Randomly on our little farm growing up, you could find the fatherless, the homeless, the soul-starved. Sometimes we all knew everyone at the dinner table, sometimes we didn’t. There’s a reason broken and strange people found rest with our family—they fit right in.

Everyone wants to be well, forgiven, and whole but I learned from watching Mama and Daddy, we’re more willing to share our table when we’ve known some kind of hunger ourselves. We pray for healing in all its forms, but while we wait, let those who doubt touch our wounds like Thomas and believe.

As a teenager, Forrest Gump was one of my all-time favorite movies, but I didn’t get to see the whole movie. Daddy took us to our hometown theater in Haleyville, Alabama where everybody knew everybody.

We were all enjoying ourselves when suddenly, Lieutenant Dan had all he could take, so he climbed the boat’s mast during a violent storm, shook his fist and cussed at God.

My dad had all of Lieutenant Dan he could take, so he stood us up and marched us out like a row of ducks, in front of God and everybody. Daddy didn’t just “stand for” something, he stood up and walked out.

I’m thankful Daddy did what he felt was right, but I’m just as thankful for Mama taking us by the hand and walking out with him. A man or woman can put her whole heart into raising a family, but if they don’t stand together, the home will fall right down on itself.

Faith is my parents’ lifeblood, teaching them when to hold on with clinched white knuckles, and when to let go. Mama was accidentally poisoned when she was pregnant with my brother because someone poured bleach in our spring. He was born so prematurely, the nurses advised her not to even give him a name.

But Daddy held him in the palm of his hand and indeed called him by name: Amos, after a fearless country prophet whose name means burden bearer.

Now he’s a 6’3” superhero, quite busy lifting burdens off people.

Experts sometimes advise people to give up, but faith tells us to put our hope in the Hand of the Resurrector who doesn’t give two cartwheels what the experts think.

To Daddy, part of being faithful meant never missing church. I didn’t care much for Sundays because we had to be quiet, but I loved Sunday mornings. Just after sunrise, he would take Mo and me on bike rides through the back country roads of our community, called Needmore. The damp blue fog was clean and chilly, and the scent of pine needles made everything smell like Christmas.

Back home, Mama had a big southern breakfast waiting. That memory sounds like clinking dishes, the bawl of scooting chairs, and clumsy thud of our yellow dog on the porch.

It was by no means perfect—Sunday mornings often ended in riots and protests and crooked clip-on ties—but it was a living testimony from the generation who saw the coming chaos and hoped that someday with God’s help, in the crisis of progress, we’d remember: we are Homemakers. Home is what we make it.

Mama is the wise woman of Proverbs 14, who builds her home rather than tearing it down. She taught me to live life awake to what is right in front of me, because it’s a gift.

Sometimes I have so much I need to do, but instead I’ll go spend the gift with Mama on the farm. Instead of being “responsible,” I watch the wind blow her curls and her hands smooth the table cloth, and I press my face against Daddy’s white beard.

The world spins too fast, too often; expensive days spent hurrying cost us dearly. But then I find their porch back home where the leaves fall slower and smoke smells like memories. I’m sober and awake to what matters—the treasures that will store themselves in heaven someday until I join them there.

 

On November 2, Mama and Daddy will have been married 44 years.

As the saying goes, they were born in a time when if something was broken, you didn’t just throw it away; you fixed it.

We’ve had our share of broken. My stars, have we ever.

But I’m so thankful they chose love, chose family, unbroken and untossed away. All us Bryants are still growing up, each in our own way, but always together.

44 years and counting.

 

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Don’t store up treasures for yourself on earth that moths and rust can destroy and thieves can steal. But store up treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

~ Jesus Christ