A Home for the Heart

by Michael Phillips

Your father and brothers are tremendously excited about the quartz line we found, and I must admit to being stirred as well. Finding the vein has caused me to ponder anew whether there is a chance I will make any money from this mine eventually . . . or whether it is time I began thinking of other possibilities for employment in order to support us when the time comes that such a need presents itself.

  I have been thinking for quite some time about the question you raised in one of your letters. You asked about our future. And I haven’t responded because I haven’t known what exactly to say. I do want to respond in some fashion, however, and so perhaps this is a good time, even though I have nothing very definite to tell you.

  My answer is simply this:

  Corrie: I do not know what the future will hold for us. But our Father does . . . and that is enough.

  I would not be honest, however, if I told you I do not think about these things. Certainly I do. Any man who wants to build a good life for the woman he loves ponders about the best way to do that. So I think about the various kinds of work I know how to do.

  I think, for instance, about our getting a place of our own and farming the land and raising livestock. If we find any gold in your father’s mine—which I have found myself increasingly doubting as more rocks and dirt have passed through my hands!—perhaps we can use my small share to buy an acre or two that we can call our very own.

  Whether or not that proves possible, of one thing you may be sure: I will always work hard, and I will provide for you and for whatever sons and daughters it may be the Lord’s pleasure to bless us with. Whatever I do, I will do it unto the Lord.

  Where might we live? I would probably say the same thing that you did: if I am with you, wherever it might be, I will be “at home.” My heart belongs to you, and from now on that’s what home will mean to me—not a city or a state or any particular location.

  I strongly doubt that any large city such as Richmond or San Francisco or Chicago could ever be a place I genuinely called home. They are tumultuous cities, and I would not want to raise a family in any such place. With you beside me, I would submit to living there if I had to, but I pray that is not where the Lord sends us!

  As you know, my own family ties are by now so thin and loose that they exert no pull upon me. After my father died I was cast adrift from any strong sense of family. Except for my affection for Mrs. Timms, I have had no personal attachments for many years . . . until now, with you and the Hollister clan of Miracle Springs. They have all made me feel so much a part of the family I could not imagine being away from them. I love them almost as much as I do you!

  (Well, not quite, I suppose!)

  If I were to speak to you about my own wishes in the matter, I would say that I am not eager to leave Miracle Springs or California. In a very short time I have come to love this locale. Even though I am from the East, I could happily live out my days here.

  And yet men and women who have given themselves utterly and wholly to the Lord can never be allowed the luxury of becoming too attached to any one place. We must never forget that we are pilgrims and strangers in this land and that God does not want our roots to extend too deeply into this world. He is preparing for us another home, in another kingdom, toward which our eyes must ever be turned. We cannot know what he might have for us to do, where he might choose to send us.

  You have given your writing into his hands. What might he yet want to do with it? I have given my desire to minister into his hands. How might he yet want to use it? In the same way, I believe, we must give our future home into his hands. If and when he says, “Go here” or “Go there,” I want us to be ready.

  We are in his hands, Corrie.

  We are at home with each other, yes, and I marvel in this sense of belonging! But more than that, and fulfilling the love we have for each other, our home is in his heart.

  We are, therefore, his—to go and do and be wherever and whatever he ordains for us according to his purposes.

  That is the only future I am sure of.

  Good-night. It is late, and we have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. The quartz vein has filled us all with renewed vigor!

  Christopher

  Chapter 45

  Commitment or Emotions

  I could hardly believe how quickly the year had passed.

  If I were to tell about all the things Christopher and I did—all the conversations we had, all the fun, all the serious times of prayer together, all the letters that passed between us, it would fill ten books!

  I felt like I’d grown ten years’ worth in that one year too. In so many ways, though I was just a year and a half older, I hardly felt like the same person who had come back to Miracle Springs from the East.

  As November drew to an end, Christopher and I were both well aware that his apprentice year was nearly over. The work in the mine had yielded just enough results to keep them going, but still the quartz hadn’t led them to the rich vein of gold they were sure was behind there somewhere. The quartz vein had widened, and they had followed it now another eight or ten feet without finding gold. They were still optimistic, but I knew they had hoped to find something more substantial by this time.

  Pa hadn’t said anything yet about me and Christopher. I knew he would say yes—how could he not think the world of Christopher after working alongside him for a year? I was still nervous, though. I guess I would be nervous until I heard the words from his own lips.

  A few days before the one-year anniversary of his arrival, Christopher said he wanted to talk to me about something that was very important.

  It was a chilly day, but we bundled up and went for a long walk. In the places where evergreen forest gave way to scrub and black oak leaves replaced the pine-needle carpet, and the trunks and branches were stark and bare.

