FaithStoriesOnline.com

Stories of Faith for Inspiration and Proof that God can be Trusted Completely

Laying her 98-year-old mother on the bed, she felt her go limp.  No pulse.  My most-favorite-mother-in-law had passed from my sister-in-law’s arms into the arms of Jesus.  No drama–she passed peacefully into His presence—at home in the cozy apartment her son-in-law had built especially for her.

The first time I met my wife’s very conservative parents, whose father was a pastor, was a bit of a jolt, not for me, but for them!  I looked like, and actually was, a bit of a “hippie,” with my long hair, torn jeans, flannel shirt, hiking boots, and a large bushy red beard.  They must have thought their conservative daughter had gone off her rocker!

After we were married, and over the years, I fell deeply in love with my wife’s parents and wonderful family.  When guys at the lab would talk about how meddling and annoying their mother-in-laws were, I’d brag about how great my mother-in-law was!  My wife’s parents were special.

Dad told me one time about when he and mother were doing missionary work back the 1940s in the wild backwoods of Kentucky.  It was a tough time for them because the main product in them hills was “Moonshine,” bootleg whisky.  The whisky boys were giving Dad a hard time because they were worried that if folks started giving their lives to Jesus, business would go down.

One day Dad drove up the dry old rocky river bed, which was the only road back then, to visit a family.  After the visitation, a group of rough mountain men came out of the woods and surrounded dad and his car.  Dad said he prayed for safety, didn’t say a word to the men, got in his car, drove through the men back down the river bed.  Later he was told by one of the men that they were so angry and on edge, that if Dad would have said anything to them, they would have stoned him to death.

Mother often told me about those days when in the backwoods how whenever they ran out of food, or milk and diapers for the babies, that the Lord would bring those things to their doorstep.  They didn’t have much money, but she said the Lord always took care of them.

One evening while sitting in the kitchen, long after I’d married into the family, Mother told me about losing her sixteen-year-old son.  He was an athlete who played football in high school.  He had a paper route, and was well-loved by the community.  One day he came home from school complaining about getting a stiff neck during typing class.  A few days later he was gone.

Mother told me his death nearly tore her heart out.  She grieved his loss; she grieved profoundly and for a long time.  Holding her hand to her forehead, she tightly closed her eyes and said to me, “It got so bad, that I was having trouble doing my duties at the church, and I really thought I was starting to lose my mind!”  “Then one night during prayer when I felt I was at the end of myself with grief, Jesus seemed to come to me and touch my mind, and took my grief, and I knew everything would be ok.  The next day I was fine and could function normally–Jesus really had taken my burden.  I still missed my son, but everything was ok from then on.”

Much later when Dad was in the hospital, Jesus again came to Mother and gave her a verse that made her realize that the Lord was going to take Dad home.  The next day, he, too, passed into the arms of Jesus.  And just a few days ago, unknown to my wife, the day before her mother passed away, the Lord also gave her a special verse to bring comfort.  Sitting in a restaurant for breakfast on the other side of the world in South East Asia, my wife who decided to read Ephesians during breakfast, was struck with the verse, “The Lord Himself is our peace.”  Throughout the day, she wondered why the Lord had so impressed this verse on her heart.  Jesus had prepared her for her mother’s death just as Jesus had prepared her mother for her dad’s death.  Both experienced peace straight from the heart of God.

Thinking back over the years, I recalled mother being funny in her own way.  She generally didn’t get jokes, couldn’t hold a tune, and in their younger years when dad started teaching her how to drive, on her first lesson she backed straight up into a chicken coop, sending the chickens and feathers flying everywhere, and that was the end of her driving lessons!  But she was awesome in a thousand other ways—in ways that count!

One time sitting at the large old farm table for dinner with my family and my in-laws that lived on a farm nearby I decided to tell a joke that was, well, a bit on the edge.  I figured mother wouldn’t get it, so I told the joke and watched everyone having a good laugh and my brother-in-law was laughing so hard I’d never seen him turn that red!  I was sitting there kind of proud of myself for launching a really funny joke past mother, when I hear her from the head of the table calling my name.  Mother said, “Can you explain that joke to me please?”  Then it was my turn to turn red!!

