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| Chivalry, 1885 (public domain) |
My wife's spirit left her body on the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century. That type of numerical coincidence happens every 101 years, which is once in roughly 36,865 days.
Her departure also happened during "Grand Climax" on the Occult Ritual Calendar, and one day after Presidential Inauguration Day in the USA. The gematria of her death date (1/21/2021) reduces to 9. Her pronounced time of death (10:58 PM) reduces to 5, and the military version (22:58) reduces to 17. I discussed both of those last two numbers in Pearls. Those are all facts; you can decide if it means anything. I believe God is in control of all things.
As I have become more and more aware of the tremendous spiritual battle taking place around us, I have increasingly fought for those I love, especially my wife. I understand she is "not my project," but she is my responsibility, or at least she was before her spirit left.
Periapsis
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| The driveway of the house where I grew up. |
When I was a child, I wondered who I would marry.
During the summer of 1969, when I was 11 years old, the girl who lived behind me walked up my driveway with a friend. I saw them from the kitchen table.
Many years later, my wife told me she went to summer school with the girl who lived behind me, and she remembered walking from the school to her house to do a project. They graduated in 1970. The population of Midland was 38,176 that year.
Another close approach happened after I finished college and was working. The girl who would become my wife played softball with someone who had a chemical engineering degree from the school where I got mine. That engineer knew some engineers I knew, and she had a party at her house. My friends and I went to the party and I remember playing Frisbee with the girl who would become my wife. I also remember her helping her engineer friend when the friend had had too much to drink.
We both worked at the same large chemical manufacturing plant, but we didn't really notice each other. I remember specifically seeing her in the 113 Building corridor, near the doorway to 114. She was with her friend, Pam, and they were probably heading back to their work areas from the cafeteria.
College co-ops had filled a specific role in my department, but the bosses decided to expand the role and fill it with a full-time employee. They offered the position to the girl who would become my wife.
Colleagues
When she started her new role, I sat down with her to explain her duties. I began by drawing a diagram of the chemical process and explaining the chemistry. She sat and listened. Then she went home and lamented to her chemical engineer friend that she had made a terrible mistake. She knew nothing about chemistry and was afraid she was going to fail. Her friend gave her counsel.
The next day, we picked up where we had left off, and the first thing she did was ask me if she really needed to know everything I was telling her. I still remember staring at the diagram and being so disappointed. I was used to dealing with other engineers. I told her no, and she asked me to just tell her what she needed to know to do her job, which was entering information into a computer. This became a joke between us for our entire relationship, and it certainly taught me a lesson.1
She did her job very well, and soon took on more responsibilities. I really appreciated what she did, and so did her bosses.
She struggled with her weight her entire life, and had become a "yo-yo dieter." As I got to know her, I noticed she ate cottage cheese for lunch and not much else. She told me later she basically did not eat. She did lose weight, and after she had been working in my area about six months, I noticed she was wearing some new jeans as she stood in the doorway of my small office. They looked very nice on her. Soon after that, she told me about a party at her engineer friend's house.
The weather was very stormy, and I wasn't inclined to go until my former roommate showed up at my apartment door with a mutual volleyball friend from college. He was in town and they were looking for someplace to go. I told them I knew about a party, and so we all went.
I have a heavy beard, and it was well past five o'clock when we had our encounter. She did not go to work while her face was raw because she was terrified the men in the building would tease her. I came down with mononucleosis soon afterward and was away from work for large portions of the next three to four weeks. My boss had her deliver me some paperwork when I was at my parent's house, which I recall was both nice and awkward. I was really conflicted and felt it would be very unwise to date a colleague I would have to work with every day. If things went bad, it would be very bad.
Late in the summer, I was offered a new position on the other side of the plant. As soon as I accepted it, I told her, "We can date now."
Our first date was part of a "two-date weekend," the only one I ever had. My dad had dated a lot of women when he was young, and he told me he often went out with more than one woman in the same weekend. I had never done that. My dating, when it rarely happened, almost always ended up being "one and done." I don't know why. Actually, yes I do! God had not brought me the right one yet! Anyway, I took someone else out on Friday night but don't remember anything about it. Then I took her out on Saturday night. We went to see Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. It was awful, but who cares?! When it was finished, I opened the passenger door of my sports car for her, and she unlocked my driver's side door for me. I recently told her it was that moment when I knew she was the one. At the time, I wanted to be with her, and no one else.
