Chapter 10

Maria Speaks Again

To observe the proper decorum, Signild lived at the Nilsson home by night during the three month dedication but by day was around Karl at weekends when she was in Kadesh-Naphtali. She still hadn't met Maria and knew that she was looked upon as an enemy. Though it was uncomfortable, her love for Karl overrode for the most part any negative feelings she might have had. But she was uncomfortable with the thought that her first sister-wife might be the objecting and objectionable Maria.

Maria's breakthrough came during the first week of Signild's relocation to Kadesh-Naphtali. She had slept reasonably well during the night of her decision but by morning was nervous. It was Sunday and Signild was still there on the property. Fleshy instinct pressed her to wait until she had gone back to Börlange the following morning but there was now another force at work in her soul that found powerful expression through her own steely determination to do what she believed was right. She would boldly go up to Karl whether Signild was there or not. And if she was, she would see it through. The Królewiec courage forced its way through.

The weather was cold but sunny, an auspicious moment to announce her decision to surrender herself to Karl on his terms. Her pride, though, was not dead, and violently resisted, like a deranged dog pulling her in the opposite direction. She would have to hold the beast on a tight leash and drag it along against its will.

You could almost see her feet dragging across the ground and leaving two ruts behind her as she forced herself out of the front door and into the snow. The short distance to the Åkerstedt house seemed like an epic journey to the South Pole in the fiercest of blizzards. She should have been looking up at the brilliant winter sunshine and praising the Lord for the glory of nature whose animation had been suspended by Jack Frost's icy fingers. But she looked down at the ground instead. The invisible dog was there, tugging her back to the house, trying to tell her that she was a fool. But she had made her mind up. She would see the journey through.

Michäela was as surprised to see Maria at the door as she was to be there.

"Why, hello, Maria!" she had said with genuine warmth in her soul. "How lovely to see you. Do come in!"

She shook the snow of her boots and exchanged them for guests' slippers and heaved her heavy lamb-skin coat off.

"We're just finishing our morning family Bible study..."

The whole family was in the room, including Karl's sister Karin. Karl was surprised to see her. Signild looked intently and uneasily at her as this was her very first sight of the indomitable Maria. Karl immediately saw that there had been a change - her hair had been nicely done up and she was dressed tastefully. Maria had gone to a lot of trouble to made herself presentable, the way she had been raised by her aristocratically-minded mother. Displaying impeccable manners, she nodded her head at everyone and took the extra seat which Bengt Åkerstedt had brought into the room.

"We're just finishing a study of the first chapter of Mark," said the elder Åkerstedt. "Actually, we haven't got further than the first thirteen verses."

He paused, realising that Maria didn't have a Bible.

"Oh, excuse me, shall I get you a Bible?" he asked her.

"Thank you," she replied.

Karl's jaw dropped. Was he the only one to notice that Maria had spoken after weeks of being completely dumb?

"Is something wrong?" asked his mother, seeing Karl's expression of astonishment.

He flipped his head to the side as though trying to shake off an irritating fly, and turned to Michäela.

"Haven't you noticed, mother? Maria just talked!"

Even Maria hadn't noticed until Karl had pointed it out. The Lord had lifted the curse from her! She was free to speak again! And everyone was amazed.

Bengt was wise enough to see that carrying on the Bible meeting was no longer appropriate and broke the silence to suggest they adjourned for the day. He offered a benedictory prayer and then got up to leave for the day's work.

"Are you coming Karl or will you be chatting a little while longer?" he asked his son, half jokingly but half serious too, knowing what a breakthrough Maria's presence was.

Karl realised that Maria had probably come in response to his challenge, and given the fact that she was now healed of her dumbness, had probably chosen to come to her senses. But you could never be totally sure with Maria...

"Can you manage without me for an hour, father?" he asked. "There are some important matters I need to attend to."

Bengt nodded affirmitively and went to get his working clothes to go out and feed the farm animals.

"I can give you a hand, Pappa," suggested Karin, and her offer was gratefully accepted by both father and son. That left only Michäela who understood that the three young ones wanted to be left alone to talk about serious matters.