  “I think we should both realize and prepare ourselves,” Christopher told me, “for something that will happen to us eventually.”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “One of these days,” he answered, “some of the feelings we have for one another will probably fade and change. That doesn’t mean our love will fade or grow less,” he added hastily, “only that it will change and mature. In many ways, when that happens, love is actually deepening and broadening. It’s very natural and probably inevitable. But when young people are unprepared for it, they often think the love that drew them together in the first place is going away.

  “I saw this over and over when I was in the pastorate,” he went on to explain. “People would come to talk to me about their marriages, and I heard them describe the same thing over and over. That’s why I want us to expect it and even anticipate it—so that we will realize that it is just one more aspect in the natural progression of human love.”

  “I don’t know if I like the sound of it,” I said.

  “It can’t be helped,” replied Christopher. “I’m not in a hurry to see it happen either. I like the way I feel about you right now. It feels good to be in love. I’m happy, content . . . sometimes when we’re together I’m on top of the world! But I want to be a realist too.”

  “Does it have to be that way?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if it has to. I am just convinced it usually is. I’m not old enough to say it always is, but all my experience says so.”

  “But why, Christopher? Why does it change?”

  Christopher thought a moment or two.

  “I don’t know . . . it’s the way God designed it, I suppose. He intended the decision of marriage and the mutual commitment two people make to be the fuel that sustains the husband-and-wife relationship—not the emotions of what is commonly called ‘love.’ As I’ve thought about this, in fact, it has struck me that a marriage can be just as good with or without the emotions, as long as the mutual commitment is there.

  “Perhaps that is why so many parentally arranged marriages worked in times past. There was never any question of emotion to confuse the issue of what marriage was all about—commitment. Nowadays, in
a sense, the process of falling in love can actually detract from laying a solid foundation for marriage because it can take young people’s eyes off the necessity of commitment. It becomes too easy to think that the emotions of love are enough.”

  “Does any of this have to do with your plan this past year?”

  Christopher laughed.

  “Ah, you are an astute one, my Corrie! Indeed it does.”

  “I’m listening!” I said.

  “When I first began thinking of the apprenticeship plan, I thought it would be good for a young man and woman to be around each other long enough to get well past the initial stages of relationship. That way, if the emotions were going to fade, they could begin to do so before marriage rather than after. Then the couple would be able to see how much they really did in fact love one another. Did they still desire to spend their lives together, even though the emotional tingles associated with doing so were not as great as before? If so, then love would truly be beginning to blossom between them.”

  “How could love be ‘blossoming’ right when it’s starting to fade?”

  “It is not the love itself that fades, only the emotions attached to the beginnings of love. True love is deeper than the mere emotions. True love never fades, it matures. All through the New Testament, love as Jesus describes it has to do with actions, attitudes, behavior, and commitment, not any particular feeling of giddiness. That is why I am convinced that a man and woman do not really begin to progress into the depths of true love until this fading process is underway. There has been a form of love prior to it, but not the depths of New Testament love. The further a man and woman can progress into those depths before marriage, the stronger their ultimate marriage bonds will be.”

  Again he paused.

  “In any event, that is what I hoped for between us. I want to love you as Jesus loves you, my dear Corrie, not only in the shallow way the flesh of Christopher Braxton is able to love you. That is my commitment to you.”

  Dear Christopher,

  I have been thinking almost constantly about our talk of a few days ago. You said there will come a time when the “feelings” will fade between us. You told me to expect it, that the high and emotional crest that we’ve felt—speaking for myself at least!—since knowing that we were beginning to love each other couldn’t last forever at the same intensity.

  At first your words seemed a bit frightening. I see the point of everything you said, but another part of me didn’t want to believe it.

  But just since then I think I have come to understand a little better what you were talking about. In fact, I had felt this fading a little already, but I hadn’t said anything to you about it because I didn’t want to admit that something might have changed in my feeling for you.

  Could it be that the intensity we felt was almost too much for us, that perhaps we are wearying from it? Perhaps the oneness between us has been so total and our communication so fervent that it has almost drained us. (You specifically warned me of upcoming “lows” between us.)

  But this is good. Isn’t this exactly why we are waiting this year? I know we are doing it in part so that you and Pa can work together and get to know one another before Pa gives you his answer. But isn’t it part of the plan that we will get to know each other so well—even if it means lows and sometimes fading emotions—that we don’t depend on those emotions to sustain us through marriage? That is what I thought I heard you say.

  More and more I see the wisdom in this arrangement. Marriage has to be based on so much more than just a romantic and emotional connection, doesn’t it?

  What am I saying—you told me that exact thing!

  So again I say, this is a good time of testing and learning and growing. We are being sobered by it and are thus able to look peacefully and realistically toward the future.

  Christopher, I love you so much for the way you communicate and share with me. You are a most unusual man! I don’t think that most men are able to be as open with their feelings as you.

  I am the luckiest girl in all the world!

