My friend Larry challenged me to write a story about a family where they all love each other and function well as a family unit. Hope you like it, Larry...
The Positive Power of Preyer
People ask me sometimes - and it’s always people who think they’re Christians but aren’t really Right with the Lord or they’d already know - they ask me why me and Sylvie have so many children. As if any real Christian would have to ask such a darned stupid thing.
Sylvie and me, we have fifteen kids because we love each other, and because God has blessed us and showered His blessings on our love. That’s the plain and simple truth of the matter. Anything else is just lies, the work of Satan himself trying to worm his way into our lives like the Serpent did in the Garden of Eden.
Sylvie is my wife, we met back in 1992 when I did a revival show in Pottboro, Arizona, a little town just on the edge of the Kohatchee Indian Reservation. I was 35 then, and newly Baptized in the Lord, but filled with the Holy Spirit of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus Almighty. I lived and traveled in a smallish Airstream camper that I had filled with Biblical Tracts proclaiming the Word of the One True God and His Only Son Jesus Christ. I would set up a tent to preach in and use a tape recording for my organ music. It was nothin' fancy, like those sinnin' TV preachers gots, but the Lord God would speak through me as His Voice and His Instrument and the people would listen and hear His Word.
Sylvie came to the revival show alone, oh her people was fearful sinners. But the Holy Spirit was working in her, and she’d snuck out to hear the Word, Praise God. After the service was over, she knocked on the door of my traveling home. She was fifteen years old then, and untouched. I knew before I threw open the door that the Lord God Almighty had sent to me the Wife that I had prayed to him for.
We said our vows before God that night, our hands resting on the Real Leather Bound Bible with Gilt Pages and the Words of our Lord in Red that I did my preaching out of. When we paid our call on her people in the morning, our first seed was already planted and growing in her belly. That was as it is supposed to be. The Wife is a Vessel for the Holy Seed of her Husband, and from his loins is produced the fruits of our Lord’s love.
Sylvie’s mamma and her daddy was fearful sinners, like I said, not Right in the eyes of the Lord God Almighty. They gnashed their teeth and spoke with the Tongues of Serpents the morning after our Holy Joining, but let not the Children of God be undone by the voices of demons. In the end they, too, were purified in the eyes of the Lord.
After we had laid them to rest, we took from them only what we needed. Sylvie was the eldest child and the inheritor of all of their worldly goods. We did not need their home, as we planned to live in mine, which was proper. The Wife shall leave the home of her Father and care for the home of her Husband. Sylvie and me was charged with the Most Holy Mission, to continue to preach the Word of the Lord God.
As Sylvie’s husband I was charged with the guardianship of all that was hers, it is not the place of a woman to own properties or have dealings with any man besides the husband she cleaves herself to. Sylvie is a good Christian woman, and confines herself to those matters that are a woman’s province, leaving to me the business of a man.
I chose to bequeath her parents’ home to her infant brother. We left the babe sleeping in his crib while we read the Scriptures over the fresh graves in the woods behind the house. Then Sylvie left her father's house forever, to join with her husband as we drove away to begin our new lives of spreading the Word of God together.
Our first son we named Caleb, a goodly and God-fearing sort of name. Our second boy we called Seth. Then we had a girl, Elizabeth. Our fourth child was also a girl, and we named her Ruth.
After Elizabeth was born, we realized that we were outgrowing our home. Me and Sylvie prayed mightily upon this matter, and the Lord did provide. In a deserted winter campground in Wyoming we happened upon two men, committing the Sin of Sodomy. When they would not repent of their wickedness, the Lord God charged us to scourge them of their wrong nesses. After we had done so, and given them Christian Burial - for, at the last, they had Repented, as all Sodomites shall do when confronted with the wrath of the Lord God Almighty - we found among their possessions a key, which led us to their lodgings at a small inn in town.
We Purified and Cleansed their room with Scripture and blessed Holy Water, since it had been the scene of sin. Among the gifts there that the Lord did bestow upon us was another key, this one to the Motor Home that we conduct our ministry from unto this day. The rest of the Sinners’ belongings we gave unto the charity box in town, for so the Lord God tells us, that we shall not suffer a surfeit of worldly goods, but that instead all the Kingdom of God shall be given to he who gives away all that he has.
And so we travel this beautiful Country of God unto this day. I choose our path as God sets my course along the highways in the beautiful Home that He has provided for us. Our ten sons travel with me, that I may teach them in the ways of the Lord God, Father to Son, as is proper and written in the scriptures.
Sylvie follows behind us in our first home, which we kept, for it is written that waste is a Sin in the Eyes of God. Our five daughters travel with their Mother, and she instructs them in the proper place and role of a Daughter of the Kingdom. Sylvie is again great with child, soon her time will grow nigh and our love will again be blessed.
Last summer Caleb, who is 15, took to him a Wife. Her family had named her Brittany, which was a Sinful name, but she has been Christened Mary in the eyes of the Lord. She had been Cast Out by her parents, and Caleb met her when she embraced the Lord God at a Revival meeting we held outside of Los Angeles. The path our Lord God has set our feet upon leads us slowly South and East. When we reach the home of Mary's family we will call upon them, to assure them that their Daughter is well and properly Wed and Right with the Lord God our Father. We will give them a chance to Repent of their evil, and Scourge the Taint of Satan from them.
Throughout our Ministry, the Lord has been present in our lives and our family has prospered in Love and Faith. Whenever we have hungered, He has fed us. Whenever we were naked, He has clothed us. Whenever we thirsted, He gave us to drink. Whatever our needs, the Lord has always provided in abundance. There is no shortage of Sinners, and the Souls we have Saved are Legion.
I see the cities and this modern world of technology and wonders. I think that they are joyless places, the lives within them empty and suffering. At the tent Services, as I gaze from the pulpit at my own family, bound together by Trust and Sacrifice and our Mission from the Lord Jesus himself, I cannot help but pity those we pass by.
I sometimes wish that I could show them, Share with them, the plain secret to the happiness and deep love that Sylvie and I live every day with our children. It’s very simple, really. The family that Preys Together, Stays Together.