Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (6 page)

One afternoon I went out bike riding with the new contacts, even as my eyes were still watering from the pain. But one of the lenses suddenly flew out of my eye, landing on the gravel shoulder alongside West River Road. I got off my bike and searched for it as cars whizzed by just a few feet away. I had this feeling of horror: I had worked for three years, and now the lens was gone, and I was out that three hundred dollars.

Unable to find the lens, I rode home in tears and told Mom the bad news. Always determined and always the optimist, Mom said that we would go out together and find the missing lens. So we went back out to the highway, and together we got down on our hands and knees on the gravelly side of the road and looked for that lost lens. It probably seemed ridiculous, but that's what families are for—to solve every crisis that arises, no matter how ridiculous. Then, miraculously, the sun glinted on the lens—and we saw it! That little piece of plastic represented three years of work and savings to me. I was thrilled to know my labors weren't for nothing. So we took it home and washed it off, and I put it back into my eye. I was utterly grateful to Mom, and utterly happy at the same time—so I ignored the pain.

With the help of my new look, I felt more confident in high school. I wasn't really a beauty-pageant girl; there were scads of girls far more attractive than I was. But I was chosen twice as a princess for the homecoming court, and, yes, I even won the title of Miss Congeniality. I borrowed friends' prom dresses to wear to the court; we couldn't possibly swing buying a fancy gown. But there was one problem: the tradition at Anoka was for a girl's father to walk the queen, and all the princesses, across the football field at halftime in their ballgowns. I borrowed a gown, but I didn't have my dad. What to do? We had no adult male relatives in Minnesota, so I looked to a man who laid down the law at Anoka, our principal, Art Dussel. I made an appointment with the school secretary to speak with him. I was very nervous and felt a little ashamed to ask him if he would escort me across the football field. My emotions overcame me and though I didn't mean to, I started to cry when I asked him to do this. I'd never spoken of my parents' divorce, and it was harder than I had even anticipated to talk about it. Mr. Dussel couldn't have been more gracious or kind. He immediately agreed, and seemed honored by the request.

At the Friday-night homecoming game, sure enough, Mr. Dussel met me at the fifty-yard line in his suit and tie. He had a little gift-wrapped box in his hand that he gave me which contained a small pearl pendant necklace. Gifts were rare to nonexistent in our family, and I couldn't believe that he and Mrs. Dussel would be so generous. I've never forgotten his kindness or how he “stood in the gap” for me when I needed a dad's presence at that important event in my life.

I went on a few dates in high school, maybe to the movies or to a school event, but not many. In addition to the fact that I was always studying, working, or rehearsing, I wasn't fun in the way that so many high-school boys defined “fun.” I didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't do drugs—and didn't fool around. Despite serving as prom chair, I didn't get asked to the junior prom. I felt bad when I didn't get asked my junior year, but I was really embarrassed and sad that I wasn't asked my senior year. I was working as a grocery cashier at Country Club Market and was scheduled to work prom night. Because girls couldn't ask boys, and because I had no idea how to flirt, I found myself literally minding the store rather than primping for the prom.

Meanwhile, my home life was changing yet again. In 1973, when I was seventeen, my mother remarried. She had met a man named Raymond J. LaFave, a divorced father with five kids of his own, at a Parents Without Parents meeting and dance. My mother hadn't had much success at these meetings and decided this would be her last try. Ray was, and is, a wonderful man. He worked hard all his life and is a true salt of the earth. And he has always been good to Mom. Finally, our economic situation had stabilized. My stepdad was a proud Army veteran of World War Two, with a great smile and a great sense of humor. He had been a single father to his five kids, and clearly he was crazy about our mom. So in May 1973, I became a bridesmaid at my mother's wedding. In October of my senior year, I got to see my mom and stepdad purchase their own home, a three-bedroom rambler. Thanks to everyone's pitching in, from Grandma Laura to the youngest sibling, all through those tough years, we had made it. During the lean years, my mom had told us, “Don't worry, it won't always be this way. Things will get better.” It was tough, but we all learned a work ethic, we learned to save, we learned that if we wanted something, we'd have to work for it, and we learned the value of a dollar. We also learned that material possessions could sprout wings and fly away overnight; we also learned to look at material possessions as temporary, rather than permanent. It was my first lesson that I didn't want material things to own me or define me.

