Birthday Musings - Third Decade

Perhaps everyone has to learn to navigate disappointment, dashed dreams, and ruined hopes. This was the decade of discontent tempered by a deepening consecration and awareness of the One who does not disappoint. The decade opened with me finishing my junior year at Washington University in St. Louis where I majored in sociology - was doing a major independent study on changes in the role of the individual in Japan following World War II as it manifested in changes in the Japanese educational system. I was also taking Japanese, French, and Spanish. And then I got engaged and married in August. One miscarriage later I was pregnant with Esther and bed-ridden for the last six weeks until she was born at home attended by a neighbor not by design but because the doctor did not believe I was in true labor and did not arrive as planned. We lived in Hillsboro, attended and found a spiritual community at a small unaccredited Bible school and my degree was postponed for four years until after we returned to Missouri after spending time not achieving our goal in southern California. By the end of the decade, three miscarriages later, Nancy was born in Danville, Illinois, which is where I had my first significant job serving a nonprofit organization as the children's program coordinator for a battered woman's shelter. In that role I also traveled the state as the chairman of the children's committee of the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence to conduct the first survey of children's program standards in state funded women's shelters. This job is where I learned that very dark Mary Kay foundation turns white arms brown but does not easily wash away - a key experience that I used with the main character in my novel,  Pastor's Ex-Wife - available for too little money right now on Amazon Kindle. The job ended when premature labor threatened to end this pregnancy and once again I was put to bed. Nancy was born during the 1984 Summer Olympics in the Danville hospital- thankfully our friends took Esther and forced their father to stop watching whatever competition was on at the moment.