113a: Faith of her husband

Sunday Morning

There was this incredibly annoying sound, and I sat bolt upright, staring around in confusion. Caleb, laying next to me, stirred and moaned, but the sound went on. Finally, across the room, half buried in a pile of books, I saw a clock radio. Grabbing a robe from beside the bed I went across the room and, finally, got it turned off.

“Morning, love,” I heard from behind me, and turned to see Caleb sitting up, yawning, stretching, and staring at me.

“Morning,” I said, coming over for a kiss… not as pleasant an experience as last night. He really needed to brush his teeth. He pawed at me but, “What’s with the alarm?”

“Church,” he said, swinging his legs out of bed and reaching for his boxers. “Sunday School.”

I groaned, remembering that his church… my new church… did, indeed, start earlier than ours. “I’ll go grab a shower, then,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, collapsing back into bed. “Let me know when its free.”

I was a little disappointed he didn’t want to come with me but, when I got to the hallway and saw a girl coming out of the bathroom, I realized why he waited. “Hey girls,” I said, coming in. Three of his girl cousins were there, and they greeted me eagerly.

“Roberta!” the youngest one said, even giving me a hug.

“You guys sleep all right?” I asked, reaching in and turning on the shower.

“Oh, no, we talked alllll night,” the oldest one said. “You?”

Luckily I was facing away from her and she couldn’t see my blush. She was too young to have any idea what she had asked. “Well, the party went kind of late.”

“Mom put us down early!” the middle one wined. “Long before the And now we have to get up early to go to church!”

“When you finish here tell Caleb, will you? He wants to come in.”

“’K”, the oldest one said, and I hung my robe up and slipped quickly into the shower.

“Finally!” a male voice said, some minutes later, just as I was finishing up. “Thanks for sending that cousinette to get me,” he said. “What is that verse about a loud greeting early in the morning?”

I laughed and reached out for a towel, starting to dry just as he pulled the curtain open. “Wow!” he said, “You look wonderful wet!”

I blushed, and dried, and grabbed my robe, while he stepped into the shower. “I’ll see you down at breakfast,” I said.

“Darling!” River said, meeting me outside the door and, dramatically, kissing me again. Luckily she had made allowance for our ‘conservative values’ and was dressed, well covered, in a bizarre set of pygamas, all covered with scenes from all over the world, including the Eiffel Tower right up the center of her chest. “Thank you for letting me stay. The little girls were quite amusing. I will shower and be in to debrief you. This boy had best be treating you right.”

She went to go in the bathroom, but I stopped her, “Caleb is showering,” I said.

“I will wait,” she said, reaching for the handle again.

“You will wait, out here,” I said. “Come to my room, we can talk now.”

“You are so plebian,” she complained, but went willingly enough to my room, and we ‘debriefed’ while I dressed for breakfast. I had just assured her, for the third time, that he was ‘treating me right’ when he, himself, came in the door.

“Well, I suppose I will have to believe you,” she sighed. And then, in an almost normal tone of voice, said, “Is the shower free?” to Caleb.

“Yes,” he said, staring at her pajamas.

“Good,” she said. A few seconds later we heard her pounding on the bathroom door, “Girls! Let me in, I need to shower. Girls!”

I giggled and closed the door, and Caleb watched as I collapsed on the bed in giggles.

—

As we walked, hand in hand, to the Sunday School classroom, I couldn’t help comparing the reality to my dream. There was no ‘deja vu’ like I had experience with Jervis. Everyone came up and congratulated me, of course, like they had; but not the same people in the same way with the same words or anything. And the text was nothing like I had imagined.

“We’ll be dealing with a very difficult issue, today and for the next few Sundays,” the elder said. “An issue that divides todays church, both from itself and from the historical church. Indeed, I expect that several of you are going to be very uncomfortable. But I would ask that you not only listen with an open heart to what Scripture has to say, but that you feel free to question and even challenge what I say and how I interpret it. We are going to be looking at the blessing of children.”

