My dear friend,
Perhaps you are thinking to yourself that I do not cherish and love my wife, and I suspect that there are many others that are thinking the same thing. When I published my post, “A Riddle?,” I figured that it would cause a bit of a stir, and it appears that it did. What was I supposed to do, pull a Jonah and disobey God by running off to Tarshish? You have heard the story before, no?
“1Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. 3But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. 4But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. …”
“15So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. 16Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows. 17Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”
Jonah 1:1-4 & 1:15-17 KJV
I would rather not attempt my circumnavigation in the belly of a fish, thank you very much!
God instructed me to post that message, and so I did … verbatim. The only thing that I did that was not in complete obedience was that I added the line, “All praise and glory and honor unto our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Everything else in that message was exactly as God instructed – to the letter! Besides, if that message has anything to do with my own wife, let God be the judge.
Thus, I think that it is important that you understand more perfectly how much I do cherish and love my wife. I would not want any untruthful rumors making the rounds. May God have mercy on our disobedient hearts!
I would love to tell you the whole story right here and now, but as with the topic of circumnavigation, it is not a story that I can tell in a single blog post. Therefore, I will do my best to spread it out in colorful sketches.
Before God inflicted me with my gastrointestinal disease, I met my wife in a nightclub of all places. Neither her nor I wanted to be going out with our friends to nightclubs that night. Yet both of us relented to the pressure of our friends and suffered ourselves to their shameless urgings. We and our friends all ended up in the same nightclub, a place called “Popeye’s.” As we later discovered, we were both very discontent to find ourselves at Popeye’s with our cheeky friends. Neither one of us was in the mood to be dealing with the typical meat-market personas. When I saw her on the other side of the dance floor, I was captivated with her gracious countenance, and she was very fair to look upon, with her long flowing blond hair and her Amazonian stature. She was as the Lady Galadriel among the women of Bree. She was like no other woman I had ever seen before. Why it is that she accepted my invitation to dance is beyond me.
I soon learned why she was so different. She came from a family of upstanding rapport, out of the mountainous farmlands of Montana. She was a true down-to-earth Montana breed queen of virtue, and she had the beauty to match her distinguishing heritage. Her father and her late mother were both very fine, upstanding, and highly respected citizens of her hometown in Montana: hardworking, genuine Spirit-filled Christians, moral, ethical, gracious, warm, loving, caring and humble people. How could I not fall in love with her, especially when she regarded me with such great respect and adoration?
When my father was murdered in 1993, she was an extraordinary source of support, comfort, and understanding. I could never have asked God for a better friend and companion during that difficult trial of my life. Shortly afterwards, she unofficially became my business partner. I left my position at the headquarters of Tower Records and became an independent contractor. Of course, my contracts with Tower Records accounted for over ninety percent of my business. Essentially, I was installing all of the low-voltage electrical systems (audio, video, telecom, & datacom systems) that I had designed when I was still an employee at Tower Records. Tower Records was at the peak of their heyday, opening about 40 new stores each year. My wife (girlfriend at the time) was my financial/accounting expert. She was so amazingly good to me, and patient beyond measure.
Only a few months before my father’s death, I used up one of the twenty or thirty some-odd lives that God has blessed me with. (A cat has nothing on me. By the grace of my Lord and Savior, I have at least three times as many lives as a cat!) I am sure you have heard me tell this story before, of how I nearly drank myself to death when I was working in Mexico City. (That is a story for another day, however.) Nonetheless, it was that incident that began all of my gastrointestinal issues. Over the years, my gastrointestinal problems gradually became more difficult, more problematic, and an ever-greater impact to my ability to live and to contribute to a rich relationship and marriage with my wife. Regardless of all of my short comings, she has always endured and supported me with the utmost mercy and provision for what I lacked (financial security in particular). It has ever been her goal and purpose to have a sure retirement.
Immediately after we were married in 1997, my gastrointestinal symptoms began to become an impact to my livelihood, especially at work. It also began to limit my ability to eat certain foods. In the beginning, there were only a few restaurants that we had to scratch off of the list, for instance, most of the Italian restaurants. Despite the changes to my diet, the symptoms continued to get worse, and I became more aggressive in my search for answers from the medical profession. The problem was that none of the doctors that I had seen were able to provide any help or any solutions. In fact, most of them thought that the problem was largely, if not entirely, psychological.
I have lost count of all the medical professionals that I have seen over the years. Some of them have proved to be a hindrance and/or antagonistic. Others have been nothing more than a waste of time. A few of them have blessed me with a little bit of insight on my problem, and only one of them has provided genuine help in solving the gastrointestinal disorder. Unfortunately, that man passed away about ten years ago. At this point in time, I have found that there are very few medical practitioners that possess more practical knowledge about my condition than myself.
Perhaps you have heard this explanation before, but the big problem now is that I am not especially confident that I can find any medical practitioner that will actually be able to supply a solution to my problem. It is a three-fold problem: I would need to find a practitioner that has the genuine ability to diagnose and to treat the condition; I would need to subject myself to the numerous months of testing required for that practitioner to diagnose the condition; and I would need to undergo the numerous attempts to treat the condition in search for a treatment that actually works (assuming that they would even be able to devise a successful treatment). More than likely, I would need to subject myself to several potential practitioners. (There is no shortage of practitioners that think that they know what they are talking about, when in reality they are simply full of hot air.) It would be a miracle to find a competent doctor in less than a year. Then it would be no less than six months for a diagnosis. Finally, our experimentation of treatments would begin, and what would it take to find a successful plan of attack? … 12 months? … 18 months? I could easily be at this whole doctor shopping exercise for the next five years, and still be without a solution. This is how dire my problem is!
There is not a chance that such an approach would fit into God’s plan for me to circumnavigate the Earth. By that plan, I would be lucky to be in the early stages of my treatment plan at the time I am supposed to embark out of Singapore. Therefore, God clearly has something entirely different planned for my deliverance.
I will let you in on a little secret. I have not the slightest inclination of what God’s solution for my affliction could possibly be. Yet, with all my heart and soul I believe that God is going to provide a solution, just exactly as I believe in you! With all my heart and soul, I believe in you, as God has given me reason to believe.
Love Always,
Dale 😊
1. Those of you that are Lord of the Rings aficionados may be wondering why I chose a picture of the “Lady of Shalott,” instead of a picture of Galadriel herself. I simply liked this picture better than those that I could find of Galadriel. It is thought that JR Tolkien may have modeled the character of Galadriel after the Lady of Shalott, in part. Looking at this picture, I can see how that could be said.
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