An Answered Prayer

Back in 2011, when we were interim pastors at a small church in Moncks Corner, SC, I was on the receiving end of a prayer answered in such a way that I can only call it a miracle.

We had given up our house the previous August, which was the last time I had seen my younger daughter. At the time we left, I had not seen my older daughter, or grandson, in a year. By the time Christmas of 2010 came around, I was praying to see my children. Little did I know that God would take me half way across the country to answer this particular prayer.

In December, just a couple of weeks before Christmas, my younger daughter, Jaime, called to tell me she had joined the Army National Guard, and would be shipping out to Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, in January. I was over 300 miles away, and wanted to see her off, but it was just not to be. When she left that January, she warned me that she would not have use of her cell phone throughout boot camp, so to expect to hear from her in May. I resigned myself that she was off the grid for the next four months, and tried to talk to Rachel, my older daughter, on Facebook as much as possible during that time. She lived in Bloomington, IN, which was about 16 hours from us.

Then, on March 22, the phone rang, and it was Jaime, crying so hard I could barely understand what she was saying. Finally, through the sniffles and tears, I gathered that she had sent her dad money to come see her graduate, but that he was refusing to come, and could I get to North Carolina, pick up her car, and drive to Missouri, and be there in less than 48 hours?

I knew I had to go, but how was I going to pull this off?? I began to pray, and made a phone call to the worship leader of the church. He agreed to take me to the bus station in Charleston the next day. With that squared away, I called her dad. I told him to have Jaime’s car at the bus station in Waynesville, NC, the next night at 10:30pm, that I was going to Missouri to see Jaime graduate.

He was quite surprised to hear that, but was there when the bus arrived. I had ridden seven hours, through a torrent of rain, and was tired, but determined to drive all night to get to her graduation by 11am the morning.

When I approached the car-in the pouring rain-he remained in the driver’s seat, so I hopped in the passenger’s side. He informed me that he had decided to go, since he had someone to help him drive. I looked down at the gear shift….it was a stick shift, which I had completely forgotten about. I hadn’t driven a stick since 1997, and figured I was probably very rusty. I told him that he could drive a while if he wanted, and we would switch out later on. So, we got on I-40 west, and headed for Missouri. Now, as if me just getting to North Carolina wasn’t miracle enough, under the circumstances, the getting to Fort “Lost-in-the-Woods’, as it is aptly nicknamed, was altogether a miraculous journey.

Here I was, traveling with my ex-husband, the father of my children, which I was not expecting to do. Driving relaxes my mind, so the peace I had looked forward to was non-existent. Then, all he talked about was wrestling, fishing, and his new girlfriend. (At the time of this journey, we had been divorced for 16 years, and I really hoped he would have matured some during that time. WRONG!) So, by the time we got to Nashville, TN, around 2 am, the rain had stopped, so I got in the driver’s seat for a while. I wasn’t too confident that I would be able to change gears smoothly, but it turned out to be like riding a bicycle-it all came back to me by the time we got out of the gas station parking lot.

Then, my next test came: morning rush-hour traffic and road construction through St. Louis in 8 lanes of traffic. I come from the mountains of western North Carolina…. four-lanes are as wide as it gets. (I had driven in Atlanta traffic once, but that is a whole other story!) I gripped the steering wheel, took a deep breath, and didn’t let the surrounding traffic break my concentration. By the time we got to another gas station an hour past St. Louis, I was ready to get back into the passenger’s seat!

As we passed through the security gates, the clock said 10:38am. As we followed the broken directions, it took us only moments to get lost. Fort Leonard Wood is a little town all on its own, complete with a hospital, 2 bowling alleys, and a myriad of brick buildings.  When I was in high school, the building  was located on the campus of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. There, all the buildings are clearly marked. Fort Leonard Wood looks like WCU, with the exception of clearly marked buildings!

So, we drove around for several minutes, looking for ‘Baker Theatre’. It was nowhere to be found! As the time soared closer to 11am, I prayed to God, “Surely You’re not gonna let us get THIS close and miss it!” I suggested we go back to the beginning, and try again. We did, and had gone only one block when we came upon a truck with an out-of-state tag. Excitedly, I said to follow it, that they also may be going to the graduation. Sure enough, they were. As we sat down in the back row, the lights went off, and the time was 10:54am.