Physical
Our relationship turned very physical right away. We pretty much started up where we had left off in the foggy car. I got what I had been looking for: sex. She had her trailer and I had my apartment. If there was any "foot dragging," it was by me because I had been taught it was wrong and I was a "rule follower." The culture taught otherwise, and we were products of our programming. The Holy Spirit has since taught me that I was both right and wrong. Those were some of the most joyful days of our relationship.
I had wanted to have a girlfriend and to have sex ever since I had reached puberty. Our culture told me I needed to go to school, and then to college, and then to get a job. And I did those things, because I was a rule follower, and my studies came first. I now know I was being groomed to be a slave.
God's ways and His designs are perfect. People are ready to begin procreating before they are ready to live on their own and be adults. That is why we are ready for it in our early teens, when we reach puberty. I find it interesting that the Bible says...
...a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24 NIV)
It doesn't say the wife leaves her parents! Is it God's intent that she stay with her family so they can help her through her first pregnancies? Seems logical. Mary, the mother of Jesus, visited Elizabeth during the last months of her pregnancy with John the Baptist. Did God give Mary that experience to prepare her for giving birth in Bethlehem?
I have learned to strip away cultural and religious requirements to expose God's actual requirements. His requirements for marriage are three things: consent, commitment and consummation. Civil and religious traditions and practices may help bring those things about, but in God's eyes, it is only those three things that matter.
My problem was I lacked commitment, until God forced me to make a decision. I was offered a temporary, nine-month job assignment overseas. I had two decisions to make: 1) Do I take the job, and 2) Do I take her with me? Taking her with me meant we had to be civilly married so her passport and visa could be obtained. It didn't take me long to make the first decision, but the second one was harder.
Emotional
I didn't know anything about oxytocin at the time, but I had heard of the term "making love." These things bond people together, and it is God's design.
I decided I would take the overseas assignment, but I would go alone. It was only for nine months, after all. She remained silent and let me make my own decision. Later, she confided that she was afraid I would find a "Sheena Easton"2 and forget about her. I think she applied the wise advice: If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours; if it doesn't, it never was.
When I woke up the next morning, I was lying next to her as the radio played Laura Branigan singing How Am I Supposed To Live Without You. I wept. At lunchtime we were at her trailer in the kitchen and I decided I wanted to get married. What a jerk I had been. I can't listen to that song without crying.
I remember being with my dad in his living room, probably the evening before. I was conflicted, and he said that she would make a good mother. He was right.
From the beginning, we became friends. Best friends. We enjoyed going to movies, and we left work on Fridays to get lunch at a Chinese take-out restaurant. I remember taking an afternoon off from work on a beautiful, Spring day and sitting in a particular restaurant next to the window and just talking until mid-afternoon. We had common things to talk about from work, but we moved well beyond that.
We spent a couple of years in Britain being newlyweds, although I had to work. She had been an only child until her brother was born when she was 15, so she was self-motivated and liked to explore. And shop. She took full advantage of the strong dollar. She found places to show me, and planned trips we could take. We went on a 21 day tour of Europe, and spent our first anniversary in Vienna, Austria. We also went to Scotland, Ireland, London, Paris, a tulip festival in Holland, a wine tour in Germany, and drove many places to see many sights in Wales and England. We also went on a skiing vacation in Seefeld, Austria, although she did not ski because she thought she might be pregnant. She arranged it all. I would have been miserable without her.
We spent four years in Kentucky, where we bought our first house and brought our children into the world. Before the pregnancies eclipsed our lives, we went to movies and spent money on our home. Once she was pregnant, and moving around became difficult for her, she ordered things from catalogs and we would spend the evenings returning items she didn't want. Well, I did. I always got fed, though.
We returned to Britain in the 1990's for my work, and this time we had children. It was a completely different situation, and we did very little touring, although we did go on canal-boat holidays. We really enjoyed them. And we learned to take vacations like Europeans -- we went where there was sun.
We returned to the States and shepherded our kids through their school days. We lost interest in most theatrical movies, and instead preferred to re-watch films from our young adult days and earlier. She liked old movies, although she usually deferred to my preferences She said that she didn't really care, as long as we watched something.
As I began to discover the sinister secrets in the films produced by the media, I began to analyze them. She saw those things, too, but probably would have just preferred to simply enjoy the stories. She immersed herself in clean, romance novels about Britain and similar places. She wanted to go back there again, but it never happened. Evil has come out of the shadows and the world is not what we thought it was.
