Test of Faith

Dr. Roy Reynolds

Description

The book describes a life ruined by tuberculosis meningits with abscess and come beginning at age eleven ending up in nursing homes for 46 years before finally dying of pancreatic cancer. Both parents had major tragedies in their love life.

Everyone has a life. Right? And each can tell a unique story. Millions of them. But have you ever put yourself in a picture where your normal life experiences stopped at age eleven years after meningitis and a prolonged coma, yet you lived to be fifty-nine years old living in a nursing home the rest of your life with multiple impairments?

This book is centered around Barbara, a real-life person described above who struggled with such a life from childhood.

Or think about Barbara’s father who returning from a terrible war to the girl he left behind three and one-half years earlier, having a baby one year later, then have your wife contract a fatal disease four months after the birth and watch her slowly die over the next five and one-half years?

Imagine you are a woman having ten brothers and one sister and one day you drop out of high school to be servant to your brothers and father coal miners after your mother dies suddenly. Would you marry without love in desperation to escape being a slave or possibly sexually threatened by your father? How would you feel when your true love returns from the same war after years to find you plunged into marriage thinking he was killed in action because of deceit by his sister? Would you feel depressed when he killed himself with alcohol? What kind of stepmother would you become to someone like Barbara after marrying her father?

Experiences like these can test anyone’s faith in a caring God but, if you believe enough and keep your faith, God will never forsake you. He cares about each of us.

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Appalachia
• Faith
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: WestBow Press
• Date de parution: 02 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664281547
• Langue: English

Extrait

TEST OF Faith
 
 
 
 
 
DR. ROY REYNOLDS
 
 
 
 
 

 
Copyright © 2022 Dr. Roy Reynolds.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.
 
 
WestBow Press
A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.westbowpress.com
844-714-3454
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
The Christian Standard Bible. Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible®, and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers, all rights reserved.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6642-8155-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-8156-1 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-8154-7 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919748
 
 
WestBow Press rev. date: 12/02/2022
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
About the Author
Preface
Talking with a friend on a snowy November day, I had been describing what had happened to my stepsister, Barbara Sue, after she developed bacterial meningitis with a brain abscess while growing up in Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century.
After thinking about the effects of the permanent mental and physical impairments that developed, I began to list them realizing even more what a tragedy her story represented. Reading her lack of normal experiences, the friend suggested I write a book about the story.
Considering common activities experienced in a normal full life, several pages of events she never experienced quickly came to mind. Some of these events included never having a pet, graduating from any school, riding a bicycle, traveling, learning to drive a car, having a birthday party with friends and family, going to church, attending a concert, or shopping for and picking out her own clothes.
Her normal life stopped four months after her eleventh birthday when she contracted tuberculosis meningitis. After two years of hospitalizations, she spent her final forty-six years in nursing homes.
A normal close mother-daughter relationship was denied Barbara Sue when her mother developed a different form of tuberculosis when Barbara Sue was four months old. Her mother, Loraine Reynolds, deteriorated slowly over five and a half years with no treatment available during her illness with pulmonary tuberculosis.
Her father’s childless Aunt Sally agreed to stand in as Barbara Sue’s mother to help quarantine Barbara Sue from her contagious mother. Aunt Sally and Barbara Sue lived across the orchard two hundred feet from her father, Homer, and mother, Loraine, during Loraine’s losing battle.
Thirteen years before Homer died, he had written a twenty-page autobiography, but he never shared the document with the family while living. Once discovered in the family cedar chest of keepsakes, more was learned about his first marriage and about Barbara Sue’s arrival into this world. Homer never talked with his family about Loraine or the navy years.
Homer returned as a war hero with a Purple Heart on July 5, 1945, just four weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Within two days, Homer and Loraine were married. The next year, on July 9, 1946, Barbara Sue was born.
Homer had experienced several years of personal suffering and grief after the loss of three close friends when a kamikaze struck their destroyer.
After his discharge and quick marriage, he spent five and a half years watching helplessly as his young wife slowly died of pulmonary tuberculosis.
After Barbara Sue developed a type of tuberculosis with meningitis five years later, he began forty-eight difficult years of managing Barbara Sue’s life living in hospitals and nursing homes.
Many hardships also occurred in the life of his second wife, Myrtle, before they met. She had her own tragedy because of World War II after her boyfriend’s letters were received by his sister and jealously kept from Myrtle. Seeing no response to her frequent letters and thinking that Alan was missing in action, she married out of desperation to leave her father and five brothers, all coal miners, behind. The boyfriend returned to find out what had happened. His depression led to heavy alcohol use and living homelessly in a train tunnel. He was later found dead in the tunnel at 4:00 a.m. by a coal train engineer. The marriage failed.
Despite Homer’s life of tragedies, he never gave up on his belief in a supreme creator—God—and neither did Barbara Sue, Loraine, or Myrtle.
 