The door closed as Michäela left to go over to the Engströms. The three were alone.

It had been hard enough coming to the Åkerstedt house but seeing Karl sitting hand-in-hand on the sofa with Signild made it ten times more humiliating. For Karl, it was hard to know what to do. Inviting her over to sit next to him on the other side might be met with either a positive or a negative response depending on the circumstantial balance of forces operating in Maria at any one moment of time.

Signild was uneasy too. Having next to no experience of plural marriage and being new to the whole atmosphere of it herself, she was unsure what she should do. She tried to smile to make Maria feel welcome but in her heart-of-hearts she wished that Maria would just go away. Everything had been so wonderful and now a force of instability threatened to upset or perhaps even shatter her dream world.

Maria knew that she could not operate on the basis of will-power alone indefinitely because at some point she would just explode. The feelings lay menacingly behind an enormous dam which threatened to burst its walls at any moment and the only choice now remaining for her was to let it burst there and then in front of the couple or flee and let it all out in private. Instinctively she wanted to run, of course, but she now knew she had to grit her teeth and grip her wayward heart by the reins and stand her ground. She would let go in front of them and cast herself into the hands of fate.

Karl was the first to break the silence.

"You're looking fastastic!" he said, complimenting the way she had carefully groomed herself before coming over. Signild took her cue: "Oh yes, you look beautiful!"

The contrast between what she looked like on the outside and how she felt on the inside, suddenly thrust into the limelight, was enough to cause the dam to suddenly and providentially break. Though she did not know it, the Lord was in control.

Maria burst into a flood of tears. The sobs were from the depths of a tortured soul who, in a fit of desperatation to be free, had suddenly cast aside all the chains of her self-imprisonment and now found herself as naked and utterly helpless as a small child. She did not know how the man she loved would react, whether with compassion or contempt, for she suddenly knew deep within herself that she was not remotely worthy of him. It was therefore with indescribable relief that she suddenly found her hands taken in his and her Heracles standing in front of her and gently pulling her up out of her chair. She did not hesitate but flung herself into his arms and held him tenaciously as though he were the only life raft in the raging billows of a vast and lonely ocean. So great was the need for his warmth that her fingers practically dug into his back like the talons of a falcon - she would not let go again but remain there forever. She sighed and sobbed, shaking all over until, after two or three minutes, the storm began to subside.

Knowing that timing was of the essence, and figuring that Signild would be starting to feel left out on the periphery and doubtless struggling with feelings of her own, Karl gently edged Maria over to the sofa next to his fiancée and the three sat quietly not saying a word. Every now and then Maria would reflexly gasp for a little breath as the last of the emotional surges began to subside. Signild, knowing that she should do something, reached over with her right had and placed it over the interlocked hand of Karl and Maria more for symbolic unity than anything else. She really wanted to leave, to let the two talk it out, feeling by now that she had been shunted into some siding, but understood that if this was Maria's reconciliation, that she had better start getting used to thinking and behaving like a plural wife-to-be. The monogamy dream had lasted only a few days, and perhaps that was just as well, because slipping into its mindframe would, she knew, be all too easy to do and become ever harder to extricate herself from.

Maria still hadn't spoken and whilst letting go of her feelings had been an enormous relief, and whilst holding Karl - which she had never done before - was like walking through the gates of Paradise, she knew that the most difficult part still lay ahead of her: confession. And she knew it would be doubly difficult doing so in the presence of another woman whom she knew was more worthy of Karl's love than she was. What made it easier was having watched and listened to her father's wives interact over the years, and so what she subsequently did came from her subconscious as a spiritual reflex more than anything else. She had been there when Sarah-Jane, Anna, and Kasia had gone off the deep-end. She had been there and watched all the womanly wiles trying to exert their baneful influence on her father, and she had seen how he had reacted to all of them. She assumed, rightly or wrongly, that Karl would react in the same way as her father, and had absorbed enough about human nature to know that if Karl was a spiritual man that he would brook no nonsense from her. The fact that he had come straight out with his conditions for marriage had been enough to convince her that he was the no-nonsense type like her father. She now knew, at any rate, that he was compassionate and caring, and her doubt about this had been a major hurdle to overcome.

