The Hands of God

 How God Used a Clock to Remind a Grieving Mother of His Promise

We experienced another of God's little miracles; the sort that come along when God needs to remind you he's still there. First a little background. It was March 7, 1975 around nine or ten o'clock in the evening. Sheila had been in labor since 2 am that morning. The doctor gave her something for pain and she was in and out of it. Labor pains would come and she'd sit up and holler. King babies come in 9 pound plus sizes with enormous heads. Matt was no different. Several of her friends and I were sitting with her, talking and waiting. 

Suddenly, she sat up, said, "Isaiah 54: 1 and 13." Then she passed out again. We looked it up in a Bible we had on the bedside table. It said, (vs. 1) "Sing aloud, O barren woman, you who have not been in labor; break forth into singing and rejoice, you who have not travailed with child; for more are the children of the barren than the children of her that is beloved by her husband, says the LORD. (vs 13) And all your sons shall be taught of the LORD; And great shall be the peace of your children."

Turns out we had to trust in that promise a lot with our boys, but God has "taught" all of our children over the years in one manner or the other. A little warning about that, though. God doesn't always teach your children the way we think He ought to. Parents' instinct is to protect their children from danger, pain, and discomfort. God often prefers to pull the rug out from under the little wahoos and let 'em take a tumble. We often had to take a deep breath, let them fall and pray, "God, we trust you know what you're doing."

As you may know if you read this column regularly, we lost our middle son, Micah, in 2006. Fourteen years earlier, Sheila wrote a song called Corin the Piper. She didn't know where it came from and wasn't her usual style. I've written about how the song came back to comfort her when he died. This wasn't the first time God checked in on us to let us know He is still there making things work out as he promised.

Most recently, we were talking to Matt on the phone and he mentioned something that happened to him that he believed was a little comforting sign from God. We were talking about the time his wife had decided to leave him. He had been suffering the effect of increasing symptoms of hereditary bipolar disorder. He had been going through his files looking for documents he would need when she divorced him. He came upon a copy of his birth certificate we'd ordered for him a few years back. What caught his eye was the only bit of color on the  black and white document - a red stamp showing the date the copy was made - October 18. Something about it nagged at him as he finished sorting through the little pile of paper that documented his life. 

At the time my son had been reading one of those Bible-in-a Year plans. The reading guide was there beside the gathering pile of documents. He turned to October 18 and the central chapter was Isaiah 54. Verse 1 caught his eye - "Sing aloud o' barren woman...." He glanced down to verse 13. "Your sons shall be taught by the Lord." He took the verses as a reminder that God was watching him and would continue to be his teacher. Every day to this day we pray for him and with him at 1:13 pm, a reminder of those promise texts from the night of his birth.

Micah 1995

Later, after we talked to him that day, I was struck by a memory from the night Micah passed away. We'd just got our antique Howard Miller mantel clock back from the clockmaker. As it began to chime for us once again, we were drawn back to that terrible night. Sheila and I had gone to bed early while Micah was still up watching television in bed. We had already gone to sleep and the house was quiet. Micah's movie tape had ended and everything was still.  Suddenly, there was whir as the clock chime tried to spin up. Then there was a pronounced single click as the chime gear attempted to move the hammers to sound the chime. But the chime spring had wound down and couldn't turn the chime mechanism. Sheila woke straight up at the click sound and sudden quiet that followed. Immediately, she had very a bad feeling. She woke me up and in an urgent voice said, "Go check on your son." I hurried to his room. To my horror, Micah was rolled over, face down in a pillow. He'd evidently had a seizure. He'd had nighttime seizures since his teens; something that had shown little response to treatment. He slept with a CPAP machine to help him breathe and keep his oxygen levels up. That night he'd gone to sleep without putting the CPAP mask on. 

Flipping on the light, I rushed to his bedside. I rolled him over, checked his pulse and finding none, began CPR while Sheila called 911. It was close to half an hour before the ambulance arrived and took over. We followed them to the hospital that night, praying all the way. The next three days and nights were a heart-breaking nightmare.