Another time we were visiting Mother and had brought along our dog Sassy, a miniature Doberman.  My family and I were sitting with Mother at the table for lunch during one of our many Christmas vacation visits.  Before eating, Mother would often remove her retainer from her mouth and put it in a napkin while she ate.  This time after doing that, she unknowingly knocked it to the floor.  One of my kids noticed and called my attention to it—just as we heard Sassy making some strange noises under the table.

When I looked under the table, I saw that Sassy had her paws tightly wrapped around the retainer licking off the yummy remains.  Sassy looked up at me, and I recognized her look and realized Sassy was getting ready to turn Mother’s retainer into a doggy chew!  I dove under the table and retrieved the retainer—gave it back to mother, who promptly popped it back into her mouth!

Mother was also a bit of word maven, and even in her nineties could, according to a tall and very smart friend of ours, “clean his clock,” in the word game Boggle.  That game along with Skip-bo kept her mind agile.  But more important than the games in keeping her mind agile were all the missionaries and pastors she prayed for every day!  She had a prayer manual that listed thousands of retired and current missionaries and pastors from around the world.  It became so worn and full of notes, you could hardly read it!   In 2006 we bought her a new one.

Now, 2012, as I thumb through that “new” one, it is also worn and tattered; I am simply amazed at the number of people she had prayed for including added notes of additional family members or special needs.  Mother was in the full sense of the phrase, a “Prayer Warrior.”  And oh how she prayed for all of her children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren–we will all miss her prayers profoundly!!  And she knew her Bible well—during evening devotions on our visits she would often finish quoting by memory what we had started reading from the Bible.

By now, you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with a wart and a casket.  Well, mother had expressed her wishes that she wanted an open-casket funeral.  A couple years back she had developed a rather unbecoming wart on her nose.   Now, near her death, it had become a very ugly wart.  Not that mother cared much . . .  at 98 she was past being concerned about being fashionable.

On the day of her passing, in the morning during breakfast my sister-in-law was looking at her wart thinking how bad it looked.  At lunchtime, she noticed the wart was gone!  And three hours later, so was mother!  It was as if Jesus came down and performed His own special surgery to prepare her for her open-casket funeral. What a cool final gesture of love from our Lord Jesus to Mother.

Mother will be greatly missed; she will be a tough act to follow, and we will all greatly miss her prayers.  But words cannot express the gratitude we have for the rich spiritual heritage she and Dad have left us.  Mother is now happy in heaven to be with her Jesus who she has been looking forward to seeing since she was a young girl.  And like my other brother-in-law said, “She will be rejoicing in heaven, but she will be walking–No driving, as Dad will see to that!”

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”  –Psalm 116:15

Copyright © 2012 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

Written in memory of my Most-Favorite-Mother-in-Law who went to be with Jesus on January 9, 2012.

[FaithStoriesOnline.com is now read in over forty countries.]

Three months earlier we had moved to the island of Penang just off the Malaysian coast and south of Thailand.  I was finally settling into my two-year contract teaching high school science at the Dalat International School, and my wife and I decided to visit the the much-acclaimed Butterfly Farm.  They had 120 different species of butterflies flitting about sporting an incredible rainbow of colors.  There were thousands of them flying all around us in their enclosed world of tropical flowers and nectar.

After completing our visit there, we decided to continue on around the road that loops the island and find the Tropical Fruit Farm.  It will help to understand what traffic is like in Penang.  Cars go every which direction, and at the same time, there are hundreds of motorbikes also going every which direction. Like a relative of ours who’s lived here for a number of years said, “In Penang, road lines and traffic lights are merely suggestions.”  Traveling is a life-and-death endeavor; I was recently told that so many folks are killed on motorbikes that the police no longer keep track of the statistics.  Even the Malays that live here admit that traffic is bad!

So, we were very surprised when our GPS routed us up to a very nice four-lane highway that was nearly empty!  Following the road up into the mountain, we only saw a couple of motorbikes and couple of cars go by.  Traveling further up into the mountain, we decided our GPS was giving us false directions with the mountain coming between our GPS and the satellite signal.  Turning back started to seem like a wise idea.  We found a flat rocky area to turn around and headed back down the mountain in our very small Malaysian car.

