Archives for March 2016

In 1994 we leased a big farm house in west Knox County, Ohio near our church. It was a huge 4500 square foot drafty barn of a house which was heated with fuel oil. We loved the space, the great hardwood floors, the big windows looking out on the fields and all the room for the children to play, but it was very expensive to heat. On winter nights I would lie awake and listen to the old furnace kick on and imagine the fuel oil just sucking out of the tank in the basement. Sometimes I would go down into the dark basement and watch the float and imagine I could see it visibly descending. I would worry and pray about how to keep the house warm. We prayed for a mild winter and an early spring. But it was harsh and cold and the winter lingered on. The house was in a prairie like setting with no trees or obstructions for miles west of the house so the wind just raced across the fields and howled around the house.

If the weather was especially harsh it was especially expensive to heat the house and the attendance at church and offerings would be thin because of the weather, so our income was sometimes tentative. This added to my worries. During the winter the heat alone was between 300 and 400 dollars a month. We just couldn’t afford it on our small salary with our large family and other expenses.

We closed off parts of the house and turned the heat as low as we could. I took extra work to make ends meet. I turned the heat down so far that pipes froze creating more expense and difficulty.

It was a very hard time for us. When the children would get sick I wondered if it was because we couldn’t afford to heat the house properly. Our landlord was a selfish and insensitive man.

I would leave for work on winter mornings and commute to Columbus for my job with Nationwide Insurance feeling guilty because I was warm while the family was cold and didn’t have much. Lois made crafts and sold them to buy food that we needed. I longed to be able to spend more time working the build the church.

We loved having our large family all together at home. He were committed to homeschooling them, but we were never able to afford the curriculum that we really wanted for them. Sometimes I just felt suffocating guilt because I wasn’t providing well for the family I loved so much. The children’s teeth needed care, but we could not afford dental work.

One cold evening we saw headlights coming down the road. A small truck turned in to our drive. I went out to meet our guest. It was Cliff Carpenter.

Cliff had visited our church about a year and a half earlier. I called on them a few times. One day I asked him to breakfast and offered to be his “spiritual trainer.” He liked the idea and for the next year I visited his home about every Thursday evening. I took he and his wife Amy through a series of discipleship lessons. Early in our meetings Cliff trusted in Christ for salvation. I baptized him the day Holly was baptized in a farm pond nearby. He then baptized his wife Amy. He read through his Bible for the first time that year. God began to change his life in ways all his friends noticed. They faithfully attended our church.

Once, while I was in his home I noticed he supplemented his heat with a kerosene heater. I showed some interest in it. We made some conversation about it. He recommended that I get one for our home. It would save us a great deal of money. On the way home I thought about it but I knew I could not afford the heater.

When I walked out to the truck to greet Cliff, he quietly said; “I have something for you.” He then reached in the back of his truck and lifted out a brand new heater for us. We used it every winter day thereafter. It took the chill off our home and provided a nice little place for this children to gather around on winter mornings to warm their hands.

When I would leave for my commute to Columbus I would often pause in front of the house and pray for the family in my absence. There at the base of the front stairs in the darkness of morning I would see the warm glow of that heater. I’m still grateful for the warm gesture of generosity.

Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
March 29, 2016

In my desk drawer for years in a file marked “Children’s Birth Certificates” is a yellow business-sized envelope. The envelope held a stack of eight cards little blue cards—the children’s social security cards. The stack has been getting thinner year by year and the children enter the workforce and they begin to manage more and more of their own financial affairs.

It was probably about the year 2000 when I handed Kyle his card. Today Hope called. She wants to open a little business and a bank account. At the bank she must have looked like a money-laundering terrorist so they insisted on her getting her own official identification card from the Michigan Secretary of State office. I opened the file and withdrew her birth certificate remembering the morning of her birth in the early spring in the Gerber Memorial Hospital in Fremont, Michigan. April 20, 1999. It was an hour and a half before light, 5:27 a.m.

Then I saw the yellow envelope. I opened the flap and there it was, our very last little blue Social Security card. The yellow envelope had faithfully served it’s purpose for about 30 years. I opened it eight times to add a card and eight more times to withdraw a card.

I withdrew Hope America’s card. Tears welled in my eyes as I looked at the empty yellow envelope. I drove to the Secretary of State office south of the church waked in and pulled a number. They were serving customer number 40 and I was customer number 00. Only 60 people ahead of me.

Lois dropped Hope off. We waited and chatted for about an hour and a half. We filled out our forms, paid our ten dollars, and then Hope stood in front of the camera as they snapped her picture. This beautiful little girl becoming woman who has never taken a bad picture in her life complained about how hideous it was like all women do when they get their DMV picture taken.

We walked to the car to make our way home. On the way we stopped to celebrate the rite-of-passage with a treat like you do. Carmel sundae for me. Fudge for her. She chatted and laughed.

It will be years before she understands the ache in my heart as we drive toward home. A year and a month from Sunday she will officially become an adult. But she will always be the cherished baby of the family and my little Hopey.

Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
March 18, 2016