But while Sheila and I were talking about that night, we were again blaming ourselves. We went to bed early. We didn't make sure he put on his CPAP. We failed to look out for him. Where was God's promise for our children? Sheila said she would never forget the moment the clock stopped. I do to. And I remember the time exactly. It was 1:13 am. The clock has a peculiar glitch. It always chimes about 2 minutes early - some kind of mechanical defect. It still rings at 13 minutes, 28, 43, and 58 minutes. I suspect God has prevented the clockmakers, who had twice attempted to repair the clock, from fixing the chime so that it ran on time. They never did, though I had spent more than $350 dollars on repairs over the years. 

That night the hands of the clock stopped precisely at 1:13 am. I've known this for years, but never connected it to Isaiah 54, verses 1 and 13! It was our promise that God left us - a note on the hands of the clock that awful moment to let us know He was still watching. Even in that awful moment, He was taking care of our son. And He also left us a sign to comfort us 16 years later, when it was just the two of us 3000 miles from home and our kids and feeling again the pain of losing a child. Micah was such a good person and it was hard to understand why he was taken from us.

But our God is a kind God; much more so than we give Him credit for. Remembering that little handwritten note from God, was such a comfort to Sheila. Micah's mom still grieves for him all these long years later. That terrible night God laid His hands on the clock and stopped it at 1:13, saying, "Fear not my children. Remember my promise. I loved Micah. He'll be safe with me till I come for you both. The peace I promise is his and can be yours if you only believe."

And God keeps giving us little signs and wonders to remind us we are loved by Him. He left his thumbprint that awful night. Then, sixteen years later, just when we needed His reassurance again, God reminded us that he'd already left us a message that night so long ago.

© 2022 by Tom King

Six Weeks from Everywhere

I grew up in the little town of Keene, Texas. I watched this water tower being built and for several years operated a day care center with the tower practically in my backyard. I grew up in Keene during the late 50s and finished college there in 1976. I got a special medallion with my graduation cap to celebrate my class being bicentennial graduates.

A lot of my peers like to get on Facebook and wail about how their childhoods in Keene were so terrible. Most of them do it because they are fighting feelings of guilt for leaving the Adventist Church. They didn't want the inconvenience of Sabbath observance or to have their worldly lifestyles cramped. It's pretty much a typical teenage rebellion and it starts when hormones start running wild and kids want to do things their parents would prefer that they wait before doing.

Keene is (or was) a Seventh-day Adventist town. It's grown and because it's such a nice little town, a lot of non-Adventists have moved into town and set up shop. Adventists are fundamentalist Bible Christian church. My great great grandfather, Elder Horatio B. French signed the church charter and helped establish the original Keene Industrial Academy that became the heart of the town. Elder French baptized better than half the newly minted Texas Adventists of the early 20th century. He was the traveling/baptizing pastor serving churches that didn't have a pastor yet. My family's history is deeply embedded in the town's history. The first hospital/sanitarium in Johnson County was in what became my grandparents' cow pasture. The roadbed of the Old Betsy Railway cut off a corner of their property next to the stock tank. I went to school from first grade to a BA degree right there in town. My great grandfather taught in the original Keene Public School. I did my student teaching in the elementary church school. My great grandfather's students became my teachers. 

The town stood on the highest spot in Johnson County which isn't saying much. Tornadoes for some reason (something to do with angels) avoid the town. For years we had no police department. When we finally did there were only two officers, Jake Howard, our neighbor, and my stepdad Ralph DeLaune who stuck lights on the family Rambler and patrolled on weekends. Mom turned us out on summer mornings, we ran loose in the town and surrounding woods, and we came home when the sun went down, often with a jar full of fireflies to light out way. There were no streetlights in town in those days and the streets themselves were all gravel with grader ditches. 

The secret to having a happy childhood in Keene back in my day, I am convinced, was to not care about being one of the popular kids. If you didn't care about them, they had no power over you. Me, I had no chance to join that august assemblage. I was a nerd, skinny with thick glasses and most of the time had white tape across the broken bridge of my specs.  Teachers set all the honor roll students on the front rows. We acted as a human shield for the teacher, protecting her from the barbarians at the back of the room. In my public school days, most of my class of 35-40 kids in 2 grades were either too poor for church school or had been kicked out or were the few isolated Baptists in the public school district. Meaner than second skimmings some of them. They liked to knock me around for their collective amusement.

