A Book of Remembrance

By Brenda Letherman

Brenda had a sense of God’s presence in her early childhood, but her church’s legalism disguised God into someone she didn’t recognize. She abandoned religion and God in her desperate search for reciprocated love, trashing her life in the process. God intervened by using drastic measures that left her nowhere to turn, so she returned to Him. She ultimately found her lasting, true love tucked away in the greatest love story ever written, the Bible. She discovered that her Creator had gently wooed and won her through His music, creation, and the loving kindness of His Son. She finally found the romance she craved. And, thanks be to her God, she will never be the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781684094349

Book preview

The Beginning

You can live in a dreamworld for only so long because eventually you’ll have to awaken to reality. Life’s alarm clock jangled me to coherence when I found myself sitting in a jail cell in the dead of night, and I wondered, Where am I, and how on earth did I get here? Like an idiot, I hit the snooze button and wafted back into my nightmare. Adrian Rogers once asked, When you get where you’re headed, where will you be? I wish I’d asked myself that question years ago.

I made the choices that warped me, yet I wasn’t even aware that I was intentionally making choices. That’s how drifting is. Life’s tides and currents carried me to places I wouldn’t have chosen had I been paying attention. As the barnacles of rejection, low self-esteem, and outright evil adhered, my ship began to sink. And I most assuredly wasn’t looking to the Star for guidance. Now with 20/20 hindsight looking through God’s perspective, I recognize the life jackets and rescue boats that He supplied all along my course. The crazy part is, while I was treading water, floundering in my darkness, God’s written Word and His Lamp were always there for me. But He had to let me shipwreck before I could see His lighthouse.

Wait! I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me begin at the beginning.

For eighteen years, I grew with the surrounding cornfields and soybeans on a farm in Indiana. Captivating, I know. My brother, Dave, preceded me by seventeen months, and when I was born, he was not thrilled to the point that he threw a toy metal tractor at my mother while she was holding me, or maybe he was aiming for me and was a poor shot. My brother never did hide his feelings very well.

Growing up, I would have told you that farm life was boring, but in retrospect, I had a storybook childhood in Xanadu. I did the usual things that farm kids do and even managed to survive the pig-riding, catapulting into haymows from ropes suspended from the barn beams, and falling out of the apple tree and getting the breath knocked out of me—while Dave prayed for Jesus to save my soul since he thought I was dying too. My first five years, I idolized Dave. He was my sole playmate. I was very much the tomboy and insisted that he address me as either Bob or Jim when we were at play. I called my brother Davey because he was my best friend. He was my sun and my moon.

We didn’t have a neighborhood that provided other children to consort with, but the farm offered scores of animals and pets; and I really didn’t miss the presence of other kids as long as I could dress my kitties in doll clothes and confer with the cows when I had a weighty problem to discuss. I never cared for the pigs; they were revolting, so I didn’t confide in them, and the sheep were so clueless that they followed me without knowing where I was going! Regardless, a menagerie of livestock and pets accompanied me as excellent companions as I roamed the countryside. I valued their friendship because my pets didn’t disappoint, reject, or inflict people-pain.

Dogs are evidence that love can be messy. Their body odor and disgusting moistness is repelling. Their tongues dangle and slaver foamy ropes of saliva, and getting a drink is akin to a tidal wave. A dog can’t even walk down the road without leaving a trail of fluid in its wake! In contrast, cats are dainty, self-cleaning, much too fastidious to stink, and their tongues are contained in their mouths where they belong. Kittens are my favorite: adorable and cuddly with saucer-eyes and straight-up antenna tails. And the fact that God installed them with purrs is really over the top.

I don’t recall never having cats since they were an integral part of farm life. Everyone on the farm had chores, cats included. Their duty was to eliminate grain-eating vermin and hay-soiling birds, and although we fed our cats, they were expected to get their own dessert. There was no trash service in the country, so we burned our wastepaper, which at times contained morsels of food. One day while Mom and I were burning trash, the cats were darting in and out of the fire scavenging food scraps. Mom called out, Hey, Brenda, your cat is smoldering! At our house putting the cat out had a different connotation.

As a child, I didn’t know that my critters would play definite roles in my life and that God would love me through my pets. The Creator so overflows with love that He spills it over into His animals! Psalm 139:15–16 discusses our Maker’s forming us in the womb. I prefer the way the KJV says it in verse 16, "Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."

I ponder that phrase, which in continuance were fashioned. God engineered me with the unique proclivities He planned to use for His future purposes. He made me a cat-lover for the day when I would need His stealthy solace by way of my cat, and via my tail-wagging, drooling buddy He would soothe the ache of loneliness. My built-in love of trees would eventually guide me to my destiny—serendipity? No, God. Our Lord knows exactly what He’s doing because He governs the beginning and the end.