I sat there, very confused. Who on Earth didn’t see children as a blessing? But then he read the first text, Psalm 127-128 and I realized that we were going to be discussing ‘full quiver’. I glanced at Caleb. I knew what he thought about that. My folks agreed, although they hadn’t always… thus the big gap between Jenny and the twins. And Caleb’s folks… well, they had used birth control for a while and then, to their utter shock and disappointment, once they stopped, they had had miscarriage after miscarriage. I glanced around the room, nervously. I knew that probably most of these younger couples were using birth control. One of them, I even thought, was using the pill, which was abortifacent as well as birth control.

“But, pastor, you aren’t saying that we should just have children whether or not we can afford them?” a man asked, a few minutes later.

“What does ‘afford’ mean?” the pastor asked, leaning back. “When we look at history we see incredibly poor families having children, many children. Some of whom grow up to be incredibly important people.”

“It doesn’t matter how rich we are,” Caleb said. “God says that children are a blessing from him. Who are we to refuse one of God’s blessings?”

“It isn’t a question of refusing,” the other man argued. “It is a question of timing.”

“Timing is refusing,” Caleb said. “When you wait, you give up the children you would have had while not waiting.”

“I’m surprised to hear you arguing against birth control,” the man said. “After all your folks only had the one…”

“My parents…!”

“Excuse me,” the pastor interjected. “Samuel, you don’t know, perhaps, that Caleb’s parents were never able to have children. Caleb is adopted. They’ve never made any secret of that fact, but you are relatively new to our church.”

“Oh, oh, I’m so sorry,” Samuel said, red faced.

“No, it was my fault,” Caleb said. “I get a little… emotional… about the issue. You see, they couldn’t just not have children,” He took a breath, “What the pastor didn’t tell you is that they had miscarriage after miscarriage. I grew up where, every few months, my folks would get excited because my mother was pregnant and then, a few weeks or, once, months, later, they had to tell me that we had lost another baby. We named them all, we even have a scrapbook, and they have never stopped trying.”

I stared at him. I hadn’t even known that! I mean, I always assumed they were still trying but, a scrapbook? Names?

The mood of the class totally changed after that. I’m not sure Samuel ended up convinced, but he was incredibly sobered, and kept glancing at his wife. And, after class, when everyone else had left, he came up to Caleb. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, taking his hand in an almost ‘hug’ way. And his wife hugged me and cried freely.

“Oh, and congratulations!” he said. “On your marriage and all. Funny way to do it, I hear.”

“You’re welcome to come over this week,” Caleb said.

“Oh, yeah, like you want us there for your honeymoon.”

“No, seriously. We will be having open house all week and we would love for you to come. It’s part of the deal.”

“Oh, ok. We should call first?”

“No. I mean, maybe…”

Samuel laughed. “I tell you what. I have half of Monday off. We’ll come by in the afternoon, but you don’t need to feel like you need to talk with us the whole time. I do want to talk about this issue, though. It sounds like you have really thought it through and… and have some personal experience I don’t have. My folks wanted two kids, a boy and a girl. They waited, and then tried, and out we popped. I never thought… I never even thought about anything different. Today’s class was a real shock for me, but your testimony…”

The silence lengthened and, eventually, I said to his wife, “So, we’ll see you on Monday? Afternoon?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” she said, and we hugged again.

—

“The ‘young adults’ class, indeed,” River said, when we met her in the hallway. “Young they may be, but ‘adults’, hardly. How could you have relegated me to such an oblivion?”

“Well, we could hardly have taken you to the ‘young married’ class, could we? I suppose you could have gone with my parents to the class on Ephesians.”

“That must have been more interesting. What is ‘Ephesians’?” she asked.

“A book in the Bible about grace.”

“Grace? Not the girl your husband asked me about?”

“No. Grace. As in, getting a free gift.”

“Oh. And what comes next?”

“The regulare service,” I said. “But I have to go, want to come?”

