The purpose of this blog is to promote a Biblical worldview in all of life.  It’s not a personal blog; however, I do want my posterity to be able to look through the things written here and find my heart.  I used to think nobody but my children would ever be interested in reading anything about me, personally. I’m just an average Wemmick who has had her share of good and bad in life.  Nothing really remarkable to say.

But as I’ve aged, I’ve observed how we all gravitate toward the personal stories of other people, make connections, and grow as we share our lives with one another.  So I decided to gradually share the story of my life here in a series of blog posts that I’ll sort of spread out over the course of this year.  Just the highlights.  This will be an opportunity for me to record my story for my children and grandchildren, and anyone who wants to come along for the ride is welcome to join us.

This is the first installment, and I’m going to focus on my earliest childhood and how Christ made Himself known to a bossy, 7-year-old girl living in an unbelieving family.

I don’t have a very good memory, so details will be few, but one of my earliest memories is peeking up and over the edge of a dark brown wood, rocking bassinet and seeing my baby sister for the first time.  I couldn’t believe my mom could go somewhere and then come back with such a treasure.  And we got to KEEP it!  I sensed that this tiny little thing was fragile, and that I had to protect it.  This was my second and youngest sibling.

I grew up in a family with three girls all 2 years apart.  I was the oldest.  We did not have a lot of money, but I don’t remember noticing that until I was older and didn’t have the designer clothes that were so important to everyone in school.

My mom was a committed homemaker.  She loved to sew matching dresses for her three little girls as well as do various crafts, keep a neat and tidy home, and bake delicious treats.  I always felt she must be the smartest, most creative and talented woman in the world.  She amazed me with some of her creations.  I remember these beautiful princess type dolls she would make with HUGE gorgeous hair dos and lovely, long, puffy gowns.  I wanted to BE one of those dolls.  They fascinated me.  I think she gave them away as gifts and even sold them for a while.  My mom always told us girls, “The best job in the whole wide world is to be mother.”  We all grew up and discovered for ourselves that she was right.

My dad was a school teacher at first, and then became an accountant.  He was reserved but had a very dry sense of humor that everyone enjoyed.

Neither were Christians in my earliest childhood.  We went faithfully to a Lutheran church, and I remember that God was important in an abstract sort of way.  We moved out of apartment living into our first tiny little home in Columbia Heights, MN when I was three years old.  I started Kindergarten there and took ballet for one year.  I loved ballet.  I wanted to be a dancer so badly.  Unfortunately, although I don’t remember this, my mother tells me I gave her too much trouble about the lessons, and she pulled me out in frustration.

I decided then that I would be a singer.  I loved music.  We got a tape recorder for Christmas one year, and I wrote songs and sang them into the recorder, pretending I was on the radio.  My first song was called, “Baby Come Back.”  I still remember the lyrics to this day, and I’d love to spare you, but for posterity’s sake, I will record them here in all their profound glory:

Sunshine, baby come back.  Sunshine, baby come back.  It’s getting too cold and it’s getting too hot.  Sunshine, baby come back.

Remarkable.  Let’s move on.

I was within walking distance of my elementary school.  I loved school, I loved friends, and I loved teachers.  But most of all, I loved boys.  I had crushes on ALMOST every boy in Kindergarten and first grade.  I thought they were cute and fun.  I don’t know if my fascination over boys was due to not having any brothers, if I had Freudian issues—or what.  But I can still picture those adorable little boys in my mind and how much I loved them.  I even kissed one of them in the hallway.  It was gross and cured me of my crush on that one.  But I quickly moved on.

I had several neighborhood friends and would often “organize” a game of “Gunzilla.”  We had to call it “Gunzilla” because my mom told us that “Godzilla” was taking the Lord’s name in vain.  There was an older boy named Ricky who often agreed to be “Gunzilla.”  We’d all gather in our backyard and use the old chicken coop-turned-playhouse (thank you Grandpa Cook) for a home-base.  “Gunzilla” would chase all the neighborhood kids, catch them and “eat them.”  It was rip-roaring fun, and everyone loved it.

