Anyway, one weekend I managed to go on a trip with my mother and stepfather. Much to his chagrin as I remember. Yes, our relationship was that good. Anyway to stay in Mum’s good books as he put it. He decided to throw me a bone and thought that he knew where he might get a scale model logging truck.
So we went to see a friend on a farm at Taupo and on the way back to Matamata through Rotorua. We stopped at the shops on Devon Street corner to ask if anyone knew the where abouts of the owner of the bookshop that used to be there? As it happened someone did know that whereabouts. It turned out he lived in near by.
We made our way to the residence. It was about six thirty in the evening as I remember and rapidly getting dark. We parked outside the residence, which was quite rural in 1968, and stepfather walked in to find the owner of the bookshop. He found him and talked to him for half an hour and then came back to the car. It turned out he didn’t make logging trucks anymore and wasn’t prepared to part with any that he still owned. Fair enough.
However, stepfather waxed lyrical about the quality of the man and his lovely daughters. One of which was about my age. As we prepared to drive away I asked if I might meet the man and see the logging trucks. To which stepfather replied that the man wouldn’t want a boy like me around his family and refused to even entertain the idea of taking me to see them.
As we drove away resentment smoldered in my heart and I made a very specific prayer to the Lord. Father, could the daughter that was my age be my wife one day? We drove home and I forgot about the whole incident. Life happened and I thought nothing of it.
The next year I was sent to boarding school so as to give Mother and Stepfather the space to make this marriage work. After two years the marriage was all over and I came home to attend Intermediate School and after another two years I attended High School for a term before shifting to the Rotorua area where I attended High School.
I really enjoyed living in the Rotorua Area. The people were incredibly easy going and inordinately capable. High School was very relaxed but the teachers were again inordinately capable and fairly easy going. I learned a lot from them and owe a lot to them.
My Christian life flourished as well. I had been fortunate in the intervening years since 1968. Boarding School had involved attending Anglican Chapel six days a week and when I left my siblings were all becoming strong young Christians and I learnt a lot about scripture and doctrine from them.
When we shifted to Rotorua my sister gave me a Scofield King James Version Bible and I read that every evening. It was a wonderful help text and although I had a propensity to sin I think it helped me to have a strong enough faith to continue to make progress.
The reason I mention my Christian life was that I was walking out of school one Friday afternoon and I looked at a friend of mine and had the strangest experience. I had a strong feeling that he was going to be somehow connected to my future. It was an unsettling incident and I consigned it to being just weird and forgot about it as best I could.
Around that time a couple of young men came to the high school I was attending and became friends. Being rural lads we had a lot in common and it turned out that when they mentioned my surname to their father he remembered a young chap working for them with that name. They asked me if I had a brother who had worked for them some years before. I did some research and it turned out one of my brothers had worked for them on a farm they were share milking on in the mid sixties. .
One of the two young men left high school fairly soon after that to begin an automotive apprenticeship. The other stayed on for another year, 1978 if I remember correctly. He was always telling me about his beautiful cousin and one day introduced me to her when she came to the school on the back of her boyfriends motorbike. My friend ignored her boyfriend and introduced me to her as if recommending me to her as a replacement boyfriend. Quite and awkward interlude as I recollect.
I left school at the end of 1978 and worked on the family farm. I was always interested in enduro motorbikes and I had several friends who also liked bashing around on bikes as well. Among them were my two friends from school. We had a couple of other dear friends from school days who joined us more often than not on the crop paddocks on one of the farms that our families owned.
The cousins of the girl I met were always talking about how she was going an telling me I should meet her and go out with her. I hadn’t really met her so I wasn’t particularly interested in their overtures. Time went by and we arrived at New Years Eve 1981. I took the opportunity to dance with the lady concerned at the local New Years dance celebration and over time we became an item. We went out together for a couple of years and I finally popped the question and we were married in the autumn of 1984.
It wasn’t until some years after we married that I thought of the prayer I had made as a seven year old in 1968 asking God if that girl could one day be my wife. I gradually recalled that the residence we went to then was my wife’s family home. Her parents had owned the bookshop and the model logging truck was still there.
The boy that I felt sure was connected to my life was her boyfriend with the motorbike. Her cousins were integral in encouraging me to pursue her and the connection of their family to mine through my brother working for their father played its part as well. Not to mention that if my family hadn’t moved to Rotorua area none of this would have happened.
So there you have it, Yahweh answers prayer. I asked if that seven year old girl could be my wife one day. Sixteen years later we were married and as I write this piece we have now been married for thirty eight years and have successfully raised six children and have a number grandchildren. All of this from the prayer of a seven year old boy to his Lord and God in the name of Jesus Christ.
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