The Unthankful Years Part 2

I will never forget the phone call. After being a stay-at-home mom for 18 years, I enrolled in a local art college and was in class when the message came. Call the youth pastor from your church, the note read. I ran, not walked, to the phone and called that number.

My pastor told me I needed to come home and he needed to talk to me. I told him that I was not hanging up the phone until he told me what the problem was. Did someone get in an accident? Were one of my children injured? Was my husband okay? What was going on?

I don’t remember much that happened after his next words. I don’t remember getting my stuff from class and driving to my in-laws’ house or driving with them the hour ride to Lansing, Michigan. I don’t remember calling my husband to meet us there, (he was on the road as a salesman). All I remember were the pastor’s words to me: “Your son has gotten a girl pregnant.”

I could actually leave the rest of this page blank because that’s how I felt. How could this have happened? We had just taken him to college a few months before and he was fine. He was brought up in the same home as all my other kids. What kind of a decision was this? Didn’t he know what that would do to OUR reputation at church? My husband was a deacon, I was a children’s ministry worker. What was he thinking? I was so selfish in every thought. I wasn't thinking of my son or his girlfriend. I was thinking of myself. It was one of the most terrible times of my life.

We never had to deal with anything like this and didn’t know how to handle it. The senior pastor of our church didn’t know either, so it was swept under the rug. Nobody knew why I looked like I’d been crying for weeks or why I didn’t even want to come to church anymore. No one asked why my husband was considering dropping out of the deacon’s group or quitting the choir director’s job. Doesn’t the Word say something about a person who doesn’t know how to handle his own house shouldn’t be in a church job or something like that? We were devastated. Undone. Was there no help for us anywhere? And what about those dreams for our son, where did they go? Didn’t anyone know how to bring something good out of this awful situation?

God did have a plan but it didn’t come into play right away. It was yet to be revealed. I can honestly say I was not thankful for that awful year of our lives until a day in December when everything changed. (to be continued)