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Show Marriage, Motherhood, and Migraines 123 I've been remembering how Papa never complained about the weather, even if a storm cost him hundreds of dollars. 1 remember standing with him on the covered porch at the ranch and watching hail thrashing down through the pines. And we knew it was ruining the newcut hay on the bench. He looked at the whirl of the storm and breathed great draughts of the sharp, fresh air and muttered, "Magnificent!" Gracious! What a heritage! 28 Madelyn's diary entry on the day her father died, "I went with him over the border and we found peace," recorded a sacred moment for her. As Madelyn mentioned later in one of her talks on the mission of Jesus, the Savior emphasized that The Way, the path, involved death-not a physical death but an inward transformation that resembled death. "If any man will come after cross and me," He said, "let him deny himself and take up his follow me." (Mark 8:34, Matthew 16:24, Luke 9:23) Similarly, "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it." (Luke 17:33) The self must die as the center of its own concern, and one must die to the preoccupations of the world. By dying to one's old life and being born into a new life one becomes truly a disciple of Christ. Madelyn said that in going with her father "over the border," she had left her old self behind and come back with a new one-she had become a true follower of Christ. On July 5,1931, Madelyn was reading Sir James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows (1908), in which Barrie pricks the bubble of male self-sufficiency. Madelyn loved the book. She left for the ranch on July 18, 1931. Being alone with fourteen-month-old Elizabeth part of the time, Madelyn wrote a little life history of her first child: Elizabeth's tiny wispy ringlets of black hair when she was born, followed by a period of baldness and then light little curls; when she began to crawl; how she began to talk and her favorite early expressions; playing with her little set of enamel dishes; cooing over picture books as she turned the pages; and her first steps on July 2, 1931, after which she had, in Madelyn's words, "the uncertain swinging gait of Charlie Chaplin. "29 |
