A Country Battler
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
Sally was only a teenage girl when I first came to know her in those early days of my Ararat ministry. She attended the Ararat High School where each week I taught children religious instruction. She was a bright, vivacious girl with a tremendous personality and seemed to have a very real desire to grow in her faith. To find her faith a vital force in her personal life was a difficulty and it was going to remain a difficulty throughout the next twenty five years I would have contact with her.
I did not know it then, but when I started to counsel a young, attractive girl who was struggling to know how to live a victorious life in Christ Jesus, and at the same time do all the things her friends were doing, I was starting to counsel a young woman who would need help with the same problems for years to come.
She made a commitment to Jesus Christ while I was ministering in the Ararat Church of Christ and after adequate counselling I baptised her. She really tried hard to grow in Christian living and in a quality of personal life. But she had a problem the Christian standards were hard and high, and she wanted to be popular. She always felt that her parents never loved her.
She was the only child of a City Councillor who was a business man and a man of some standing in the community. He was an older man and after some years of childlessness, the couple had adopted Sally. She had come into their family late in their lives and they seemed to be overly strict with her and yet unable to really demonstrate their love.
Consequently she was on a desperate search for love and she found it in a series of very simple love affairs with boy friends and in trying to develop significant friendships with other adults. It was almost as if she needed a caring adult to be a security blanket for her while she spent some of her life in a desperate search to be wanted and loved. I did not pick it early in the piece, but I was to be her security blanket to whom she turned in every time of crisis in her life.
She came to see me one night and told me she was pregnant. She had fallen in love with Jeremy, a radio announcer who had come recently to town. He was an attractive outgoing personality with wavy hair and beautiful blue eyes. Tall and thin, he was immediately chased by all of the girls in the appropriate age range, and Sally ran harder than most. She fell under his charms, and into his arms, and now she was telling me that she wanted to marry him because she was pregnant.
I remember talking to her that night about the fact that she could have her baby and that we could help her with her baby without her getting married, that although she felt she really loved the father and Jeremy said he loved her, I was very doubtful about the wisdom of the marriage. Jeremy did not seem to be really willing to shoulder his responsibilities in the support of her and their baby. But I had little force with this argument because after all her mother and father were highly respected and well known people in the community, her father was a City Councillor and Deputy Mayor and as far as her parents were concerned she had to get married.
In this marriage everybody wanted the marriage to go ahead except me, but I reluctantly agreed to marry Sally and Jeremy.
It was a mistake right from the start. The attractive, flamboyant and intelligent Jeremy drank too much, became aggressive when he drank, and flirted outrageously with other women.
Sally soon discovered she had taken to herself a very difficult husband. She came to me for counselling and I supported her through the last days of pregnancy. The first little baby girl was followed by two other children in quick succession. She was now twenty years of age and the mother of three.
At various times during the next few years Sally made contact, often for just a word of reassurance or encouragement as she tried to hold together a very shaky and fragile marriage with all the stress of three young children.
I never forgot the letter I received from her after I had moved away from Ararat and was living in Melbourne. The letter started off simply:
“Dear Gordon and Beverley,I have to come to Melbourne on Tuesday for surgery.
I have been very worried of late and I have cancer
in both breasts and I must have surgery.”
We went to hospital and visited her. The cancer had rapidly spread resulting in a double radical mastectomy. Her self image was at zero. Her confidence completely gone. We helped Sally while she was in Melbourne and when she returned home to try to re establish her role as mother and wife, her own mother fell ill with cancer and she found she was spending most of her time nursing her mother as well as bringing up her three small children.
Sally was a courageous battler. While she was nursing her mother Jeremy went off with another woman, younger, much more attractive and without children.
Sally took the blow with great fortitude. She had only limited faith and she called upon her faith to hold her strong. We visited her and prayed with her and encouraged that faith and in a surprising fashion her very limited trust in Jesus Christ gave to her the sustaining power she needed.
She lost her mother and was too proud to live on her father’s financial support. Her children were her responsibility and she was determined to bring them up well. She took them to Sunday School and they seemed to grow well, but Sal always looked flustered, her hair was permanently untidy and she smoked constantly.