My Father also endowed me with an appreciation of solitude. I had plenty of time not sullied by noise or distractions, and on our farm, I was granted the liberty to explore and contemplate. I was enchanted by Grandpa’s woods adjoining our property, and during the summer, I arose at dawn to spend time secluded among the trees. The wildlife inhabiting the woods captivated me. Rabbits and chipmunks darted so quickly I was never quite sure that these apparitions were reality or my imagination, adding to the eerie mystique. The moans of mourning doves chilled the already cool daybreak, and the early morning mist transformed the gloomy woods into a mysterious and somewhat spooky asylum, yet I always felt safe there. It was my childhood version of entering into "the secret place of the Most High" (Psalm 91:1). In His cathedral of trees, the formula of quiet isolation and time to ponder gained my entrance into God’s presence, and I intuitively felt His pleasure in my company. Time stood still in the woods.

As the morning sun burned away the vapor shroud, the tune of the woods music changed. The crickets’ stringed instruments gave way to woodwinds of breezes playing through the treetops. Songbirds took over the frogs’ chorale, and God’s orchestra crescendoed with humming insects and the percussion of woodpeckers seeking their breakfast. The woods were seldom silent; its symphony was muffled only by blankets of winter snow. But unlike the cacophony of the everyday world, the woods song was not raucous or distracting. It harmonized. It was soothing chapel music. In this sanctuary, I spent hours on my belly lying on a tree, which had fallen across a shallow pond, fascinated by the water spiders skating across the pond’s surface and the fairylike creatures swimming in the crystal clarity: tiny frogs, crawdads, polliwogs, water bugs, and strange near-microscopic size living things, and in so marveling, I joined with the creatures’ worship of our Creator.

It wasn’t all magic though. Life on a farm also involves routine chores and hard labor. Of course, Dave and I had the animals to help care for, and there were extra duties such as weeding the garden, mowing the yard, and even digging ditches to lay drainage tiles. Our whining, There’s nothing to do! was rewarded by Dad’s supplying us loathsome solutions to occupy our boredom. He’d send us out to glean ears of corn that the corn-picker had left lying in the fields. It seemed this always took place on the coldest day of the year, and our fingers would be frigid from prying corn from the glaciered snow, our feet as frozen as the corn. Mucking out the cow stalls wasn’t much fun either, but at least the barn was warm from the animals’ body heat.

On the flip side, we’d grumble about having to suffer the strenuous work of baling hay under the baking summer sun as Dave schooled me in the government’s child labor laws. Yet once those bales hit the barn, it was a totally different story. Then they became giant clover-scented Legos that we used to build tunnels. We constructed forts, which were woefully inadequate during corncob battles, and even shielded by these hay-bale fortresses, we still got walloped by high-velocity corncobs ricocheting off the barn wall behind us. Wholesome gutsy fun! The farm was practical training in accepting life’s responsibilities while enjoying the benefits.

My isolation was interrupted when we were with our cousins, Keith and John, and it was thrilling, as the youngest, to follow them in their rowdy adventures. We played barn basketball, which had basketball rules intermixed with football wherein you could tackle a player to get the ball. We had a lot of technical fouls called though. Our barn/basketball court was ancient, its flooring worn from years of supporting heavy tractors and hard use, and the boards underneath the basketball goal were exceptionally fragile. During one feverish game when all our feet were thundering under the basket, Keith jumped to retrieve the loose ball, caught it, and as he landed, the floor gave way beneath him. I distinctly remember the astonished look on his face as he disappeared through the floor to the cows below. I also can still see my brother gleefully snatching the ball from Keith’s departing hands and scoring his shot. Two points! Our play was rough and fierce, and I think that God gave me John to keep me from getting killed by the other two. There was no malevolence, just mundane boyish pranks like setting my hair on fire while playing with a cigarette lighter, stuff like that. Yeah, God was watching out for me from the very start.

I learned to read when I was very young, and I spent much of my childhood reading. My mother also loved to read, and our trips to the library were like going on a treasure hunt. God put a love of words in me, and I devoured books. Those summers on the porch swing reading book after book were ecstasy for me. I only wish I had read a few more inspiring, wholesome books. I remember a book called The Best of Everything. Even the title is deceptive. It was the story of a small-town girl who went to New York City and became independent and sophisticated with the nimbus of alcohol glamorizing her exciting career and romantic affairs. Pretty heady stuff for a farm kid. A few years ago, I read one of my mother’s Grace Livingston Hill books, very entertaining yet virtuous, and I wondered why I wasn’t provided books like these back then. Their influence may have made a difference in my perspective.

Our family wasn’t what I would call poor; we just didn’t have excess money. Farming is not very lucrative, so Dad worked a second job at night to support what Mom called his farming habit. We didn’t go on many family vacations, although we did take one trip to California of which I have a dim recollection. But our impromptu picnic lunches with Dad out in the sun-sweetened fields are deeply etched in my mind. Springtime’s radiance was no match for Dad’s smile of surprise and pleasure that thrilled me far more than anything Disneyland could offer. Many times I’d ride with Dad on the tractor as he circled the fields in the continuous farm dance of plowing, disking, planting, cultivating. The tractor’s engine made our ballroom quite noisy, and we couldn’t talk during our promenades, but just being his partner was fun. Words weren’t necessary; our mutual enjoyment was our unspoken communication. It doesn’t take monetary wealth to be happy, but the lack of it is certainly stressful. Our house sat far back from our gravel road, and I have a sharp mental picture of Mom one morning, frantically looking under the couch cushions to find four cents for milk money for me while I fretted hysterically as the school bus driver honked his horn for us at the end of the lane. Poor Mom.

We didn’t have excess cash, but I remember Mom coming home from town, carrying a sack just for me. I opened it, and there were two dazzling dresses; one a white cotton piqué with a yellow-checked sash, the other had a print with scarecrows and watermelons. Even though I preferred wearing overalls, these girly dresses were a prize. Knowing our financial situation, I was touched that Mom would surprise me with such a wonder. I was loved by my parents, and I knew it. As I have said, I had a very good childhood. It astounds me now that I would later become so warped.

Visiting my grandparents, who lived two fields away, was like stepping into the early 1900s. They were extremely old-fashioned and did old-world things like making apple butter over an outdoor cauldron. The evening before this event, the neighbors would gather for an apple snitzing wherein we all peeled apples. We had a snitzer on which you speared the apple and turned a crank that rotated the apple while a blade removed the peel in one long strip. We kids couldn’t decide whether operating the snitzer was the best job or turning the crank on the ice cream freezer. Because, of course, there would be apple pie and homemade ice cream for refreshments! We spent a lot of time at Grandpa’s house, lured by the intriguing activities of drying sweet corn, hog butchering, making lye soap, grinding flour, and canning garden vegetables, all those things you today just read about in books. My grandma actually wore a ruffled dust cap on her head just like in Little House on the Prairie.

We also had the sugar camp in our woods in early spring. When the maple tree sap awoke from its winter’s frozen sleep, we went with Grandpa to tap the trees. He would drive a little spigot into the tree, and we’d hang a bucket from it. The next several days, we would help him gather the sap buckets, loading them onto his boat, which was actually a sled-type contraption pulled by his Ferguson tractor, the rag-top SUV of that era. When enough sap was collected, Grandpa would boil it down into maple syrup in the gargantuan flat pan suspended over an open fire in the sugar camp. The camp was furnished with an old couch, and its walls consisted of racks of wood for the fire. Of course, an open fire always meant hot dogs and marshmallows—a kid’s dream come true! We sang and told stories, and I remember a lot of laughter.

We were raised in the church as good fundamental, Bible-believing Christians. We, meaning my brother and me, my parents, and their parents, and their parents—you get the idea. I’ve always wondered how a person’s lineage could be so saturated with preachers and missionaries and the like, yet there still be so much discord and downright meanness among them. I still do. My dad’s mother hated Mom, and Mom’s mother hated Dad; and the whole time, both viper-tongued women were sanctified churchgoers. I could not correlate this to the brotherly love mentioned in the Bible. Is it any wonder that, consequently, I wanted to extricate myself from family ties?

My grandpa, Dad’s dad, was different. He was my heart. He was not a very verbal man, but he obviously loved kids. He went sledding with us in the wintertime, he squirted us when he milked the cows, he loaded us onto the hammock under the willow tree with him until the hammock was so heavy it scraped the ground. He didn’t mind acting silly, and we’d have contests to see who could stand on their head the longest—Grandpa always won. I concluded that Grandpa was bald because he spent too much time on his head; however, he told us that growing up, he was such a good boy his mother constantly patted his head and wore out his hair. Anyway, he spent a lot of time at our house, I think probably to get away from Grandma.

For a week in the summer, Dave and I would attend kids’ church camp held at our denomination’s campgrounds. It was fun, but the real fun was at the grown-ups’ ten-day Campmeeting following our camp. One corner of the campgrounds was wedged into a dense woodland, flanked on two perimeters by trees. The hub of camp was a huge tabernacle building with wooden windows that were raised and secured by ropes for an open-air meeting. If you were a lucky kid, there was no more room inside, and you sat in lawn chairs outside the tabernacle during the preaching, and it was easier to goof around. Parents were more lenient if you were outdoors.

The campgrounds were a small self-contained community. Branching