But even so, the new LaFave-Amble “blended family” was mostly older, out-of-the-house kids. By my senior year, I had piled up enough credits that I only needed to spend half a day in school for my first semester and could work the rest of the time, and then I graduated.

But by that time, I was almost out of the house anyway. I got my driver's license and bought my first car, a three-hundred-dollar Rambler with a manual transmission with “three on the tree.” Ray taught me how to drive the stick shift while my mother drove me crazy with her backseat-driving “suggestions.” Ray had me drive back home and told my mother to get out of the car. Once she was gone, Ray directed me to the high school parking lot and in no time I learned the feel of a manual transmission and was on my way. So I could now drive to work as a restaurant hostess. Then I got a job picking up and dropping off special-needs children at events around Anoka. Once I organized a trip for the kids to go to a Vikings football game. They loved it.

I graduated from Anoka High in 1974 and with less than nine hundred dollars in the bank, I had limited options for college. I had no money for a four-year university, but I signed up to attend Anoka-Ramsey Community College to pick up some academic credits at eight dollars a credit hour, because I was determined, no matter what, that I would go to college and then figure out how to earn a living. My mom meant well, but she didn't encourage me to attend college. She thought I should try to get a job as a secretary, as she had. It would offer stability, she told me. My dad hadn't been in my life to offer direction, but I knew that there was no way I was going to miss getting an education. So I filled out forms, made calls, and assumed that my only option was community college. I paid rent to my mother and Ray to live at home while I was at community college, because I wanted to pay my bills as I was going to school. It was a bit of a lonely time for me; most of my friends had moved away, and I, too, wanted to be at a four-year school and find new friends and adventure. But with little money and even less guidance, I looked for an adventure the summer after my first year of community college.

During the first nineteen years of my life, I had never been outside the Midwest, except for just across the northern Minnesota border to Rainy Lake in Canada. So when the doors began to open and I finally got the chance to travel, I jumped at it. My uncle Donnie, my mother's brother, was an adventurer; he had lit out for Alaska as a young man with his wife Sylvia and their young family in the forties and stayed there, working as a big-game hunting guide and dabbling in other businesses. So I spent the summer of 1975 working for him at his fishing lodge in the Aleutian Islands, where he often hosted geologists looking for oil finds. I not only cleaned fish but also did the laundry and cooked—I even tarred roofs.

Those were exciting times in Alaska, as the oil boom was just beginning. Down in the “lower forty-eight,” as Alaskans referred to the continental United States, the talk was all about “the energy crisis”—the inevitability of gas lines, the need to turn our thermostats down, the need generally to live with less. According to the self-appointed experts, the seventies had become the “the era of limits.” But I surely didn't see any limits in Alaska. Everybody up there in the “last frontier,” as they called it, knew that Alaska was blessed with an abundance of oil, natural gas, and other precious raw materials to share with the world. It was just a question of accessing them responsibly, that's all. It made no sense to anyone, especially Alaskans, why federal-government restrictions were blocking the extraction of all this wealth, as well as preventing the creation of good jobs that paid good wages.

Having seen up close in Alaska the enormous God-given potential of our nation, I grew permanently skeptical of claims about shortages and demands for rationing. And in my young mind, I could see that America faced a stark choice. On the one hand, explorers and wildcatters were finding and producing wealth for the benefit of all; on the other hand, politicians and bureaucrats were trying to limit output, in accordance with a politically correct dogma that further entrenched the power of a distant and arrogant elite, many of whom had never been to Alaska.

