By Patricia Ducé
It was a typical February day – bleak and colourless. Inside our one-room bed-sitter it was more cheerful – the gas fire popped intermittently as it glowed red, some personal possessions made up for the rather uninteresting furniture and cramped quarters. That was our home at that time.
Husband Dick was out at work all day. So I felt very much alone, as I had for the past three weeks, though I was slowly beginning to regain strength and perspective.
Having a miscarriage was a new experience, and one I could have done without. The doctor had been kind but brisk. That was that – try again, was the gist of what he’d said.
At 37? Funny that – we’d had to change to want a baby, now we had to change not to.
My mind went back over the past 18 months since our marriage – living with friends after our honeymoon, then digs and more digs – different from what I’d been used to, coming from a comfortable family home. Now our conviction was that the time had come to find and set up a home of our own. Somehow the finances would work out, somehow we’d find just the right place. Our faith in a God who guides as well as provides was strong. He had certainly guided us to marry, so the rest of his plan would work out perfectly.
But I thought also of our so-far fruitless search. With both of us normally at work, we only had evenings and Saturdays free. We must have looked at about 20 different places – too big, too small, too expensive, too this or that – nothing seemed to click. Digs we were in and digs it looked like going on being. An now, this baby that wasn’t.
On that February morning, self-pity began to take over. I was still weak, and the long days of seeing virtually no one and hearing nothing until Dick returned from work had begun to have their effect.
“Better get up, get a grip on myself,” I thought. “Mustn’t lie about like this.”
I pushed the bedclothes aside and got up shakily, began to dress without enthusiasm. I was just putting on my shoes when an awful thought hit me: maybe we weren’t meant to have a permanent home. Maybe that wasn’t God’s plan for us.
Until that moment I hadn’t realised how deep my longing was for a home of our own.
The thought was too much for me in my depressed state. I sat down on the edge of the bed and the tears came. “No, God, you don’t really want that – do you? Please…”
And then another thought winged its way into my troubled mind. What about that decision of years ago when I’d turned my life over to God for him to have his way in everything? What about it? Hadn’t I had proof he loves me? Was my trust so weak?
Back and forth, round and round went my thoughts. The inner struggle was awful.
Finally I got down on my knees by the bed – “God, I’m not willing, but if that’s what you want, please make me willing.”
Almost immediately I felt a strange sense of peace deep inside, something I’d not known for a while. Just as if I’d suddenly stopped trying to swim against the tide. It was a relief. It was over to God now, to decide.
A couple of hours later I was reading the local paper and what did I see but an advert for a house that sounded just what we’d had in mind all along – right price, situation, size, everything. I could hardly believe it.
When Dick got home, we went in a taxi that evening to view it, and the moment we saw it we knew our search was over.
We awoke to another bleak February morning, but somehow everything looked different. And in the morning post came a letter out of the blue from an old friend, living in another part of the country.
He hadn’t known we were house-hunting. He and his widower father were giving up their home to launch out in a different direction. Would we like to have the entire contents of their house as a gift? Would we ever! Who says miracles don’t happen – one just did.
So our first home and everything in it came at God’s hand. That was something to think about. And I still do!
This is a slightly edited version of an article written in 2009 by Patricia Ducé, who lives in a retirement home in East Sussex.
English