Talk With Bette – Radio and Blog

This isn’t my usual type of post in Esther’s Petition. Humor me.

Thinking backwards today, “What’s past is prologue” strikes me as true in many ways. Imagination has been a lifelong friend to me. Walking along hot sandy ditch banks on my grandparents’ farm, passing masses of blackberry briars and kicking up the occasional arrowhead, I imagined cowboy and Indian adventures, or town marshals and cattle rustlers.

Back at home in town, I wandered through the paths at Timrod Park, down one side and up the other of the little stream, all the while imagining cops chasing robbers through the bushes and up the hillside.

Of course there was always a pretty girl somewhere in the story, not always a damsel in distress, though. Often she was the heroine of the drama. She came to the rescue of the injured cowboy, helped out the puzzled policeman, somehow saved the day.

Writing down the stories for myself (and occasionally for the English teacher at school) came natural on those summer days when it was too hot or too rainy to wander around outdoors. I never once imagined writing something that my peers would care to read, however. Not back then.

After school chores in junior high and high school — helping my mother in her executive secretarial work — became an actual job as her paid assistant later on. I learned how to operate office machinery of many kinds, from transcribers to offset press. Turning machine dictation into professional letters and reports was amazingly easy for me. Every secretarial job I had after that made good use of prior office experience.

And writing eventually became part of my business, often composing things for others to sign, others to take credit for. Editing and re-writing polished material for grateful clients, business and political.

After finishing an online college course from UC-Davis, I added a division called Family Memories to my company. Designing and creating personal histories and biographies, I traveled here and there to conduct interviews, take photographs and dig up family trees.

Every bit of that experience became useful in the years I worked as a volunteer interviewing and photographing missionaries, then writing up their stories for international online and print publication.

Nowadays I see the hand of the Lord in all that. Sometimes frustrated, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry at how things weren’t working out the way I had planned for my life, I didn’t always acknowledge that perhaps He had a plan for my life himself.

http://talkwithbette.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/talk-with-bette-radio/

The train of his robe

If you’re a regular reader, you probably wonder if I’ve given up writing posts. No, but in recent weeks I’ve found myself spending more and more time interceding for people, reading and studying about prayer and intercession, as well as keeping in touch with folks here at home and around the world.

Here’s a new post about something that happened the other night…

As I was praying and thinking about various things last night (June 7, 2016), the scripture song “I saw the Lord, he was high and lifted up and his train filled the temple” kept running around in my mind. (Isaiah 6:1)

I thought about articles that I’d read (or written) about his train, i.e. the long trailing hem of his kingly robes, and the idea that it completely filled up the temple. Then the Lord quietly interrupted my thoughts as he is apt to do and said…

“Do you know what I consider my train?”

“What, I asked? Something other than your robe?” So he showed me.

I saw him dressed in ordinary clothes such as Jesus wore on the earth. He just looked sort of like a grandfather surrounded by happy, laughing grandchildren. Small kids were playing around his legs, running around him in circles and tugging on his clothes as he walked, taking careful steps. They were obviously headed somewhere. Outside to a garden, maybe?

Spread out on either side and behind him as far as the eye could see were people of all ages, all races. Young children were the nearest ones to him, but just outside their ranks were teens and pre-teens, young adults and mature adults, smiling, gesturing and chatting with each other as they all kept pace with him.

Strolling along he would reach out and touch first one and then another, pat someone’s head, hug a child close for a moment, shake a hand, always smiling, walking along in a casual but steady gait. Where were they all going? I couldn’t tell and he didn’t say. What he did say was,

“This is my train, really – my children.”

And I realized as I looked closer, there were generations going all the way back to Adam and Eve! While all were his spiritual children, many were the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren – descendants of others in this tremendous throng.

It was amazing.

After a few moments I asked, “So you don’t actually wear robes with a long train, like a king on earth wears for ceremonial events? Like what Isaiah saw?”

“For formal occasions,” he answered with a chuckle, “but not for every day – it’s hard to get down on the ground to play with the kids, wearing all that…”

And with a wave as if saying “Later,” they continued on their stroll, the happy crowd keeping up with his steps.

As I drifted off to sleep, my mind drifted back many years. I recalled summer days playing outdoors with my own father, grandfather or uncles, several of us cousins laughing and grabbing them around the ankles by their pants legs, trying to pull them down to our level. And they always let us. They always let us.