Knowing that you are loved and that you will be received with open arms when you are humble and submissive to your man builds tremendous self-confidence and sets you upon the right spiritual track. Maria knew what the patriarchal way was like because she had grown up surrounded by, and immersed in, it and in that respect had an advantage over both Karl and Signild. Whether or not it was pride that was the motivating force, part of her wanted to set an example to both Karl and Signild. That she had grown up in a polygamous household and was therefore quite experienced in patriarchal ways at least as an observer, her frequent periods of rebellion notwithstanding, suddenly made her realise that perhaps she had as many cards as Signild up her sleave and that they could even be useful to her. Perhaps, she thought, the two women could be a blessing to each other after all and she need not feel like the underdog that she very definitely was at that particular moment.

A picture of one of the many reconcilliations between her father's sister-wives suddenly flashed through her head, and without even thinking, she suddenly broke away from Karl and reached over to give Signild a hug. Seeing such uncustomary behaviour in Maria at first shocked him - this was to be a day of many such shocks - but then his heart gladdened. Though it lasted only three or four seconds, it was the gesture that changed his heart from scepticism and pity for Maria to the first stirrings of genuine love. She had risen above herself, albeit only for a moment, and so set a process in motion that would propel her along the way that she had chosen. She had given of herself to a future sister-wife and let Self fade into the background. It was a new experience for her and the years of tutoring by her father suddenly transported her out of the theoretical realm and into the real world of flesh-and-blood.

When the two women separated from their short embrace, they looked each other in the eyes, as each searched to try and discover the essence of her opposite. How do you build a sister-wife partnership from raw materials? It is a challenge that all women must go through as they look at the unknown in the face. How would they relate together with such different backgrounds? What would be the territory on which they would meet, how would that territory expand, and what sort of a spiritual garden would they plant there together for their husband to walk in?

Cars, trains, aircraft, and then cyberspace have, in their time, cut the distances down between people, making remote places accessible that previously could only be dreamed of. And now the Spirit of Christ lay in the hands of these two women and a shared man with the ability to bridge any distance of even cosmic proportions.

Maria had seen the miracle of plural marriage work in her home even though she had tried to distance herself from it and go down the monogamy-only path. But the Lord had intervened in what had been a terribly painful way to ensure that she did not make that mistake, though He would have shown grace and mercy to her had she insisted and taken a left-turn instead. She was thankful that she had that visionary dream imprinted in her mind so that she could clearly see the choices that faced her - that the choice of a form of happiness lay before her in the easier monogamy territory with another man she was aware of, along with the blessings of motherhood, though until now she had not been too interested in raising a family.

But she had also been shown a greater glory if she chose the harder way of plural marriage. She knew she would have children but did not know how many for all of Karl's children were mixed together in the dream as though they had only one collective mother, the prophetic significance of which she did not miss in later years. She had watched how her father's children had so effortlessly mingled together even though she had tried to keep apart from them to some extent, and knew that they were happy together. She was a living witness of how children with a mother and many "sister-mothers" were so much more enriched and stable because they had so many different rôle-models to imitate - different and yet one in love and purpose. So she could see only too clearly all the benefits that plural marriage gave them.

Her thoughts dwelt on this theme as she sat up next to Karl looking at Signild and the Spirit confirmed to her that this was to be her entrée. She should tell them of her dream.

"I'm sorry for the way I've behaved," she said to Karl in a lowered voice after she had related her night experience. "And I'm sorry I didn't come and welcome you when you arrived here," she added dolefully as she looked quickly at Signild and then turned away again in shame.

There was a silence a while as none of them knew quite what to say.

"I accept all your conditions," said Maria, suddenly looking up again at Karl, and then not quite knowing what to say or do, turned away from him. She had a far-off look for a moment and then remembered where she was. She knew that she was a dreamer and that she needed to focus more on what was going on around her. Karl was a man of the soil and had little time for dreaming. There would have to be major adjustments in Maria's way of being if she was going to flourish around her future husband.

