An incident occurred when I was a young woman that best illustrates my mother's faith. It was at one of those times when Ted was away on some Air Force excursion and the children and I were staying with Grandma and Grandpa while he was gone.
It sticks in my mind because it so perfectly taught me what it means to trust God for daily provision. Mother's example has been important to me as I've faced my own fears and made decisions about how to deal with what life hands me. I have used this story over and over as a teacher, when I needed an illustration of plain, simple faith.
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| Pete and Billie Stanley |
Mother was a strong, shy women, not overly articulate or chatty and outgoing. I don't think I ever heard her pray or even talk about praying but I always knew that she did. It was something that just showed in her life.
My folks had a cistern on the farm. It sat right behind the garage where it caught rain water. When the rain fell from the sky, it ran into an enormous drain pipe, then flowed through a simple filter down into the cistern. It was the softest, sweetest water for miles around and it cooked a great pot of beans, which to a central Texan is fine cuisine! Added to that the water was always cold, being kept in that metal cistern that was double walled and insulated from the hot Texas sun, so it was a wonderful summer refreshment. It was also a good beauty product. It made your hair shiny and silky and your skin feel moist. In short it was a valuable commodity.
They also had a well in the back yard that had been drilled when they first moved to the farm, but the well water had sand in it. The sand didn't make the water dirty but it did make it unpleasant to drink. A special filter would have solved the problem but then they would have had to buy a water softener too, because the water was so hard. So they opted for the cistern.
In Central Texas water can be a precious article. Seems that there it's either "feast or famine". One neighbor was heard to remark, "When Noah's flood came, Central Texas got an inch and a half!" This area can go for months without rain then overnight it will come a frog strangling, gully washer. My parents counted on these rainy times to fill their cistern. When it was full it would supply them with water for months.
But here we were in the middle of a hot, dry August and there hadn't been rain since fall. Daddy could tell by the gage on the front of the cistern that it was getting very low. He came in one day and said to Mother, "We're running out of water. If it doesn't rain soon, and I mean lots of rain, we'll have to drink well water." At that time buying water was unthinkable.
I don't recall Mother giving him an argument. She just accepted it quietly, as she did most any other inconvenience. I do remember that she said, "It'll rain sometime."
They had always been generous with their cistern water. If a neighbor lady needed some for a pot of beans or to wash her hair, they would say to her, "Sure! Come on over and bring your bucket!" That's probably how the news, of an abundance of rain water at the Stanley's farm, spread. They now had people arriving almost daily, some with buckets and some with tall milk cans, to get water. Most folks would ask permission and Mother never turned them away, but some began to come when they were gone, then they would return home to find a tell-tale wet spot beneath the spigot. My mother responded to this with a shrug or a sigh but Daddy began to resent it as the water level went lower and lower, with no rain in sight.
Soon his daily warnings became urgent. "We're running out of water, Billie. You'd better stop giving it away!" Then Mother would say something like, "Oh, Pete."
One morning I walked into the kitchen and encountered a full fledged domestic war. "I'm not going to refuse people a drink of water!" she was declaring.
"I wouldn't refuse them either if it was just a drink they wanted." replied Daddy, "but they are hauling it off by the bucketfuls! They have wells. They don't need our cistern water!"
"Well the bible says that if we offer someone a cup of water in Jesus' name, we will be blessed, so I'm not going to tell people they can't have water as long as I have it to give to them!"
Daddy didn't answer her this time he just walked outside muttering to himself. That day brought more neighbors and their containers for their "drink" of water. One of them even had the audacity to say to Daddy, "You know Pete, your water's gettin' low." Daddy showed a lot of restraint when he just nodded silently.
That night I remember waking up momentarily and hearing rain hit the roof. Mother told me later that she had pointed it out to Daddy and he said, "It's going to take a lot to fill up that cistern!"
Well, God must have heard him too because it rained all night and the next morning it was still coming down in torrents. Just before breakfast Daddy came running through the kitchen door, shaking like a wet dog, to get the water off his coat. Mother and I were enjoying our morning coffee as we watched him reach for a towel. Finally she asked lightly, "Did you notice the cistern?"
"Yep." he replied and poured himself some coffee.
I hadn't thought to look at the cistern myself, so I got up, walked to the window and looked out behind the garage. What I saw was an amazing sight. Water was gushing over the top of it and washing down its sides.
Over the years that memory has returned to me many times. I knew without explanation that it was an important one. Mother never said to me, "God provides for those who trust Him.". She didn't lecture me about how to exercise faith. She didn't quote the bible where it says,"Give and it shall be given to you, pressed down, shaken together and running over..." she could have said all of those things, but she didn't. Her example had spoken loud and clear.
She had shown me that we could be kind to others even when they were thoughtless of us because her God was bigger than a Texas drought. I saw Daddy's mistake in looking at circumstances and fearing, rather than looking to God and trusting. I saw a good wife being a challenge to her husband's faith and an encouragement for him to trust the Lord ... and I saw God once again being faithful to His Word.
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