I was bossy, but I did make sure we all had things to do together.  And I really loved all my friends.  They didn’t always love me though.  I remember they threw rocks at me one day, and I didn’t know why.  My mom says I stood there for a long time until a rock actually hit me, and then I came into the house crying.

I cried a lot.  I hated wiping dishes, so I cried every night when it was time to wipe dishes.  For years.  I deserve a couple of the kids God gave to me.  I think that’s called “poetic justice.”  I kicked and screamed a lot.  I really hated it when things did not go my way.  My way was always the right way and the most fun way.  Not to mention exciting and adventurous.  Why couldn’t everyone get that?  I thought if I screamed and kicked long enough, folks would see how much more smoothly things could go if they would just listen to me and my ideas.

One of my little sisters ALWAYS listened to me and my ideas, happily obeying me in all things, and we got along swimmingly together.  The other one—not so much.  She was the adorable one with the dimples all the babysitters would gush over.  I was a gangly, skinny, stringy haired bossy kid, and believe me, nobody was gushing.  Well—that’s not totally true.  My mom thought I was the cat’s PJs when I wasn’t throwing a fit.  But everyone thought my cute, baby sister was not only cute, but funny, intelligent, and gifted.

While she was playing Aggravation by herself in the bedroom for hours, I was in the back yard trying to turn the spider infested shed into a store front, convinced I could sell our junk and make millions if I could just clean up the place a little.  And I was bossing all the neighborhood kids around again, recruiting them for the dirty work.

My mom babysat a little girl in our neighborhood who was one year older than I was.  Kerrie had a knack for hurting me.  One day she told me to hop on her back and close my eyes as we slid down the hill in our back yard—into a tree.  I’m told my face was a bloody mess when I finally made it back up the hill and into the house.  I’m sure my mom could tell you more stories about Kerrie, but the neat thing about Kerrie and her mom is that they were real, born-again, Christians.  And they weren’t afraid to blab about it on a regular basis.

One Sunday morning, my mom let me go to Kerrie’s church, Soul’s Harbor, with her.  This was a stretch for my mom, I’m guessing, because this was a Pentecostal church, and they did a lot of strange things over there.  Fortunately, nothing weird happened in Sunday School that morning, and in fact, something amazing happened.  The teacher told us about heaven and hell and Jesus dying on the cross in our place so that we could have our sins forgiven by God and go to live in heaven with Him when we died.  Sounded like a good idea to me—I was no dummy—so when the teacher asked for a show of hands if anyone wanted to take advantage of this special offer, my hand was the first to go up.

And I was saved.  I know, I know, if you take a room full of 7-year-olds and tell them they’ll go to heaven if they “accept Jesus into their hearts” and go to hell if they don’t, most, if not all, will “get saved.”  And most of them will NOT be saved.  This isn’t rocket science, this is simple human psychology.  BUT….

God moves in mysterious ways, and I really did get saved that day.  It was as real as real could be, and God became real to me in a way that I can’t explain, but that I’ve reveled in ever since.  I LOVED God, and though I didn’t know much at the time, I knew I had to tell everyone I knew about Him.  He was the MOST IMPORTANT THING about Wemmicks.

My mom was miraculously saved within a few months through the witness and testimony of Kerrie’s mother.  My mother began going to prayer meetings at Soul’s Harbor, but after a few bad experiences with being slain in the Spirit (we won’t go into it here), and another move into a new home over 20 miles away, she found a new church where nobody was slain, and that we ended up loving and calling “home” for the rest of my growing up years.  My dad was still not saved but was such an easy-going fellow without a lot of strong desires about anything like churches and so on, that he just went along with whatever Mom decided.  (He did get saved a few short years later, stopped drinking beer and dancing, although we never could tear him away from the movies—still can’t to this day—and now some of his grand kids hope to be Christian film makers, but I digress, and he became a deacon and Sunday School teacher.)

Now I had a new life, lived in a new town with a new set of neighborhood friends, a new school, and a brand new set of problems.  I was about to embark on some very painful childhood years that God had, in advance, lovingly designed especially for me to make Himself known to me and to cause my heart to treasure Him above all else.

But that’s a story for another blog post.