The Door Back In

By B. Barrow Hamby

Each of these fifty-two essays was originally published in a small town newspaper as a column entitled Notes from Home. Their publication stretched over a period of five years. Although the message of each essay is unique, and there was no particular connection intended by the author among them when each was written, readers may possibly discern an overarching theme. That "theme" encompasses the sense that if we all perhaps slowed down the pace of our busy lives just a little, and took time to consider everyday sights and experiences all around us, we might very well discover many messages embedded in the commonplace. These unexpected, often winsome messages can potentially awaken us to some things that may have slipped from our memory - but that are truly essentials of life. The reader may conclude that he or she really does not want to let those values slip away, after all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: B. Barrow Hamby
• Release date: Aug 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989910316

B. Barrow Hamby

Beverlie Barrow Hamby has "worn many hats" over the course of her life. In her younger years she worked in medical research as a molecular biologist, and occasionally as an adjunct college professor. Later, after she and her husband adopted their two children, she dedicated her life to the privilege of motherhood and to home-schooling her son and daughter over the next twenty years. Beverlie describes herself also as having all her life been a "searcher," not ever quite able to settle in to living life merely on the surface. Now she has returned to a "first love": writing.

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The Door Back In

Food for Thought for Each Week of the Year

The Door Back In

Copyright © 2013 by B. Barrow Hamby

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All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of B. Barrow Hamby. Requests for information should be addressed to B. Barrow Hamby, [e-mail] or visit her website at www.hungry2knowhow2live.com .

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible unless otherwise noted.

Scripture quotations marked AB are from The Amplified Bible, Old Testament. Copyright © 1965, 1987, by the Zondervan Corporation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Or The Amplified Bible, New Testament. Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1987, by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved

Editing and formatting by ChristianEditingServices.com

Cover design by Shannon Herring of ChristianEditingServices.com

Cover photo from iStockphoto.com

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This book is dedicated to the memories of

my father and mother,

Arthur Elliott Barrow and June Makepeace Barrow,

and my father-in-law,

Joseph Lawrence Hamby;

and also to my mother-in-law,

Betty Jo Staples Hamby.

Each of you, in your own unique way,

has given me a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6)

May I be faithful to pass it on.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I: As We Should Be

Part II: Knocked Down or Lifted Above?

Part III: In What Direction Am I Living?

Part IV: Springs Along the Path

Part V: Teach the Children

Part VI: Pondering

Author Page

Notes

Preface

This book is a collection of brief thoughts and heart calls, noted down from home life, nature, and various life experiences, that may draw us back to where we should be,

To places of being as we really want to be that somehow slipped from our higher levels of conscious thinking,

Places brought again to our awareness by an awakened focus on things we had forgotten.

Perhaps by moving too fast or being too busy, we have lost touch with deeper but also simpler values that are really not very far away.

Gradually, undetectably, we came out.

We forfeited sensitivity, discernment, and perspective.

Now, where is the door back in?

If we slow down just a little, contemplate our steps just a little, and open our eyes just a little more to the very things all around us in our days, perhaps we will notice what we missed just a moment before, there right in front of us—

A door back in.

PART I - As We Should Be

We know. We all know. We know the word ought. We may not like it, and we may certainly come up with countless ways to try to avoid its implications. But it doesn't go away. It is inherent in the corporate consciousness of the human race. Inevitably, yet tragically, it is possible for individuals to override the sense in their deepest being of the way they should be. That's because our Creator did not choose to make us robots; rather, He deliberately chose to create us with free wills. We are free to choose either to believe that His ways are best for us or that we know better.

There has been no era in history or any place on the globe where people have not heard the story in one way or another. We read the book or watch the movie. Here comes the interloper and there sits the victim, blindly unaware of the intruder and his evil intentions. We see the trespasser's sinister manipulations as he gradually encroaches over boundaries into that which is not his to take. It is strangely reminiscent of the snake that silently, relentlessly, stalks its sleeping prey until its slithering coils have smothered its victim, and down it goes behind the snake’s jaws into a dark and hopeless death. In a similar way, the life we wanted to live is swallowed up.

There are innumerable different scenes and variations on this same theme; but the show goes on in every generation, in every individual life. An enemy is afoot and on the prowl. And as a result, things are not the way we want them to be or the way we sense they ought to be. Ah, there is that niggling word ought again. Perhaps, after all, there is more to the story than merely the bad guy and the innocent victim. The stage is set. It is our planet. The plot is set. It is conflict—violent conflict—between good and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness. And whether we are aware of it or not, each one of us is a participant in the age-old drama.

No, we don't want disease and death and wounded lives and broken hearts. We don't want cruelty, dishonesty, unfaithfulness, assault, and abuse. We don't want calamities and disasters and famines and nature itself groaning in anguish, wanting its realm to be as it somehow knows it should be. But we do want a certain thing, and that particular desire is a key factor in this seemingly out-of-control script. We want to be our own boss, to put ourselves on the throne, to force our own Maker to abdicate. That is the hook into us the Adversary was looking for, that ramification of his own core desire. And it is the hook we gave him. He tenaciously latched on to our free-will choice. Unwittingly, we teamed up with our very destroyer against our best Friend, our Creator, our loving Father. And so, the conflict rolls on and on.

Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, the conflict's ultimate resolution has already been determined. Yes, the last chapter of this book of the human drama has indeed been written. The battle has been won. What we foolishly gave away has been won back for us, won by a strange battle, a battle of eternal significance and consequence. It was won on a cross. Now, it is in our hands to write our individual conclusions to the story. I am free to choose a new ought from a renewed heart and, thereby, recover my stolen inheritance. I ought to be what my God's good purposes made me to be. By the power of His Son's shed blood, I will be. And may each freed life help other lives be set free!

Week 1 - So Long, Single

Since I was an older woman of age thirty-three when I got married, I can say I’d had some experience in what it’s like to be single. A lot of you, I’m sure, married in the freshness of your youth. I suppose you may have had a little growing up to do after you were married, some of which I was able to at least attempt to accomplish before I was married. I don’t know. You tell me! At any rate, I was single long enough to learn how strong a yearning could develop within for the companionship of that special someone. At times, I wondered if a special someone for me existed somewhere on this globe. At first, I enjoyed being single. There was a certain thrill to the freedom of it, no doubt about it. But when I passed the age of thirty, somewhat of a desperation began to edge into my general outlook on life. I discovered in due time, however, that desperation is not a very healthy state of mind in which to abide.

I needed to face the very real possibility that I might be single for the rest of my life. I needed to overcome my fear of and distaste for that. I needed to knock the wind out of the sails of my desperation. But I didn’t know how. Oh, how sluggish and dull-minded I have been sometimes in realizing the right place to go for direction! I don’t reckon any of you have ever been like those parents at 2:00 a.m. on Christmas morning who are trying to put together a couple of bicycles for the kids, wrenching this and breaking that and bending whatever all out of shape. And then it dawns on you (dear, sweet dawning of light): Oh, yeah! Maybe the manufacturer put some instructions in the box. Now, where are they? Hmmm . . . Well, the bright idea came to me: why not go to my manufacturer, my Maker? Surely, He had the blueprint for my life.

And you know, guidance did come my way. And it was good. It came through a wise, elderly gentleman in his seventies, a man of God. It may seem simplistic to you, but, I tell you, it took every bit of the sting of that desperation out of me, truly. This was what he shared with me. He asked me what I thought the difference was between being a single woman and being a spinster. I really had no idea what he was getting at, although I did think spinster was an old-fashioned word with a rather negative connotation. I didn’t want to be one! Observing my puzzlement, he went on to explain: A married woman has to be concerned with the needs of her husband and children. A single woman doesn’t really have to think of anyone else but herself. Then he helped me to see that, because I had no husband or children who needed me, it would be easy to become increasingly self-centered to the point where my world could become very narrow and my concerns petty. I could possibly turn into the stereotypical, crotchety, old spinster. But if I sought to notice the needs of people around me in my unique circle of acquaintances and contacts, and if I found ways to meet some of those needs, then I could potentially be as fulfilled as the married woman who meets the needs of her family. I was at peace, then, with being a single woman, that kind of single woman, if so be it. The choice was mine.

In the very same sense, not one of us has the excuse to feel lonely or useless or that our life has no real significance. For all of us, isn’t there at least one person whose path crosses ours who needs something we can give?

Week 2 - Turning the Hearts of the Fathers to the Children

Have you seen the highway billboards with their huge letters for all the world to see, stating that Real Men Are Good Fathers? I’m glad someone cares enough about the matter to make the point. But at the same time, I am a little saddened that the point would need to be made. Wouldn’t you think the principle would be so basic that everyone would understand it?

Of course, we all have an image of what the term a mother heart means. I think of the mother bear and how she defends her cubs, and I find an accurate picture of the tenacity of a mother’s love. The mother who has nursed her infant at her breast may find that weaning her little one away from their close bond is as difficult for her as for the child being weaned. And other letting gos of one’s children as they grow older probably don’t come any easier. A mother will always be a mother, even when she’s ninety years old and her baby is seventy. To a woman with a true mother heart, her children will always be uppermost in her concern, and I believe, if events came down to it, she would give her life for them. I have known it to be so.

But is there such a thing as a father heart? I’ve heard it said that a man’s meaning and identity come through his life’s work. I can see the truth in that. I believe that is the way the male of the species is wired. After all, it is primarily his responsibility to be the breadwinner, the provider. Thousands of generations of humankind and all the cultures of the world confirm this. But though it be true, is it the whole truth? Can his work alone bring a man his greatest fulfillment? Perhaps the answer lies in what I've read has been heard from many a man on his deathbed. It is not that he wished he’d spent more time at the office or on the job or had accomplished more in his workplace; but rather, so often it is this: I wish I had spent more time with my family. For too many men, there is that aching regret: My children grew up, they say, "and I didn’t even notice. I was always so busy. One day they were small, and now, so quickly, they’re gone. I was just too busy, too