Early in my life I discovered two important things.  One, you can get a job throwing papers when you are in 6th grade like I did. The route was five miles long, up hill and down, rain, snow, sleet or hail. I made $5 a week which I collected on Sunday (that's when Adventists and agnostics were all home in Keene). The Cleburne Times-Review didn't publish a Saturday edition. That's so they could take off on Sunday. It worked out perfectly for me because I couldn't throw papers on Saturday. All the businesses in town at that time closed up from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and Seventh-day Adventists don't do business on Saturday. Not even delivering papers. So the local newspaper business had a kind of symbiotic relationship with their Adventist neighbors.

The second important thing I discovered was the miracle of mail order. I picked up the newspapers I delivered on the loading dock at the post office where we had a PO Box for years. As my reading for pleasure expanded, I discovered the classified ads in the back of Boy's Life and various comic books and such. For a few dollars I could get all sorts of things through the mail - flying airplanes, toy soldiers, catapults, and a subscription to the science fiction book club. I built a sci-fi library to rival the Carnegie Library's in Cleburne.  I pedaled my bike to on weekends, dodging big toothy farm dogs and climbing hilly gravel roads all 10 miles there and back.

Back in those days, we were apparently more tolerant of delay. Virtually everything I ordered from the back of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and other such magazines, carried a warning label.  

PLEASE ALLOW SIX WEEKS FOR DELIVERY.

When you are 12 years old, six weeks is an eternity. I'm not sure whether it was because they had no robots to pull stuff from the warehouses, or because they just weren't in all that much of a hurry. One thing it did was teach me patience. As a kid with galloping ADD, patience was a skill I very much needed.

Anyway, though Keene seemed to be six weeks from everywhere in the world, I became addicted to buying stuff by mail. I took up slot cars and found a whole company that sold slot cars, track, tires, motors, frames, decals and everything you could imagine. I learned how to buy a money order, fill out an order blank and send off for stuff. I bought model rockets, models of things the local five and dime didn't stock. The mail-orders arrived through the pokey old post office kept me supplied with bits and bobs to support the 47 hobbies I practiced in my bedroom workshop. 

As an adult, Sears, Montgomery Wards, and various mail order houses scratched my itch to send myself gifts in the mail. As a grownup, I still liked getting those packages in the mail.

AND THEN CAME AMAZON!  What a wonderful idea. I was already a fanatic reader and they started out with books, sucked me in and then expanded the range of things they sell astronomically. Then I discovered eBay  and debit cards and it was off to the races. I have Amazon Prime and no car, so there is always a steady stream of stuff rolling up the driveway that I got shipped to me free. Walmart's even bringing me some groceries. It's Christmas every day. I even send stuff to my family straight from Amazon. It's cheaper if it qualifies for Prime shipping and it gets there faster than if I went to the post office, picked up a money order, sent my order in, waited six weeks and then reshipped it to Mom for her birthday. 

Thanks to Fedex, Amazon delivery, UPS and other competitors, even the US Post Office has gotten faster and more efficient.  

So now, I'm down to three days from everywhere on average. I get cranky if I have to wait a week. I even run a little mail order website and print the shipping on my computer. People talk about the good old days and the good old days definitely had merit. We had lots more horned toads, fireflies, and trees you could climb that weren't forbidden by insurance companies. But if I'd had three day Prime shipping and streaming video, who knows if I would have ever worked up the enthusiasm to get out of the house and become an adult.

I think I became an old man during a crucial social, political and cultural upheaval. Not a bad time to be alive. Anyway, the Schwann's guy just delivered two frozen pizzas, I've got Amazon coming this afternoon with a package of guard rails for my Carrerra Go Slot car set, and tomorrow a guy on eBay is sending me a usb fan to cool my 3 tb hard drive that has all my movies on it. And Sheila's got a bottle of vinyl floor polish that will be here Thursday, same day her prescription refill will arrive.

We've come a long way from the days of six weeks from everywhere. We've even got our five year old grandson hooked on receiving packages from Grammy and Poppy (mostly Grammy). Grammy just outfitted him with Batman outfit complete with mask and cape - all ordered from my desktop and delivered in 3 days.

I really like living "3 days from everywhere." We don't have a car. We're old and arthritic and don't get around very well. We're kind of back to where we were as kids. Thank heaven for those wonderful packages. They don't take nearly as long. And icing on the cake? My town just got an Amazon Warehouse that opened up just a couple of miles from our house. Some stuff comes the same day or the next from there. 

Is this a great country or what?

 © 2022 by Tom King