That was Thursday, March 24, 2011. We spent the next two days with Jaime, as she didn’t have to be back on base until 6am Sunday morning. After a tearful goodbye, we headed back the way we had come, except at St. Louis, we continued through Illinois, into Indiana, getting to Rachel’s house about 2pm. Even though our time was limited, I got to spend the next three hours with her and my grandson. Another tearful goodbye later, we got on the road heading to North Carolina. 

By the time I got back to the little church in Moncks Corner, SC, I had been gone five days total, and I was tired from all the driving. But, it was well worth it-God had given me an answered prayer! 

‘Go Get Him, He Is a Special Dog’

For my daughter’s 15^th birthday, she begged for a dog. Not just any dog; she had her heart set on a large male dog, black, that she wanted to name ‘Buddy’. She pestered me for weeks, but I would not budge from my original ‘No!’

We lived, at that time, with someone who took in every stray and those injured on the interstate. There were already 14 dogs on the premises, besides about two dozen cats, and a horse. All my money was poured into animals that weren’t even mine. They ate better than we did.

I had nothing against dogs; I was raised around animals of all sorts on a small farm. However, I could not justify feeding another animal. Finally, after several weeks of being badgered, I gave in and let Rachel ‘look’ for a dog in the Iwanna paper. I fully expected her to find nothing, given the boundaries she had given herself. I was wrong. The second ad held all the promise of her wishes being fulfilled.

“Momma, LOOK…it’s a male Lab-mix puppy, just six weeks old, black, and HE’S ALREADY NAMED BUDDY!” My heart sank…..what was I going to do now? I told Rachel I would ‘think about it.’ That night, when I went to bed, I prayed a sincere prayer to the Lord. ‘What do I do?…. I don’t want to disappoint Rachel again, and I can’t afford to feed another dog! Help!’ I fell into a troubled sleep, weighing the pros and cons in my head. Sometime during the night, the Lord woke me up with the words ‘Go get him, he is a special dog’ spoken audibly into my right ear.

The next morning, a Tuesday, I told Rachel we would make a call later in the day, and inquire about the puppy. She was ecstatic! I was self-employed, and traveled about an hour to work, building rock walls and gardens, and general landscaping. Near lunchtime, I made a call and talked to a really nice Christian lady who told me the dog’s story.

She , her husband, and daughter, had been to Smiley’s Flea Market the weekend before. It had been her daughter’s ninth birthday, and as they walked along, she saw a man selling puppies for $50 each. She ran up, as children do, wanting to pet them. It turned out that the parents of the puppies were both registered bird dogs, as wells as show dogs in their sport, owned by someone locally. An accidental breeding had taken place, and the puppies were half Labrador Retriever and half Golden Retriever.

They left the man selling the puppies, and continued to walk around the flea market. When they returned to their starting point, the man only had one puppy left, after beginning with five. He called them over, and told the parents that he would give the daughter the last puppy-Buddy-for her birthday. So, they brought him home that Sunday.

When I asked the reason she was getting rid of him after having him for only a week, she explained that she had nine cats, and that Buddy terrorized them by chasing them constantly. Her old tom cat had left the second day, and had not returned. She emphasized that she wanted him to go to a good home, but that her cats took priority. She and the daughter had compromised , and result was that Buddy would have to go, in favor of receiving a new kitten. I made arrangements to go the following Thursday.

The puppy that greeted us was all feet and ears, but Rachel picked him up and did not put him down until she put him in our SUV. All the woman asked for was the $20 that she had spent on a bag of dog food. Rachel gladly paid her, and we set out on the two hour drive back to work. That first day, he began to show me what a special dog he was.