Our friendship was always real, however, and it carried on until our last day together.
Parents
She was in her 30's when we got married, so we didn't wait too long before trying to start a family. We were still in Britain, and there were at least a couple of miscarriages. Every one is tragic, although we learned that they are more common than many people realize.
When we returned to the States in the late 1980's, she consulted with some doctors who specialized in difficult pregnancy situations. With a few hormonal adjustments, she was pregnant. With twins, girl and boy. I had been successful at my job, and I was going to be the father of twins! I was proud.
We lost them. They were not quite viable, and I was grateful that we were not burdened with crippling medical costs. I was devastated, and I still think it was the worst day of my life. It broke me, and seeing the "Footprints in the Sand" poem on the wall at my parents' house started me on the road towards God.
My wife did not get to see her babies, but I got to hold each of them. I think this left a gaping hole in her heart, but I am confident she is with them now. I didn't realize it, but she had a photo of their headstone as the lock screen on her phone for a long time, and it was there when she died. You can tell what is important to a person by what they put in places like that.
I was with my mother a couple of years ago when she was having blood drawn for a test. The phlebotomist's name was the same as my twin daughter's name, spelled the same uncommon way I spelled it on her birth certificate. At the same time, a young woman was behind a screen in the same room stating her birthdate to ensure proper identification. It was the same month and year our twins would have been born if they had reached full term. We later saw that woman sitting in the hallway, and the Holy Spirit pointed out to me that my twin daughter would have been the age of that woman. He was telling me that the Father remembers.
We were eventually successful. We have two daughters, and they are now about thirty years old. Our parenting years were joyful and fun. My wife always wanted to be a mommy, and she did a very, very good job. Just ask her daughters.
Spiritual
I am convinced that God picked us both for each other from the beginning.
Our first mutual "strange experience" happened on our civil wedding night. We got to the hotel late and checked into room 225. (What does that reduce to?) She was "off limits" due to a recent medical procedure, but we expected that. What we did not expect was our bed was about two feet short! We thought the mattress might have been turned sideways, but the bedspread and sheets fit the short mattress. It seemed like a practical joke, like "short sheeting" a bed, but it wasn't that, and no practical jokers came forward later to find out what had happened. No, this bed was just short! We were very tired, so we just got in to go to sleep. I had to sleep all night with my legs pulled up because they hung off the end of the bed if I stretched them out. I have always associated this with God's displeasure at our fornication, but I now believe the circumstances of that night had more to do with my prior failure to commit. I have learned that God has an interesting sense of humor.
The next day was lovely and sunny. As I drove home, I felt the ring on my finger, and I looked at her sitting next to me. She was my wife. I liked it. I had made the right decision.
During one of our trips in Europe, we took an overnight ferry from Ireland to Wales. As we waited to disembark, all of the passengers were lined up and vetted as they got off. My wife was ahead of me, and all of a sudden a man stepped between us and said, "Excuse me sir, but where are you from?" I stammered and told him. He got a smirk on his face and stepped aside to let me go. I ran to catch up with my wife, who did not know I had been detained. I exclaimed to her that they thought I was "a provo" (IRA). A year later, we were watching the news and they told the story of how they caught the "Brighton Bomber." They said at a particular time they were watching the ports. It suddenly hit us that they were talking about the time when we came back from Ireland. I got the newspaper, and on the front page was a picture of the bomber, and he looked very much like me.3 It's a good thing I had an American accent!
Many other things started happening as we started attending church and reading the Bible. The driver's seat in our new van came loose, and it was as if the legs had been sawed off. The dealership replaced it under warranty, and we got the impression they had no idea how it happened.
I discussed some of the other "strange experiences" in previous blog posts.
I am now going to discuss some of my wife's health issues because I believe they contributed to her departure, and I think it might benefit people in similar circumstances. Sharing the truth with candor is a loving thing to do, although I would not share some of this information if she was still around. I know she cannot see what I am doing here because, as a wise person once said, if those in heaven could see what is going on here, it wouldn't be heaven.
For many years, we did things in our own strength, like most people. The pregnancies affected her body a lot. She did not nurse and she retained much of her prenatal weight gains, and because of that, she may not have adequately metabolized the pregnancy hormones. Her years of taking birth control may have messed things up, too. She elected to have her tubes tied after her last pregnancy because they had been difficult and she couldn't handle another one. This seemed to kick her into menopause, which was not as traumatic for her as it can be for some women, thankfully.