  We will be starting out many miles ahead of so many young couples who marry—not necessarily ahead of them in maturity, but in having learned how to really communicate about deep spiritual things. I have you to thank for that. I know, if we really listen to God, that we won’t go wrong (or if we do, that the Lord will steer us right again).

  Oh, Christopher, right now I want to be with you so much I think I might cry. I mean really be with you! I know there will be unemotional lows, but right now I am not feeling that way! I am feeling very pensive and romantic and I so long to feel your arms around me.

  All in good time, I know you would say. And I trust you.

  Corrie

  Dear Corrie,

  Am I really all that unusual as far as men go? You are right, I’m afraid, in that most men aren’t as open with their thoughts and feelings as I am. But it’s not because they can’t be . . . rather because they won’t be, or they don’t know how to be.

  Men “feel” just as much as women. But they have this ridiculous notion that it’s unmanly to let anyone see what they feel.

  I used to find myself so irritated by some of the men in my church when they would stoically hide behind their so-called manliness, never opening so much as a crack to show their inner selves. Then I would have to remember with a shock that I was one of their kind myself!

  But forgive my soapbox. I suppose all preachers—even retired ones like me—have bees that buzz about inside their bonnets and that cannot help from coming out at times.

  I don’t know if it was from observing these stoic, silent parishioners of mine, or from keeping a journal that helped me clarify my thoughts and feelings, but for whatever reason I determined long ago that I was going to be a different sort of man. I would try to make of my inner self an open book that anyone could read who wanted to know me. Not that I thought I was anything so special in and of myself. But God was carrying out a work within me, and that qualified as significant—equally significant as his work in all men and women.

  I crave knowing what the Lord is doing in the lives of others. I want to get inside those who pass my way just as much as I want to expose my innermost self to others. How else can there be unity between brothers and sisters unless we truly know one another?

  I have so much enjoyed, for example, getting to know your brother Zack. He’s got such quality of character—bolstered, no doubt, by his time in the desert, but begun long before that. If ever I imagined having a brother of my own, Zack is him.

  So many marriages would be so much more wonderful, Corrie, if their men would make the decision to make the communication between husband and wife equal and flowing both directions.

  I agree with you that this present time is the best foundation we could want for building our future. If I can say such a thing—I want your romantic and emotional feelings for me to fade somewhat so that we get all that out of the way before marriage. I probably said that poorly. I’ll try again. Perhaps it is good that they fade. The same is true for me.

  It is such a shock for so many who discover, after marriage, that their feelings are becoming different than they were. Not expecting it, they conclude that perhaps they didn’t love one another after all, and that the marriage was a terrible mistake. Well, like you told me about Jennie.

  We are so fortunate to be able to be near to each other like this, to go through the normal “fading emotions” phase of knowing each other and then go beyond that into the realization that we do love each other—more deeply, not less, through all emotions, high and low. Marrying too soon prevents people from testing their love as we are having the opportunity to do.

  I too find myself, even in the midst of these lessons we are learning, longing to hold you forever. I can be a very emotional man in that way too!

  The time will come, no doubt sooner than we think. I would work and labor to make you my wife for seven years . . . and even for seven years beyond that, so great do
I deem the prize of your hand.

  But I hope it will not come to that!

  I love you, Corrie Belle . . . if not more than you can know, certainly more than I can ever say.

  Christopher

  Chapter 46

  Pa’s Answer

  Another Christmas season came—and then the day that marked the end of the year Christopher had been working with Pa. I knew the exact hour! Whatever I’d said during the year about being content, which I was, I was still anxious to find out what Pa’s answer was going to be!

  I expected Pa to come and say something on that very morning, but the whole day went by without a word from him. At supper that night Pa was his normal self. I was watching his every move, but he never brought up the subject of our “Jacob” arrangement or our marriage.

  I was dying of suspense!

  Somehow I managed to sleep through the night. But the next day was just the same . . . and the next . . . and the next.

  Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. When Christopher and I were alone, I asked him why he didn’t say something to Pa.

  “What should I say?” he asked, as if he hadn’t even noticed the date.

  “Tell him your year’s up,” I said impatiently. “That’s what Jacob did after his seven years.”

  “I’m sure he knows.”

  “But he’s not saying anything.”

  “If it keeps going another seven years, I’ll be sure and say something then.”

  “Christopher!”

  He laughed.

  “Your father is an intelligent man, Corrie. He’s more aware of the date than you think he is, and I’m sure he’s giving the matter of our future a great deal of thought and prayer. If he hasn’t said anything, it’s because he’s not ready to say anything.”

  My frustration must have shown all over my face, for he took my hands gently and went on in a serious voice.

  “When I submitted the decision into his hands,” he said, “I submitted the timetable to him too. It’s out of my hands, Corrie. There’s nothing I would do, even if I could.”