings. (I realize this sounds callous, but please don’t judge me. You don’t know the whole story.)

By the grace of God, my second marriage to Ted Wyndham has lasted for forty-seven years. I haven’t become an expert on marriage, but I have learned a few things on the journey that I’d like to share with you. After all these years, I can honestly say that we have learned to live in harmony with each other. Beautiful harmony. What has made our marriage work? Four Cs and one L: common values, common interests and faith, communication skills, and compatibility, all interlaced with the big L–love.

C—COMMON VALUES

When I met Ted at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, I was working my way through college and raising my daughter Angela, along with help from my parents. I was employed five hours a day for an attorney in an insurance company. I ate my sandwich in my lap while driving from campus to the office. When I entered the building, I drank water from the fountain in the foyer. Five days a week, that was my schedule. Almost every weekend I went home to Walterboro to be with Angela.

Ted was working day and night and attending law school in between. He was actually holding down five jobs. He worked as a page in the Senate. He worked at the camera shop uptown. He retouched negatives by the hundreds in the wee hours of the morning for a commercial photographer. He played lead guitar in a rock and roll band. Last but not least, he sold Fuller brushes door-to-door in his spare (?) time.

This young man has got potential, I thought. He told me that he had attended his first two years of college at High Point, North Carolina, on a full basketball scholarship. In the summer after his sophomore year, he moved to USC, having been recruited to play on their basketball team. While scrimmaging with the team, he broke his little finger. He hadn’t officially signed an agreement and so, along with his little finger, his scholarship plans were smashed. He hitched a ride home to Myrtle Beach to ask his parents for tuition for the fall semester. They told him that they were sorry; they didn’t have any money to give him, but they knew that he could make it on his own. Three important things they had given their only child were a whole lot of love, self-confidence, and determination.

For that first semester at USC, Ted lived on fifty cents a day. For lunch he ordered a glass of water in a diner. Then he used the sugar and cream on the table to mix a drink. His big meal of the day was a hamburger at supper that he could buy for fifty cents. Every time I think about his going hungry during those months, it makes me want to cry. I didn’t ever go hungry. But Ted was determined to earn his degree; he was determined to be successful. He added job upon job so that every waking minute outside of class was consumed with work. One of his first jobs was teaching dancing at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. He had taken tap dancing for eleven years, and he was a natural dance teacher.

When we met during his second year in law school, he told me about his work; I told him about mine. He was no longer poor; he even had a car of his own. A pretty one, I might add. And he was muscular and handsome. He was more articulate than anyone I had ever dated. Handsome, ambitious, and articulate too! Oh my! Each of us shared our dreams for the future. We both liked to talk, but we both knew how to listen. Ted valued his education; I valued mine. Actually, I prized mine.

I plan to be somebody someday, he said.

Oh my! So did I.

Ted had a line a mile long, and I bought it–hook, line, and sinker! He rattled on about honesty and integrity and justice. As young as I was then, I still had sense enough to know that a man’s character is the most important thing about him, not his car–as I had thought as a teenager–and Ted seemed to be overflowing with strength and depth of character. He also shared his faith in God with me; I shared with him my deep-rooted spiritual beliefs. Also, we had both lived in the country as children. We had grown up in the city, but we had country in our bones. We both claimed to be from the low country. He had grown up on the banks of the Waccamaw River outside of Conway, South Carolina. I lived inland in Walterboro, which is near Beaufort and Charleston. We often kidded each other about our roots. My contention is that the Myrtle Beach area isn’t the real low country. Now what do you think?

We both shared a very strong work ethic. We both valued money, but we wanted to work in professions where we could make a difference. My divorce was final. Ted was actually engaged to someone else when we first dated, but after one date with me, he broke off the engagement. Honestly! On our third date, we were both talking about marriage but were willing to wait a year until I graduated. I was in love for the first time, way down deep in my soul. I was convinced that the Holy Spirit had led me to the man I was destined to spend my life with, my very own Prince Charming, my own white knight.

C—COMMON INTERESTS AND FAITH

When Ted first slid his hand in mine, tears welled up in both our eyes as we stared at each other in disbelief. Oh my goodness! We both felt an electric spark running through our bodies. But there was to become much more than the physical attraction between us. Our common interests at the time were music, dancing, theater and, extremely important, our faith.

Ted took me on many of his band gigs. The Vikings (Ted’s band) played often at the air force bases at Sumter and at Myrtle Beach and at the army base at Fort Jackson in Columbia. At those clubs, there were lots of lonely soldiers looking for a dancing partner. Ted let me know in certain words that he didn’t want me to dance with anybody who came over to my table, so I learned to move my legs and arms in frantic rhythm while sitting in the chair. I think I became the best chair dancer in the state of South Carolina. I was a go-go girl before there were go-go girls! During breaks, Ted played the jukebox, and we danced