Within a couple of years of that last pregnancy, she had a kidney stone that had to be removed surgically. We were in Britain at the time, and she received a lot of antibiotics to fight a fever that would not resolve. She was in the hospital for seventeen days. That probably wiped out her gut microbiome, which we knew nothing about at the time. The medical establishment promoted their "heart healthy" diet of low fat foods and high grain consumption, and we dutifully followed that advice. This fed her craving for bread, to the point where we both gained a lot of weight and were miserable.
She always had headaches, and during her fertile years she had terrible migraines. She became dependent upon pain relievers and caffeine. The migraines subsided after menopause, but she almost always had a headache, even to the end.
In 2013, our nephew was concerned about her and recommended we look into the "paleo" diet. At my insistence, we looked into that and other related ways of eating. It made a big difference, and we both lost a lot of weight and felt a lot better. I was able to demonstrate to my doctor that I could keep the weight off and insisted on coming off the blood pressure medication that was only treating a symptom and not addressing the root cause. My wife eventually did the same with a different doctor, but mainly to escape the bondage.
We researched diet supplements and chose to follow what we considered to be wise advice. We ended up finding that sea salt, iodine, vitamin D and a few others were the most helpful. We drank purified water and avoided bromate in bread in order to avoid interfering with the iodine and the inevitable detox headaches that would result. We also had to supplement with magnesium to avoid cramps, since we weren't getting any through our drinking water.4 These things all helped, but only went so far.
After her scoliosis was gone, I paid for her to have a personal trainer for a year. It was wonderful to watch her do lat pulldowns with a straight spine, and her sled work firmed up her whole body. We both enjoyed being stronger, until the "pandemic" ended gym workouts.
The stress and limited logistics during the "lockdowns" caused us to relax our diet discipline, although we had been indulging in ice cream before then. She began having toast in the morning and introduced limited amounts of bread into our diets. She served rice with many dishes, which is better than some things, but it's still a starch. She was craving these things, and I think her gut was still messed up.
Before we went to Jacksonville, both of her knees swelled up and she got baker cysts. We recently correlated that with a shingles vaccination, but there was no way for us to prove a connection. She had surgery to deal with a torn meniscus in one knee, and the surgeon photographed some unknown tissue inside of it, but he didn't do a biopsy. Later, we went to a rheumatologist, and he diagnosed her with systemic inflammation, confirming what we had suspected. His recommendation was some drugs to inhibit her immune system, but we rejected that as unwise. We wanted to know the root cause, but he admitted he had no clue. He was also puzzled why the knee surgeon didn't analyze the tissue he found.
I was frustrated, and ended up praying for understanding, as I discussed elsewhere. She was the reason I prayed that prayer, and she was the reason we went to Jacksonville. When I was set free, I wanted her to be set free, too. Prayer worked to reduce the swelling in her knees, helped resolve her headaches, and did some other things, but it never resolved what I think was an eating disorder. It seemed logical that there was something there that needed to be driven out, but nothing ever manifested and the issue never went away.5
I believe the Spirit began to show me that renewing our minds will set us free from things, which is why I wrote Training. It's about identifying sin in our lives and dealing with it. When Yeshua healed the man at the pool, he returned to him and said...
...“See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” (John 5:14 NIV)
I think this, and the totality of Scripture, point to sin being our whole problem, and getting rid of sin in our lives is our personal mission. As I prayed for resolution of her issues, the Spirit testified to me that I needed to help her recognize and deal with her own issues. At the same time, He pointed out that it was my marriage and if I wanted to see things change then I needed to speak up and lead. It was hard for me to do that, but I eventually did. She listened. We talked. She didn't always agree, especially at first, but as we would discuss things, and as I made my points by pointing at Scripture, she followed me.
I think it is really hard for both men and women to actually follow Paul's biblical portrait of marriage in Ephesians 5. Giving yourself up for your wife is hard; so is submitting to your husband in everything. Everything means... everything. I had to learn to be clear to her when I was really firm about something and when I was just making a suggestion for her to consider. That helped, but in the end there were just some things she could not do. I think Yeshua's words about a prophet having no honor in familiar situations may have played into it. She was almost six years older than me, and we had known each other well before all of our spiritual growth took place.