“Of course,” she said. “Even I, as countercultural as I am, have to bow to the necessity of holding up our flag against boys and engaging in the time honored ritual of female going to the bathroom with female. Let us go,” she said. She was always making crude, but subtle, puns like that.

At the door of the bathroom I bumped into a girl, and I had this bizarre feeling that, the last time I had seen her, she had been in tears. I spent the whole time in the bathroom trying to figure out why and then, suddenly, as we washed hands side by side at the sink, it came to me. “Say, could I talk to you? Outside?”

“Sure,” she said, looking at me very oddly.

River, with her usual lack of social sense (although I, personally, always thought that most of what she did was on purpose) followed us outside, causing the girl to stare even more. “What’s up?” she asked, when were far enough down the drive that no one could hear us.

“I need you to ask your boyfriend something. You do have a boyfriend, right? And he goes to the college?”

“Yeah. Fred.”

“That’s right. I need you to ask Fred something for me. I need you to ask him if he recently had a really mindblowing dream.”

The girl, whose name, I remembered now, was Sarah, paled. “How on Earth did you know? He called me up and talked to me, like, forever about it. About how he was two people at once, and how he got arrested, and tortured, and all.”

“I’m not sure what is going on,” I said. “But I’d really like to talk to him about it. Actually, my husband would like to talk to him. Could you set it up?”

While the girl and I were exchanging ‘contacts’ on our phone, I felt River’s eyes on me. Finally, when the girl had left, she said, “Again with the dream. This is serious to you, is it not?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very serious. More and more all the time, it seems. I can’t figure out how we could have ‘shared’ dreams like that.”

River will help then. I will find more of these people, who dreamed. I know people, and they know people. Soon you will have an entire list of dreamers. And not the kinds who do drugs.

“Ummm, great. But we need to be careful not to let the government in on it.”

“Ah, yes, the fascist pigs. We shall be careful,” she said, tossing her head. I almost laughed and followed her back into church.

—

“Tess!” I said, kissing her. “Stan!” I added and, for the first time in our relationship (and probably the last) he kissed me.

“I’m so glad you could come!” I said. They had, apparently, gone over to ‘my’ house first, as their car was parked there. “Come on in!”

They came in, and we visited, but I was nervous the whole time, more so when Caleb and his dad came in from the backyard. I knew what Caleb’s dad was going to do, and I agreed, I supposed, but I didn’t have to like it…

“Ah, so you must be Tess and Stan?” Caleb’s dad asked.

“Yes, yes sir,” Stan said, a little nervously. Caleb’s dad did have a funny look on his face. A few minutes later Stan came out, white faced, and said, “Tess, can I talk to you?”

The rest of us continued with our ‘party’ nervously, waiting without trying to seem to wait, for Tess and Stan to come back. And when they did come back, hand and hand, followed by Caleb’s father.

“I, umm,” Stan said, looking nervously at Tess, “I… Mr. Jones has asked us… and I wasn’t upset, actually, altho we will still…” he gulped, and then, when Tess squeezed his hand, he said, “I would like to call Tess, her, my wife.”

“And I am thrilled to call Stan my husband,” Tess said, “but if he thinks he’s getting out of the big marriage that I want, he’s got another thought coming.”

We all laughed and ‘congratulated’ them. “He wasn’t going to sleep apart if he could help it,” Tess whispered in my ear a few minutes later, “But he wasn’t going to agree without asking me.”

“You all already knew you were going to get married.”

“And, as River is oh so fond of pointing out, we are already ‘doing it’. But your father in law sure is funny. He was so serious. Stan made him explain it to me. We could sleep seperately, me with River, Stan on a couch. Or, since he knew we were already sleeping together, we could call ourselves married and sleep together, like you two were doing. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t get all moralizing or anything. He just gave us those two choices, and told us to pick.”

“Well I, myself, like what you picked.”

“So glad you are pleased. You Christians!”

I giggled, because she said it in a nice way, not at all ‘moralizing’.