Minutes later the car started bumping along, and my wife who was driving said, “Is the road rougher than it appears or do we have a flat?”  That was about the time I smelled the rubber.  She pulled over, I got out, and our front left tire was flat as a pancake!  While I was looking at the tire, three teenagers pulled up on their motorbikes and wanted to know if we needed help.  I assured them we were good, and it would only take me a few minutes to change the tire.  Besides, I didn’t know if they were there to hustle us, rob us, or whatever.  I kept trying to get them to  move on, but they just stayed … kinda laughing while they spoke to each other in Bahasa, the Malay language, and very broken English.   Still, I persisted in politely trying to get them to l-e-a-v-e!  Still smiling, they wouldn’t budge.

Then I started thinking, “Lord, is there some reason these guys need to be here?”  As soon as the prayer left my head, I discovered we didn’t have a jack or lug wrench! When we were buying the car a month before, I checked the spare, jack, and lug wrench–all were good.  Apparently, before we brought the car home, someone removed the jack and lug wrench!!  We had no AAA membership here and mechanic shops are tucked away among hundreds of other little shops.  But the one big teen kept repeating to us in broken English, “You rtree no gd, I cld mhs frnnd, h  ees say gud muh ka n tik!!”  Smiling we said, “What was that you said?”  Straining to understand after a couple more smiles and repeats, we got it–”Your tire is no good. I called my friend; he’s a good mechanic!”

Soon after, down the mountain below us we heard a revving motor and then saw a small sedan flying around the corner, swing past us at full speed, hit its brakes, slide sideways, peeling rubber with gray smoke billowing everywhere. The sedan makes the turn, aims at us, and then slams on its brakes right beside us, and out steps our smiling mechanic.   He pulled off the tire, and the inside sidewall had a hole the size of my fist.  I paid him, and gave the three teenage boys some money for their help, and all was said and done in less than thirty minutes!!  Talk about speedy roadside service!

On the way back down the mountain, I prayed, “Lord! Thank you for helping us once again!  Even when I didn’t think we needed help, You knew we did and had those boys stay.  And thank you that we didn’t have a wreck when the front tire blew a hole the size of my fist.  Thank you, Lord, our trust and confidence is in You, and You alone.  Amen from Penang.”

… I have had God’s help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike …        Acts 26:22

Copyright (c) 2011 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

The following story is about my blind friend’s faith and that we can do more than we think we are capable of doing . . .

Lying in the dark in the forward berth on the portside of the sixty-five foot schooner, “Journey,” the darkness and boat started me thinking about my blind friend Allen and our last sail together.  Allen lost his sight in his thirties, and I met him twenty years later at the agency where I worked.  Allen had his own business, running the agency vending machines.  I loved Allen; he was a straight-shooter with a great sense of humor.

He was also smart!  One year he ranked eighth in the nation in the blind chess national championships.  He could also keep all his inventory straight, like which vending machines had pop, which had candy, what kind of pop or candy, when the pop or candy reached its expiration date, how many and exactly where items were located in the machines, the accounting of his money, etc.  Even in his storage room . . . when I would help him move something, he would tell me where it was, how much there was of it, and exactly where to put it.  He kept all this information in his head!  I was impressed, but I never imagined that he would impress me even more in the future.

One day I told Allen I had a twenty-two foot O’Day sailboat and would like to take him sailing.  Allen flatly said, “No!”  I tried another time and found out he was worried about falling out of the boat.  I promised to lash his butt to the mast, and he wouldn’t have to worry about the overboard issue.  Once he finally got on my boat, he felt secure in the cockpit and with a lifejacket on he was good.

After one of our sails, we headed back to my van, and I jokingly said, “Hey Allen, I’m tired, how about if you drive home?”  He said, “Give me the keys!”  So I did and got in the passenger side–playing along with Allen.  We were on a service road by our dock, and it was about a half mile out to the main road.  Next thing I hear is the motor starting! With a blind guy at the wheel!  I yelled, “Allen!  There’s a blind man at the wheel!”  He said, “Yep, that’d be me!”  And stepped on the gas!

He wasn’t going fast, but I’d say right, left, or right, right, yikes, right!  Left, slow, slower, no, no, MORE slow, and so on.  He drove the entire half mile!  He just barely missed two trees, a dumpster, and by the time I got him stopped, he had parked us between two empty picnic tables.  When he got out of the driver’s side tapping away with his white blind stick, some folks eating at another picnic table stopped mid-bite and stared at the blind driver in disbelief!

