Complimentary Story
January 2025Hadassah and I were raised in Godly homes and accepted Christ as our Savior before our teenage years. Sadly, as so many young people do, we made some serious mistakes. We never lost our love for the Lord, but we certainly did not follow a lifestyle that would show people that we loved Him.
We just finished a lengthy series that told about God leading us on a cross country walk and how He provided our every need as we walked 1300 miles. This series will tell how God guided us back to a life that honors Him and built the faith in us that it took to do the cross country walk that He gave us. It is a series of events, some big and some small, but each one showed us God’s guidance.
We joke about it, but we often wonder if God did look down on two messed up lives and said “I wonder if we get these two together if they can get their lives straightened out and live for Me?” We always had a love for God and His Word. That never changed, despite the mistakes we made.
When we got married, we were both unhappy with life and were ready for a change. We went for an afternoon drive and ended up in Iowa at a Buckskinner camp. Buckskinning is a historical reenactment that concentrates on the fur trade period in the Old West. These people portray mountain men, Native American Indians, traders, missionaries, or anyone else that was part of that era. My (Harry) Great Grandmother was a full-blooded Blackfoot so this was interesting to me. Hadassah enjoyed the period dress and crafts.
Even though we enjoyed the encampment, there was certainly no thought, at that time, about doing anything other than going to work and paying bills, just like we had always done. Our life was very typical. We both had very good jobs and the ability to get anything we wanted (within reason), but we were basically bored and unhappy with life.
When we use hindsight, we can all find many places that God had an influence on our lives. We can now see where God was orchestrating a radical change in our daily lives. The Buckskinner encampment left a memorable impression on both of our minds and it became a very important part of our daily conversation. The more we talked about it, the more we tried to see if it could fit into our lives. We did decide there was no way to both work and travel to the encampments, so we put the whole idea aside. But....the thoughts would not go away.
As I said earlier, when we got together, we had both come from difficult times and we both were ready for a change. For some unknown reason we started talking about walking away from the security of our jobs and the comforts of our lifestyle. Even the thought of doing something like that crosses the line into being irresponsible, but the idea would not go away. The more we looked into what it would take to make the change, the more we convinced ourselves that we could actually do it. We figure God had to be in all this because this is so far out of character for us there had to be an influence guiding us.
My Native American heritage and Hadassah’s interest in the period dress and the crafts led us into looking for a tipi and a vehicle we could use. A man about 40 miles from us made tipis and we ended up purchasing one from him. We found an old U-Haul truck that needed some mechanical work done and were able to purchase it very reasonably. We still had not made a final commitment, but we were working on getting what we needed. Hadassah made our clothes that would match the Buckskinner look and we started making leather and bead crafts that we would sell. We were still a long way from making a final decision.
Hadassah quit her job, but I kept working. We set the tipi up at my parents’ home and decided to live in it through the summer to see if we could stand the culture shock. All of our meals were prepared over an open fire. There was a real learning curve to what we were doing. Our kids were taking bets on how long we could last. They figured the first time Hadassah’s coffee was not ready in 3 minutes from her Bunn coffee maker she would be headed for some creature comforts. (Luke 12:15).
Well, the kids lost and we made it through the summer in the tipi and made the final commitment when I quit my job. We left in September with some very sketchy thoughts on what we were getting ourselves into. We had no real concept of what we had to learn. God taught us a little bit at a time about how to trust Him and that is what this series is all about. (Isaiah 41:13).
We all have a story and, sadly, many of them are not pleasant memories. Our hope and prayer is that some will find encouragement in the fact that God does care for us and provide guidance if we are willing to turn to Him for the help. His guidance sometimes is very different from anything we could imagine, but He is able to finish the work He has started in us if we are willing to follow Him. (1 Thessalonians 5:24).
“For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, ‘Fear not; I will help thee.’” (Isaiah 41:13 KJV).
Email:
harry@virtually-forever.com
