love comes softly
Some blog posts, like chapters in our lives, I could imagine writing. But this one comes as a surprise… especially to me.
This coming week will be eight years since Joey passed away and was laid to rest in the cemetery behind our farmhouse. In some ways, it feels as if nothing’s changed since that day in 2016, but in other ways, it feels like everything has. But the truth is, it’s a little bit of both. This year in particular, as I reflect on the beautiful story that God gave us together, and the new one that He began writing when she was gone, I’m reminded in particular of another story that both she and I read long ago, and loved.
It was about twenty years ago when Joey and I first heard about and together read the book Love Comes Softly, and some months later watched the TV movie of the same name. I remember how the story touched and inspired both of us and how often through the years we found ourselves talking about it. It’s a pioneer-days story about how in the prime of a couple’s life together, tragedy strikes, and one is left alone, grieving the other. And how in spite of what they think they want or need, love finds its way back into their life. Not in the way they experienced it before, but back into their life just the same, and they are so thankful.
Recently I remembered that movie and watched it again, this time with Indiana, and it touched me even more. But for much different reasons. I could see how much that story has strangely become my own.
Although I can honestly tell you that after losing Joey I wasn’t sure it was even possible (actually I was fairly sure it wasn’t), love has shown up in my life again. Although in a quieter and gentler way than I knew before, it has come just the same.
And it’s been a wonderful thing.
Rebecca has been in our life for the last five years, although most of that was her just across the field from me in the one-room schoolhouse, where she’s been teaching my little one and a dozen other children. And though we’ve known each other for a long while, and I’ve always thought highly of her, I never really knew her.
But in the last year or so, as we began to spend more and more time together, outside of being Indy’s school teacher and a part of our festival and farm, I was given the opportunity to learn who she really is and what she wants out of life. And I’ve discovered a truly wonderful, kind, generous person who is beautiful on the inside and out.
The story of how Rebecca came to work at the school was a little like a Hallmark movie in itself in some ways.