So I learned a lot in Alaska. And yet as I thought about my own future, including college, I knew I wanted to be closer to home. Once again, God's hand intervened in my life. I met a geologist there who had formerly taught at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota; he took a kindly interest in me. I told him I didn't want to go back to community college but didn't have the money for a costly school. He recommended Winona, not far from the Twin Cities. He explained that it was inexpensive, was situated in a wonderful little town, and offered great academics. He sold me on it. So I sent away for the school catalog; my letter went out on the airplane that came to and from our small Aleutian camp once a week. A couple of weeks later, the plane dropped its regular mailbag, and in the pouch was a catalog from Winona State. I read it, filled out an application, sent a check for the application fee, and was soon accepted. That was the beginning of my new life—first as a student and then, later, as a wife, mother, and career woman.

I borrowed my cousin's college guidebook and sent requests for catalogues for fifty colleges across the country. We had no TV, radio, or telephone; only a shortwave radio we used for emergencies. With long sun-filled days and evenings—we had three days when the sun never truly set—I had nothing to do after work except read college catalogues. So I scoured them all, even as I was teased each week by my uncle and cousins, because I was the one getting all the mail and packages. One day while cleaning the cabins, I read the Winona State catalogue. The school had it all: every department, a beautiful romantic campus; it was the oldest college west of the Mississippi. And it was eight dollars a credit hour! I could do this! When we were little, our dad had told us never to go into debt. That's the way everyone we knew lived. No one had much money, but everyone saved a little, they gave their money to church, and spent less than they had. Democrats, Republicans, apolitical, we all lived that way. “Bankruptcy” was a dirty word. Taking money from the government was something we wouldn't consider doing. Besides, there was no need. Our parents were careful and were not foolish with their money. I knew that finishing college was my goal and that there would be a better life thereafter, so I made it my mission to pay as I went and to not graduate with debt. I wouldn't even put a quarter in the pop machine on campus, much less spend money on a spring break trip. I worked. I went to school, because I had that greater goal.

But I should pause here and step back a couple of years to describe the single most important relationship I will ever have—my relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

If you had asked me growing up if I was a believing Christian, I would have said, “Of course!”

I loved the Lutheran Church. I had been baptized as a Lutheran, went to church every Sunday, attended vacation Bible school every summer, and prayed a traditional Lutheran prayer at night before I went to bed. And I was proud that I came from a long line of Lutherans; I remember, as a kid, driving through Iowa with my parents and stopping at a Lutheran church near a little place called Jericho, where many of my ancestors had once lived and were buried. There we were able to look at the old church records and see all sorts of family names—including that of Halvor Munson, my great-great-grandfather. I was proud that my ancestors had been actively involved in their church, but as far as I was concerned, that was mainly a matter of history. For me as a girl, being a Christian was a simple duty, doing what was expected, it was what we did on our way through life. I didn't know that I could have a personal relationship with Jesus. There was something missing in my life—a God-shaped hole—even if I didn't yet realize it.

As I mentioned, in high school I participated in lots of activities. One activity was a prayer group that met before school. I went to the meetings, and I enjoyed studying the Bible, just as I enjoyed listening to sermons on Sunday. I believed in God; I behaved myself. I didn't go out drinking, never did drugs, never fooled around with boys. None of that had ever held any attraction for me, because I had seen that it led to personal downfall.

But my friends knew what I didn't know—that I was not saved, that I had not made my own personal commitment to Jesus. When my friends would make this point to me, I would smile politely and, in my mind, wave them off. I was fine, I said; after all, I was a Lutheran. And I didn't need to worry about going to heaven. Of course I was going—I was a Lutheran. So my friends prayed for me, and waited, and hoped.

Let me pause again here to say that I am sure that the Gospel was preached at our church and that folks in the pews all around me heard it just fine. At that church, they heard God's word, and they were saved, just as He promises salvation to all who believe in Him, anywhere in the world. It's just that I, as a teenager in Minnesota, had missed the true import of His message. Maybe I thought it was automatic; that I wouldn't have to do anything except sit in church and nod. Well, in any case, that was all about to change.