Wednesday, November 7, 2018

#21 - The Devil and Divine

Brenda Wilbee and her van, 1985
A FRIEND ASKED on Facebook if any of us had ever experienced God's intervention. I wrote back, sure, all the time. Here is just one of those times.

I used to live in San Jose, CA, and so was familiar with the demonic elements of Highway 9 that wound through the mountain to the town of Felton and Mt. Hermon Christian Writers Conference. In 1978, I moved away from CA--but in the mid-80s drove down from Seattle to the conference using the main drag, Highway 17. Mid-conference, I was asked to take an editor back to the San Jose airport and on my return decided to take Highway 9. I'd missed the beauty of this old road with its majestic dense woods.

I was driving a V-dub pop top camper van at the time and was coming up around a curve to the summit, cliff to my right, and needed to shift gears. My clutch gave out. Having no control over my car, I slid back, off the road toward the cliff. Before I could react, my van stopped. Gingerly I climbed down from the driver's seat and went around to look. All that stopped me from plunging backwards down a steep cliff was one small mossy log. The only log. We didn't have words back then like "shock and awe." But that was me. Shocked. Awed.

Highway 9 CA
I did know I couldn't stand on the roadside, or get back into the van, or walk the nine miles downhill in my pretty pink heels. All three were far too dangerous. I'd not yet started to panic or even had time to pray when a humongous red pickup truck came roaring up from behind, muffler rattling, passed by, and then pulled over to the side. A red-neck vehicle. Rusty, dinged bumpers, guns on a rack in the cab. A big burly man with red beard and bandana on his brow got out.  Dear God in heaven...

I stood numbly while he gave me a nod and took a long, hard look at my right back tire snugged up to the log and then down the cliff to probable death. He gave me a look of surprise. "Someone's watching out for you. And it seems God sent me and my wife to get you safely away. This is a dangerous stretch. Eight women disappeared off this road last week alone."

My knees started to wobble.

"We weren't going to come this way, but something made us change our mind. Get your stuff, climb into the cab with my wife. We'll take you down to Felton and I'll help you find a tow truck."

I hopped in and met another red-neck angel, sent to deliver me from evil. They were as good as their word, got me safely to Felton and arranged for a tow. We parted teary-eyed, all three of us grateful for divine mercies in the dark shadow of evil.

So, yes, I have known God's intervention. Not always, but enough.

Monday, September 17, 2018

#20 - Living Stone


Roy Wilbee standing beside his stone wall
 Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.

I WAS NINE when my parents moved to Meteor Ranch, a Christian Camp and Conference Center in Northern California. One of the things Dad did while we were there was to build a fifty-foot rock wall at the end of the swimming pool, and it was a lovely hot summer day when he made the stone plaque to be set into it. My two sisters and I watched as he first tried one thing and then another to create the letters. He finally used medical rubber tubing.

BRENDA WILBEE, 9 years old, Meteor Ranch 1962
“Let yourselves be built, as living stones, into a spiritual temple.”

The plaque was duly installed and remained for more than fifty years after our departure.

At Dad’s death forty-one years later, in 2003, I used photography of that wall for his funeral brochure; something about the wall and plaque has always comforted me, and challenged me. How does one become a spiritual temple?

I didn't realize at the time my mother was doing exactly this. The woman who ran the ranch took in welfare cases as cash flow and didn't trouble herself with their care. I learned for the first time the shadow of evil; how it hid in the light and presented a persona of oozing holiness. She abused and misused the vulnerable, she robbed the elderly, she manipulated those fleeing addiction. She cheated them all, toyed with them all, skewered them all to their weakest points. She was a force of her own. No one stood up to her. I developed a healthy fear.

I watched her deny twelve-year-old Richie needed shoes; my father had to cut the toes out of tennies to save him foot pain. She stole his birthday money. She made him grow petunias in the roots of a tree and punished him when they wilted and died. She kept him at endless chores, and Saturday nights he sometimes fell asleep buffing the dining room floor for Sunday church. I can still hear the hateful shrill of her screaming only a few nights after our arrival, startling me awake and up out of bed with thudding heart and goosebumps like gravel on my skin. She had him outdoors in the moonlight, bare chested and skinny, hanging up his bedsheets while taking swings at him and brow-beating him with a tongue so sharp it made me bleed in my soul. I hid under my covers. His crime? He'd wet the bed. These things I witnessed and didn't understand. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. A month into our stay, she came after my sisters and me.

DIning Hall Meteor Ranch, 50 years later
Through those double doors she flew 50 years ago
and the tableware flew
Linda, Tresa, and I had just set the tables for the summer's first campers when in she stormed through the kitchen's swinging doors, sails unfurled and raging like a wind out of nowhere, sweeping the tables clean, first one arm and then another, tableware and cups flying. The metallic clattering, the skittering, the dull thud of plastic bouncing, the purple-faced screaming, the shock of it all put my sisters and I into paralysis. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. Our crime? We hadn't dusted the tables. No one told us to. My mother charged in, double doors swinging. That day on the ranch the battle line between good and evil was drawn.

I spent the remaining seven months watching my mother build herself, like stone, into a spiritual temple of protection--though I didn't understand it at the time and not until now. But her love for the afflicted never withered in the face of cruelty. She was a fortress for each man, boy, and troubled woman on the ranch. She lent a listening ear, offered a kind word, gave out special favors. When we didn't feel like going out of our way, she made us embrace the sad and lonely. She sent us on evening walks with blind Uncle Earl, joined us in playing afternoon dominoes with him, using his set of olive wood dominoes from Jerusalem with their shiny brass dots and interlocking pieces. She played tricks on Jack to make him laugh. She made friends with the women. She gave Richie a nickel for every spelling word he got right.  Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. 

Roy Wilbee's stone wall and plaque
Dad's Wall 2012
A few years ago I went down to the ranch and, with my son's help, brought Dad’s plaque home. I asked Mum if she'd like to have it.

"Where did you get that?"

"Meteor Ranch."

"Meteor Ranch?” she asked, agitated. “I don’t remember this. Did we live there?”

"Yes, California."

Mum was fading into dementia.  She could hardly see or hear as it was. She shuffled around the house constantly looking for things. A far cry from the woman who’d loved the unloved: the young boys, the old men, the recovering alcoholics.

"Yes, do you remember Richie? You were going to adopt him." I thought this would jar her memory, but she shook her head in frustration. "Dad made this plaque for the stone wall."

“You hauled it all the way up here?”

I don’t know if she remembers dad’s work or not. From time to time, perhaps. And while I'd known it could be a gamble, I was still disappointed the plaque wasn't quite the gift I’d hoped. But reading the words again and remembering what Mum couldn't of the day Dad had created each letter--my sisters and I watching, wondering what they would spell--I finally understood. My mother was a spiritual temple, not only at the ranch but throughout her life, befriending the lost and loving those very few would. Love as solid as stone.

My gift to her suddenly became hers to me. An answer to metaphor I finally understand.

Prayer: Thank you for the living example of my mother’s love for those we tend to ignore. May we all be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.


Jack and Brenda riding bareback on Lucky, 1962
Jack Kimble and me with Lucky, 1962
Mum wrote to Jack, a recovering alcoholic, for years.
He called me Brinder. I loved it.

Roy Wilbee's stone wall, 1962