Now Maria began to feel uneasy holding Karl's hand. She had vented her feelings, recounted her dream, apologised for her earlier rudeness, and accepted Karl's terms. Living them was another matter altogether, though.

------

Kasia was in tears. The week before she had announced excitedly to the community that she was pregnant after having patiently tried to have a second child for four years. Stan was, of course, delighted but was not convinced that she was pregnant.

"I think you have announced it too hastily, my dear," he said. "Give it another couple of weeks then you'll be absolutely sure."

The trouble with Kasia was that she had wanted another child so much that the second there was the remotest possibility that she might be pregnant she worked herself up into a near frenzy of joy. There had been numerous disappointments in the past, together with days of depression afterwards as her mood swung proportionally in the opposite direction.

"I must be pregnant, darling," she insisted. "I feel sick, I've missed my period, and my breasts are sore. I just know I am!"

But Stan still wasn't convinced. He of course accepted the word of a wife in faith, knowing she would probably have a better sense of when she was pregnant than he, simply because it was her body and she could detect any chemical changes taking place. Some years before he had had a prophetic dream in which he had seen Kasia with a second child but in the dream there had been a new wife who had had a new child at about the same time. But the mysterious woman in the dream had not yet appeared so Stan was sceptical. So when she announced her pregnancy Stan went along with her though tried to downplay it somewhat.

Kasia then discovered that she had miscalculated her period after sitting down with Kryztina to try and work out when the birth would be expected. She was crestfallen.

"Well," said Stan, trying to be as supportative as possible, "it's still possible that you are pregnant. You say you have all the symptoms."

She had spent the afternoon sleeping because she felt tired though Stan had wondered whether this was psychologically-induced. Kasia lived everything to the full - both the good and the bad times - becoming so emotionally involved that one could truthfully say that there was no part of her that wasn't involved.

Then her menstrual period had begun and the speculation was all over. She cried for a couple of hours and Stan comforted her, trying to get her mind onto something else. He knew what to do to get her out of herself and back on track again and by the afternoon she was her usual cheerful self. But deep down she still regretted that it had not been as she had wanted.

"I felt as though I had actually had a child and a miscarriage," she said, "and I was in mourning. I know it's silly but feelings are like that."

Stan smiled. He knew all about women's feelings and was just glad he wasn't one himself. He had enough problems struggling with a man's problems to even guess what it would be like to be tossed to and fro by swirling emotions so often.

Elisa and Salme were learning quickly, listening keenly to everything that went on. They had settled in well and were now looking forward to their full marriages in the spring, and also the companionship of Hilda and Silvia when they returned. They were in regular contact by email and from time to time Elisa would be called upon for advice by her successor. The Tartu Fellowship was growing well and missionaries had been sent to plant new house fellowships across the country. They were especially keen to get something established in Tallinn, the capital, and had had some limited success.

The ex-satanists, for their own safety, left Tartu with two other Russian Estonian families to resettle in Russia, and within two months of their departure had founded a small fellowship of like-minded believers in the enclave at Kaliningrad (Königsberg) and Ladushkin (Ludwigsort), the home of Kasia's aunt and where she had been born, respectively. It was a big city and close to Estonia and Sweden, which was more to their liking than the deep interior of Russia. Stan was also delighted because of his family connections to the area. Thanks to her relatives, Kasia was able to help the men find work and to settle down in spite of the high unemployment and the stagnant economy there. Communists still ran the city council making economic growth difficult, and the Soviet-era statue of Lenin still stood in the square in front of the House of Arts on Leninsky Avenue. The city had all the social and economic problems of large post-Soviet era cities. It was a large Russian naval base with constant movement of soldiers, sailors and airmen in and out, presenting a unique opportunity to plant the gospel across the whole of Russia with the minimum of travel.