Over the next few years we kept contact with her and her Christmas cards and letters were always full of news of the growing children and then of a new man who came into her life. He was named, not Jeremy, but Jed. We laughed at first at the similarity in the names and hoped she managed her words of gentle love carefully distinguishing between Jeremy and Jed.
Jed was probably the first decent caring man she had a relationship with in her life. He was a good solid farmer who lived on a very dry property in the Wimmera. He had five children and needed a wife who could care for them. I counselled Jed and Sally about their future. Their real concern was not in bringing up the eight children that they had between them but with the fact that they both wanted to have their own children as well. Yet they were living on a non productive farm whose dry land was seriously savaged by the spreading of salt on their property, a legacy of the use of too much irrigation water.
We talked the issues through and I counselled Sally and Jed about their future and then I married them. Sally had been divorced a couple of years previously. I had no problem in my own mind in justifying their re marriage. She was struggling with her faith and with her commitment to Christ, but her faith was there through all the years of difficulty.
To say that they were taking on a huge burden was to under estimate the difficulty. They had his five children, her three children and their own two children on a farm that could hardly support one adult a year. Jed worked long hours but they never seemed to get ahead. However, he did love Sally and their own love held them together in spite of the difficulties they had with shortage of finance and the toughness of the banks. It seemed as if Sal was now on top of her worries in spite of spending a lot of time underneath washing and ironing for twelve people!
Then I received a tragic ‘phone call. Could I come? Jed had been killed by a crop dusting plane. He was standing in the paddock directing the crop dusting plane into each new run as it swooped down low to drop its load of super phosphate upon a difficult part of their farm where a normal super spreader on the back of a tractor could not go. Caught in a sudden down draft of wind their plane suffered from a wind shear and dropped suddenly with the propeller slicing into Jed as he stood with outstretched arms indicating to the pilot where to fly.
It was a tragic unfortunate accident for which no one was to blame. Jed and the pilot were only doing what they had done a hundred times before but in that little hilly terrain a sudden wind gust had tilted the plane suddenly downwards and caught Jed without warning. The pilot was badly injured and Jed was killed immediately.
I buried him on the side of the hill in the little country cemetery at Cathcart. The community stood around and I looked at Sal with the ten children and knew that behind her she had a property laden with debts, badly producing because of the salt factor, and her hands more than full.
The little Church of Christ at Minyip where they lived rallied round. The women helped her with food and support for the children. The men formed a roster system to come in to chop wood, or to plough a paddock or to work a harvester. Sally worked like a man alongside them all. No one worked harder and in all of this the faith that was always difficult in her life managed to sustain her.
There is no neat surprising end to this story. Eventually Sal sold the farm at a loss, and by the time she paid the banks she had nothing left except some debts. She moved into town where she got a job and has continued to bring up the youngest of the children. We get a Christmas card from her every year with a letter enclosed telling us what has been happening in her life. She never became a joyous, radiant Christian. The Christian faith seemed always a struggle, but at every point of real testing it was there and helped see her through. And we have kept in contact with her, not as her pastor and regular spiritual guide, but more like a security blanket that she could hold onto when she needed a hand.
Sal watched my television programme each week and to her it is a spiritual support and comfort. She listens every Sunday night to my radio program and loves these stories of my being a Country Parson. I am sure she is listening to this one.
All I want to say to Sal is that there are a mighty lot of us who admire a woman who sticks to her task as a mother and a wife through tragedy and suffering, discouragement and death, who holds up a standard before her children and works hard for the benefit of her family, who never has it easy, but who is always willing to make a contribution to society, to the church and to her community.
There are many decent battlers like Sal. The breaks never seem to have gone with the likes of Sal, and the good fortune which comes to many of us has never shined upon her. The faith which means so much to so many of us and which comes so easy, has never been an easy matter but always rather a struggle for the likes of Sal.
Yet through it all Sal has been faithful and generous, warm and gentle. I admire the plucky courage of the decent Australian woman who struggles through the battles of life.
I just hope God has it in His plans to smile upon them with some unexpected blessing. In the meantime I just have to be available, even if all I can do is be a bit of a security blanket when times get tough. Practical help we can give. Wise counsel we can give. But just being there when needed is also important. I was learning: “They also serve who stand and wait.”.
That was another lesson that I learnt in Ararat, following my first meeting with such a vivacious young girl at the Ararat High School. I headed off home after counselling her for the first time, to the manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES