Sometimes the end of one chapter in life arrives long before we recognize that the story is changing. What we believe to be an ending may be where God begins writing something we could never have imagined for ourselves.
Now that our time in Crewe was coming to an end, a new opportunity opened eight miles down the road in a town called Blackstone.
My mother recalled Miss Moore, the kind lady who had helped with the connections for new employment, telling her, “Eight miles down the road, it’ll be different.” And when she recounted those words to me years later, she added something that made us both smile.
“And she was right.”
But before Blackstone could become our place for a new beginning, a controversy was brewing at the church where my father worked in Crewe.
My father was a gifted musician. There was no denying that. He had an extraordinary ability to draw people to him, both through his unparalleled talent and his personality. People admired him, trusted him, and often seemed willing to overlook the very things that caused my mother so much pain.
But talent and character are not the same thing.
By the time our years in Crewe were drawing to a close, accusations had surfaced that my father had embezzled from the church. The controversy, led by the Pastor’s wife, eventually led to a formal proceeding held in the church sanctuary.
According to my mother’s recollection, the church voted not to bring formal charges against my father. Instead, his employment was terminated.
This was public humiliation in a marriage already filled with private disappointments.
Crewe took a lot out of my mother, so they decided my father would go ahead of us to Blackstone, set up the house, and settle into his new job at the church.
My mother took Christopher and me to her parents’ home in Georgia.
Of course, returning to her parents’ home carried its own difficulties, but she needed time. Time to think, pray, and consider whether the life she had been trying to preserve was a life she could continue living.
My mother had discovered that my father was involved in an affair with a man, leaving her once again devastated. Once again, the secrecy and broken trust in their marriage became intolerable. Once again, the betrayal and broken promises screamed so loudly that she literally couldn’t hear him make yet another claim that medication and a new beginning would change everything.
For the first time in what must have felt like an eternity, she had the chance to separate herself from the marriage’s immediate demands and consider what she wanted her future to look like.
The final decision could wait.
The Mountain
That summer at my grandparents’, my mother began doing something she rarely had time to do. She began taking time for herself to get stronger physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
For years, her life had revolved around the needs and wants of everyone around her. There were parents to please, students to teach, a household to manage, children to care for, and a husband whose unpredictable behavior seemed to consume whatever spare energy she had left. She stepped away from the turmoil of her marriage and, for the first time in a long while, let herself focus on her well-being.
Every day, she climbed on her bicycle and rode for miles through the Georgia countryside. It became her daily ritual. Her destination was the mountaintop.
There, away from the noise and obligations of everyday life, she sat, meditated, and talked to God.
She then descended to the base of the mountain and returned home.
One morning, something happened that threatened to end those rides altogether.
As she was riding down the mountain, a dog suddenly ran in front of her bicycle, causing her to crash and bang herself up pretty good. The fall left her scraped up, bruised, and terribly sore. She recounted how painful the accident had been and how for a while she couldn’t ride.
But my mother was never one to give up easily.
As soon as she had healed enough, she was back to riding those roads to the top of the mountain. Something about that determination captures so much of who my mother was.
She had all but decided to leave my father. She kept praying for guidance and clarity.
On that mountain, surrounded by the countryside’s quiet, she sought God’s guidance through meditation and prayer.
During one of those meditations, something extraordinary happened.
The Lord spoke to her, telling her that she would meet a man. She was also given a vision of a man’s outstretched hands.
And then came this message:
“He is my servant.”
She had come to God seeking an answer to her marriage, and instead received a message about a perfect stranger.
Beautiful hands.
A servant of God.
What could this possibly mean?
No instruction to return to my father. No promise that their marriage would survive. No explanation of what this unknown man might have to do with her future. Only the reassurance that she would recognize him when the time came.
She carried those words and vision down the mountain and into the uncertainty of a future she had not yet decided upon. Her marriage was still in trouble, but now there was something else—something she could neither explain nor forget.
Somewhere, there was a man she had never met.
A man whose hands would be beautiful enough for her to recognize him.
She had no name to search for, no face to look for, no reason to expect that she would ever find him. Only a promise, spoken in the stillness of a mountain, waiting for the moment when a pair of hands would reveal the man who had already entered her future.
Beneath the Tree
We left Georgia near the end of the summer and arrived at our new home in Blackstone. We arrived days before a large gathering and picnic on the church grounds where my father had been hired as the director of music.
She remembered the setting vividly, even decades later. Magnificent oak trees stood there, their branches stretching outward to create a quiet refuge beneath them.
It was at this gathering that my mother met the pastor of the church where my father had been hired for the first time.
Reverend Bob Hawkins knew about the struggles in my parents’ marriage and, at my father’s request, asked to speak with my mother privately.
They walked away from the crowd and found a quiet place beneath one of the trees.
Reverend Hawkins explained that he had counseled my father over the summer and would like to hear her feelings about where the marriage stood in her mind.
He listened as she shared the difficulties she had experienced, the infidelity and the heartbreak. He knew that my father wanted to reconcile, but he also understood that my mother had reached the limits of what she felt she could endure.
He explained that my father was deeply repentant for the damage he had caused to the marriage and truly wanted to reconcile.
And then, as they stood beneath the tree, Reverend Hawkins extended his hands toward my mother, and said:
“Bob wants nothing more than to reconcile. Would you please consider doing so?”
My mother looked down at his outstretched hands, and in that instant, she knew.
They were the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man.
The very hands from her vision.
The hands God told her would belong to his servant.
There she stood, with a man she had met that very day, listening as he asked her to reconsider the decision she had spent an entire summer struggling to make.
And suddenly she understood.
This was the man.
The man God had told her she would meet.
The man whose hands would be the sign.
My mother knew in that moment that she was looking at the answer to her prayers.
She believed God had prepared her to recognize this man before she ever met him. And because she recognized his hands, she believed she could trust his counsel.
She had climbed that mountain seeking an answer, never imagining it would come through the outstretched hands of a stranger.
But there, beneath an oak tree in Blackstone, the mountain’s mystery was finally revealed.
She chose to stay.
That decision would shape the course of all our lives.
And although none of us could have known what lay ahead, my mother believed one thing with absolute certainty.
God had heard her on the mountain. And He had answered her beneath the tree.
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