I was cutting some overhanging branches from a maple tree from a client’s driveway using spring-operated loppers on a pole. The branch was almost out of reach, even with the full extension of the saw. I needed to get a better grip on the rope to pull the blade to make the cut. My girls were behind the house weeding a flower bed, and did not hear me call them. However, Buddy was sitting just a few feet away from me, watching every move I made with pricked ears and his head turned to the side. Just for a laugh, I called him to me, and put the knot at the end of the rope in his mouth, telling him to ‘hold it.’ As if he understood exactly what I needed, he closed his mouth on the knot, set back on his haunches, keeping the tension on the blade while I got a better grip. He did this twice for me, until I got the branch cut, then I patted him on the head, telling him what a good dog he was. He was such a cute little fellow, sitting there , looking back at me. He was about the size of a large house cat, weighing 13 pounds. But, he grew fast!

 

We got Buddy a month and a half before Rachel’s birthday, and by time it actually rolled around, she had found her a boy to have a crush on, and Buddy was forgotten. He went to work with me everyday, and hardly left my side. As my life in the relationship I was in spun out of control, he developed a protective toward me.

If I was in the bathroom too long, he would come and nose the door open, with a ‘just checking’ look on his face, then back away. If there were time I had to leave him at home, he would be overly excited when I came home, whining and circling around me endlessly. Of course, he reacted the same way if I had just walked out to the mailbox!

In November, 2006, I got out of the shower-my feet still a bit too wet-and fell on the tile floor. The first thing that hit was the back of my head. All the lights went out on impact, but I was still conscious. Buddy was the only other ‘person’ in the house, and he circled me continuously, whining, until I was able to figure out where ‘up’ was. I went to the emergency room, where they gave me five staples to close the gaping hole in my head, and told me I had a concussion. (I lost almost all of my taste and smell capabilities because of the accident, but thankfully, seven years later, I have regained about 95% of my taste, and about 25% of my smell!)

As the years passed by, I saw him train a horse to not be afraid of, or violent toward, small dogs. One summer, as a momma cat was having kittens under a camper cover for a pick-up truck, Buddy crawled in with her, inspecting each newborn kitten as it came out, and keeping the other curious cats away by putting his front paws between the kittens and the trespassing cat. If they tried to get beyond that barrier, he would inch closer, and put his body in their path.

The summer he was two years old, I took him with me to visit some cousins that lived about an hour away. After being there a little while, she wanted to go see another cousin that had just received a two-month old baby, born addicted to drugs.

My cousin, Keitha, along with her husband, has committed their life to helping babies born this way by being a foster parents. She had had Tavares two days, and he was just two months old. When we got there, I asked Keitha if I could bring Buddy inside, since I didn’t bring a leash, and he was completely house- and car- broke. She said yes, and Buddy came in and circled the car seat sitting in the floor in front of the sofa.

He had never been around a baby before, especially a newborn, but he was curious. He laid down beside the sleeping baby, taking up a vigil that I believe was his instinctive nature. A few times when the baby would wake up and cry, he would raise his head, looking in curiously. Keitha would gently rock him for a few seconds, until he fell back asleep, and then Buddy would settle back down, resting his head on his front paws. We were there about three hours, and he never moved from that spot until it was time to leave.

When we gave up our house, back in 2010, I had to give Buddy up, knowing we could not take him with us into an uncertain future. I prayed over who to give Buddy to; giving him up was very much like giving up one my own children. A neighbor who helped us disassemble our house had an eleven year old boy, Wade. He thought Buddy was THE dog! Whenever they came over, Buddy followed him every step he made. When our living room furniture was gone, we all sat on the floor. Wade would sit cross-legged, and Buddy would lay down, putting his head in Wade’s lap. It was like watching a modern version of Timmy and Lassie.

So, that is where Buddy is now. I’ve not seen him in two and a half years. But I still miss him terribly. I dream of him often, and there are times that I wish I could just go get him back, but I know that is impossible right now. Some might think I am overreacting, that I would love a dog that much, but God was right-he IS a special dog, and saw me through many hard times.

The above picture is one of my favorites of Buddy. He loves the snow, and our last winter in North Carolina, he had plenty of it to play in! It is ironic that his parents were bird dogs, because I tried many times to ‘sic’ him on the herons when I lived near the Tuckasegee River. He was not interested. Oh, and by the way, in all those years around the dozens  of  cats,  he never  chased a one. But, he has a great affinity for rocks, and usually would bring one home every time we went on outdoor excursions!