 
 
 
 
 
As for man, his days are like grass—
he blooms like a flower of the field;
when the wind passes over it, it vanishes,
and its place is no longer known.
—Psalm 103: 15–16 (Christian Standard Bible)
Chapter 1

T he thick dawn fog was lifting lazily up the hillsides at Big Mud Creek in the fall of 1950, revealing the fall trees in shades of gold, brown, yellow, orange, and crimson. Another winter would soon arrive. Jake was pondering if he had enough corn put up in his barn for his cows and horse to last through the cold months of the approaching winter. He had already gotten the barn attic filled with hay bales in preparation.
Since 4:00 a.m. he had been up tending to the fireplace, the coal, and the wood-burning stove where his coffee was brewing, filling the home with the familiar aroma.
The home was quiet except for the crackling and popping coming from the fireplace in the next room. The coals started to burn themselves into a red glow as some smoke escaped into the room. As usual, the home with no insulation—the norm in the Appalachians—was cold, requiring Jake to stand in front of the glowing fireplace and turn after one side of his body reached adequate temperature. His blue jean overalls had been very cold when he put them on, but body heat and the fire were making them more comfortable. There was no radio or newspaper to distract Jake’s thoughts, but the big red rooster was crowing to wake everyone while the chickens ran loose with some corn. The only other sound was the constant ticktock , ticktock of the Big Ben clock sitting on the mantle. The loud, clanging alarm went off, and Jake reached to shut it off.
Sally Hamilton had been sleeping in their feather bed and was starting to wake up in their bedroom in the back of the white frame home when the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. She was further aroused by their family bird dog, Chase, barking outside the kitchen door. She presumed he was barking at the squirrels and rabbits living in the adjacent garden where they made their morning appearance and were out early scouting for more acorns. Jake was not the only one planning for worsening weather ahead. By 6:00 a.m., Sally made her way to the kitchen.
Jake was watching dew-covered leaves fall while thinking about his yard raking planned for later that day. He hated leaves cluttering his meticulously cared-for lawn. Jake sat at the table, tapping his fingers on the red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloth, still mentally planning his day. He was already sipping his second cup of strong black coffee.
At the stove, Sally began frying bacon and put some large homemade biscuits in the oven. “Thanks for getting the fires started, honey. It is cold this morning.”
“You’re welcome. I’m glad I got the last cord of wood stacked on the porch. We should have enough coal in the shed to last the next four weeks before we need another delivery from Bentley,” Jake replied.
There was a brief silence as Sally cracked eggs fresh from the chicken coop. Then she asked, “Jake, have you thought about what Homer is going to do with Barbara Sue when Loraine dies?
Sally and Jake had been keeping five-year-old Barbara Sue already for four and a half years, as her mother, Loraine, lay next door, across the orchard, dying with pulmonary tuberculosis. There was no cure, and most of those who knew Loraine wondered how much longer she could linger. Loraine had just returned from her eight-month stay at the Louisville Tuberculosis Sanatorium, where her illness had progressed. The doctors told Barbara Sue’s dad, Homer, that Loraine might live another six months. Barbara Sue had been removed at four months of age from the doomed mother’s home in the hope of preventing her from getting TB from her mother. When the weather was good, Barbara Sue had visited Loraine as she sat on the porch of her home. Barbara Sue, Loraine, and anyone else brave