The next time we went sailing, we had to motor over to the other side of the lake.  I thought about Allen driving, so I set him down by the tiller.  I said, “Allen, the left is “port” and right is “starboard” and you have to push the tiller in the opposite direction you want to go.”  Off we went just like the van; I’d yell out directions as we went in big circles, little circles, just missed a buoy, and almost ran aground once, but in relatively short order Allen started getting the hang of it!  From then on when we went sailing, I’d let him motor us out to wherever we were headed at the time.

One late autumn day we drove to the lake to go sailing, but it was too cold and windy.  Allen, who liked to smoke cigars, asked if he could smoke one in my new-used clunker I had just purchased.  I said, “Sure,” because it already smelled of cigarette smoke from the previous owner.  We rolled the windows down, and he started puffing away.  He had eaten a large order of French fries on the way up, so he held the fry container in his lap to tap the ashes into.  I had been looking out my window for awhile at the lake when Allen casually said, “Am I on fire?”

I said, “What!  Are you on fire???”  Turning, I saw a foot-high flame leaping up from his crotch!  He had accidentally touched the lit part of his cigar to the edge of the French fry container and set it ablaze!   My first thought was to smack out the flame with my hand, but then thought to myself, “That wouldn’t be nice to a blind guy, he’d never see it coming!”  So I grabbed the container by the edge and threw it out my window.  Allen was not bothered by the incident in the least; he only said, “The reason I asked about the fire was because it was getting a bit toasty down there,”  and kept right on puffin’.

The really important thing that came out of those times together was our talks.  Allen believed in Jesus as his Savior but struggled with some ethical and theological issues.  We would talk, and talk, and pray.  I would often tell him some of my faith stories and those would counter some of the legalism he struggled with.  In time, he began to see Jesus as a relationship and not just a set of rules but more as a living Lord and Friend.

The last time Allen and I went sailing, we discussed his sailing the boat himself that day.  I didn’t realize how much information about our surroundings and sailings Allen had been absorbing through his other senses.  He said, “The hardest thing for me is feeling forward movement and speed.”  He told me to close my eyes while we were moving forward.  He was right, we could have been sitting at a dock rocking in the waves with the wind blowing in our faces and going nowhere, and it would have felt the same as when moving!

Still, off we went and within an hour, Allen was sailing the boat by himself!!  He explained that the wind on his face gave him direction, the sound of the sails told him when they were full of wind or luffing (flapping), and for forward movement and speed?  He listened to the gurgle of water behind the boat!  Allen sailed leaning over at the waist with one hand on the tiller and looking straight down at the floor of the cockpit.  He was doing it all by feel and sound!  I was standing up on deck by the mast, when we would pass another boat, folks would wave “Hi” and smile then look puzzled at Allen staring at the floor and not looking at where he was sailing.  I’d yell over, “He’s a bind sailor!”  Their mouths would drop open, and every time I looked back, I’d see Allen face down with his hand on the tiller ‘grinning.’

He sailed for three hours that day, and I only had to guide him around one buoy.  Allen was thrilled, and I was impressed once again!  However, neither of us knew that would be Allen’s last sail.  By the next summer, he had developed cancer, and his slide downhill was fast, and then he was gone.  I had the privilege and honor of speaking at his funeral.  What I said in that service can be summed up in the following poem I wrote for his loving, caring family who miss him deeply–as myself.

Blind Man Sailing

The sailboat glided past the other boaters.
Looking on puzzled, they stared.
The man at the helm, gripping the tiller,
Was bent over in the cockpit staring at the floor.
He sailed gracefully past them and only smiled.

They had never seen…A blind man sailing.

Blind Allen listened to the luffing of the sails for trim,
The gurgle of water from the rudder for speed,
And the wind on his face gave him direction.

He sailed for three hours that day by himself,
Not knowing it was his last sail.
Then the storms came in his life with high winds,
Towering waves, lightening…he was shattered on the rocks.

The storms have passed.
He now sails the heavenly seas,
Navigating among the stars.

Allen stands tall at the tiller,
Gazing into the distance.
For he is a blind man sailing…no more.

“Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” –James 1:12  (KJV)

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

PS:  The previous story was written aboard the schooner “Journey.”  For pictures of the vessel Journey and other information about B-About Sail Ministry see:  http://www.babout.org/PhotoAlbum/