Stan left Kadesh-Naphtali for a a couple of weeks to visit the members of the Kaliningrad New Covenant Fellowship to help them get established, and was joined by a brother from Norway to be a traveling and ministry companion. Compared to the beauty of former German Königsberg, which the British and Red Air Forces had bombed to ruins in 1944, Kaliningrad, was a grotesque Stalin-era type city, grey and monotonous. Apart from the main railway station, the Stock Exchange, the Brandenburg gate, the Kant memorial, a theatre, the residential district of Amalienau, and one or two other badly preserved structures, nothing much of the pre-war city had survived.

The countryside wasn't in a much better state either. The formerly prosperous German farms were in a state of complete disintegration. The new Russian tenants had moved in without properly taking care of the buildings, and when they began to fall down, simply moved on to the next vacant farm building and lived there until that fell down. But the countryside was still beautiful in the summer, he was told, when all around lupins burst into colourful blossom in massive swathes across the landscape. During his first visit to Kaliningrad Stan had to force himself to concentrate solely on his mission because he knew he would break down in sorrow thinking of how East Prussia used to be before the Bolsheviks ruined it. He was, he later admitted, glad to leave.

"It's like being forcibly separated from a beautiful wife by some terrible calamity," he said to me, "and returning to see how she is half a century later. You imagine it is the same woman you loved, only with a few more wrinkles and grey hair, but you don't mind that because it is still the person you loved. And then when you return you discover that your home has been neglected and is falling to pieces, and instead of your beloved, there is an old and heartless hag who has forcibly taken over your house and turned it into a wreck. You long for your beloved but she is dead, killed by the old hag long, long ago."

I had rarely seen Stan sentimental like this and it was both fascinating and sadding both because it was unexpected as well as because it revealed a side of Stan I had never seen before. How could he feel such a deep attachment to a place he had never seen before but only heard of from his father and extended family? What was it that held him in magical thral to a place that was no more? I had often seen him poring over old family books with black-and-white pictures of towns, castles, villages and countryside - places that had been destroyed over half a century before. He seemed so utterly absorbed and in such a way that I felt it would be committing an unpardonable sin to disturb him. It made no sense to me because as an American we had no such sense of history and culture extending so far back in time. Ours was no more than two centuries old but his was over a thousand, and older. There was a mystical bond between him and his ancestors, as though he wished to be with them, to share in their lives, to breathe the air of their experiences, their hopes, and their fears. There was a bond there, deep and unfathomable.

"You will probably never understand, Hélène," he said to me once. "It has to do with what we call Blut und Boden - blood and earth. Our ancestors broke the hard ground, tilled it, cared for it, and died for it. It was the earth that fed us and gave us life and which cruelly swallowed us up again into itself."

He opened up an old map of East Prussia and called me over.

"Look," he said, as he reached over and started pointing at names I had never heard of before. Quednau, Löwenhagen, Göttkendorf, Abschwangen, Bertung, Stallupönen ... he reeled the names off, and with each name he mentioned uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces over many generations as though he had only just spoken with them the day before. Old dusty leather-bound volumes came off the shelves one by one and were opened to reveal sketches, photographs, and genealogies written in old Gothic-style German. It was just a maze of foreign-sounding words to me, the outer surface of a mystique that no-one but Stan was a party to in the household. There was deep sadness in his eyes as he recounted the extermination of a whole culture and people by the brutality of war. None of his other wives could understand him and so in this world he was utterly and completely alone. I wished I could join him in it, like Mary Poppins jumping through a sidewalk (pavement) with Bert and the kids, but it was a wall to me, an impenetrable mist of antiquity.

"It has all gone," he said sadly with head bowed, staring into and beyond the table into some fast receeding memory. "All gone, only one or two ruins here and there. The people aren't our people but forced settlers. They have no real attachment to the land. They did not reclaim it from the wilderness, they did not shed their blood for it, their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren do not lie buried under it. Though we are no longer there, it will always be ours, because we purchased it with our blood. All the fruits that today's inhabitants are enjoying from it are because of the labour of others. They are illegal tenants, and deep down they know it, but conscience has a way of being suppressed by constantly repeated false narratives. Today the people speak Polish, Russian and Lithuanian, but the bricks still speak German."

He paused again, still with that far-away look.