Some people may find the Shulamite post troubling, but it is one of my favorite posts, and I think it biblically addresses a lot of issues that prevent marriages from being what they can ultimately be. The things it discusses truly led to great things in our marriage, and we restored a lot of the magic we had in our early days, plus much more! God let us enjoy each other to the fullest, right up until the end. The last time we made love was special; I'll just leave it at that.
I had her make this pillow. She used to cross-stitch a lot in her younger days, but it was more difficult for her with her older eyes. She researched various patterns and came up with her own design, and did a superb job, as usual. I had not seen any commercially available pillows displaying that particular biblical concept. It made me sad, but didn't surprise me. That's why we made our own.
I told her the only thing I really wanted for Christmas this past year was respect from my wife and my kids. She was learning to give it to me. It's hard in our programmed culture.
In return, I had been praying for God to help me love my wife even more. When He did that, I'd ask for it again. And again. And again. My love for her was greater than it had ever been. And then the music stopped... Going from 100 miles per hour to 0 in a moment will literally destroy a person's heart. It was awful.
But then, blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Thankfully, that is very true.
My wife is a damsel, and she was in distress. That is a common motif that makes a good story. There's a reason for that.
I am actually glad that she did not have to go through what I am going through now. I am better equipped to handle the situation, and she is the one who needed to be rescued. I clearly wasn't getting the job done, and maybe that's the whole point. It's not my project. It's His.
All glory to God.
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2Do you see the triangle, and the mirrored triangle in the video?6 Symbolism. This is from 1981. We didn't recognize it then, but we know about it now.
UPDATE, September 10, 2021...
5I was given more insight into her health issues after I wrote this post, and I discussed it in Sunlight and Root Cause.
UPDATES, June 27, 2022...
Changed footnote 3 to footnote 4 to maintain proper order in the main text.
3See this BBC article for a picture of the "Brighton Bomber."
UPDATES, August 11, 2022...
Changed footnote numbers to maintain proper order.
1Right from the very start, our personalities were "enigmas" (puzzles) to each other. I discussed this in some detail in updates to my Engineer post.
UPDATE, December 17, 2022...
Added the picture of the sports car.
UPDATE, June 15, 2023...
I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’ (Isaiah 46:10 NIV)
This song (Take On Me by a-ha) was popular when my wife and I moved back to the States in 1987, and this video was on MTV a lot during those early days of music videos. It takes me back to our time together before our children were born. I was prompted to watch it recently and realized it is heartbreakingly romantic and echoes the theme of this post.
According to my wife's wall calendars, we traveled to the Portsmouth area on Saturday, February 28, 19877 so I could play in a volleyball match the next day (3/1/1987 --> 29 --> 11) against a Royal Navy team in Gosport. As we approached our exit on the M27, the sun came out behind us and this sign appeared (picture). I remember thinking at the time that there was something special about the place, and it continued as we went around the roundabout towards Gosport.
Notice on the sign it was Junction 11, and the highway number was 27 (--> 9), as was that of the motorway. (Knowing what I know now, it doesn't surprise me that these numbers are associated with Portmouth and the Royal Navy.)
Sixty-one (61 --> 7) months later, shortly after the 15th of Nisan, we moved back to Britain and into a house half a mile from that motorway junction.
The map on the cover of that atlas was of the region we would move to five years later. The extent of that map included many of the places we would frequent when we were there with our children in the early 1990's, and our house was close to the center of the image.
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| The plaque on my dresser. |
The Take On Me video affected me deeply the other day when I watched it. I realized it reflects what happened with my wife and me. I took her from her ordinary life and we lived a fairy tale. I grabbed her by the hand and led her to safety. I found the spiritual exit, and I got her into it; then I stayed behind to fight the Darkness. I am confident we will be reunited in True Life. She is waiting for me.
I'm a hopeless romantic. 💞
UPDATE, June 25, 2023...
6Linked to a different Sheena Easton video because the one I originally posted was taken down.
Renumbered footnotes to maintain order in the main text.
4I have found eating salad greens seems to adequately take care of the magnesium issue and I don't need to supplement as much to avoid cramps anymore. This is a more natural way of doing things -- God's way, to be exact. 😉
UPDATE, July 7, 2023...
7Corrected a gematria arithmetic error. 2/28/1987 does not add up to 55. It adds up to 37 (-->10, 1), which is not significant.
UPDATE, February 10, 2024...
'80's music 😊...