"Once there was a possibility of our people going home, so long as that generation was alive. But there are few left now. Most are very old, and when they have gone, who will remember? Their children have forgotten, they do not care. They have become westerners, and the old traditions and dialects have long since died. It is all finished, forever."

The melancholic air seemed to hang over him like a thick pall of depression and I was amazed to see my husband so completely and utterly absorbed. Where was the Stan I knew - the realist, the man of the moment, the crusader of Christ? The Kaliningrad trip had woken up a sleeping ghost, of deeply buried childhood memories of stories from his father and grandfather. And yet, what was the more astonishing, was that these were other people's memories. He had never been to many of these places, let alone the time era which was before he was born. How could a person be so utterly and completely absorbed?

He smiled almost pitifully at me as though I were trying to open a magical box that only he had the key to.

"It is the way your were brought up, darling," he said, now looking me in the eyes and engaging the real me for the first time. "You were born and raised in a narcissistc culture absorbed with its own navel, where getting for self was the driving force - the 'American Dream'. But for my ancestors there was this huge, extended family, where people stayed together and lived for one another. It was the kind of culture that could weather any storm or disaster so long as the people remained. They lived close to the land which was mother and sister to them. They were the last of the family generation - of people who knew what real community was. Today that community spirit is in fragments. Today people want to leave home as soon as they can and go and isolate themselves in a little urban box in a concrete jungle where nobody thinks of anyone except self and how they can make it big-time. Our fathers lived, however imperfectly with their distorted vision of Christianity, a patriarchal way of life, where family mattered. I yearn for these things as much as I do for the homes and land we lost, though the latter I know we shall never see again. The Poles and Russians will never forgive the Germans for what they did in the last war, and those who suffered - the people from the east - will forever be dispossessed. None of the big nazi bosses came from these lands, where German and Slav once lived happily together.

"Hitler was from Austria, Himmler from Bavaria, Goebbels from Rheydt in the Rhineland - Göring came from the west too - they were all from the west. But western and central Germany is still in Germany. It was we easterners who had to pay with the loss of everything that was dear to us, and do you know why? Because Stalin wanted to gobble up eastern Poland, and the German east was his way of "recompensating" us. There never were many Poles in eastern Poland. And when the Soviet Union annexed it first in 1939 and then again in 1944, we were never systematically thrown out of our homes. There are still many Poles living there. But in the German East, that was a different story. Long after the war ended, the communists murdered over three million of us. And it's not in your history books either ..."

I suddenly felt Stan's pain for the first time. Suddenly I was one with his people, through him, and I felt the heavy weight on my heart. Suddenly a door opened into that mystical world of his as I saw imaginary pictures in my mind of women and children dying of starvation, of women being raped and old men stripped naked being nailed alive to barnyard doors. Suddenly I was in his world - suddenly I began to feel. It was painful, but I had entered a part of Stan none of the other sister-wives had managed to ever penetrate. The appreciation in his eyes as I began to see and feel as he did made my love for him grow even more. I was uniting with his pain, sharing his silent, inner suffering, and he was grateful beyond words. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I could now comfort him, and help him be healed of these deep wounds. I could see and understand his loneliness as he hung over those big books. Suddenly, for the first time, his ancestry was my ancestry too. No longer was I just married to Stan the Masurian, but suddenly I was a part of his family - a family that none of the others could yet see until my twin sister-wife Emma later came and married him! From then on, he would tell me stories of old East Prussia and I was there with him. It was enthralling - better than any movie because it was unadulterated and about real flesh-and-blood people - I was connecting with Stan in a new and meaningful way.

Years later I would recall this event when Estelle, then a prospective wife from France, visited with us for the first time. She was trying to fathom Stan out and not getting very far. This side of him both baffled and irritated the Gallic in her, perhaps because of the historical animosity between her own country and his, exacerbated by the fact that one of her relatives had been a nazi sympathiser, thus adding to her prejudice against all things German and therefore Prussian.

She had retired to bed the evening before, highly agitated over something Stan had said at the dinner table. She had woken up early the next morning, her thoughts still locked into a converation she had been having with him over the history of Alsace-Lorraine where she came from, a disputed territory that had exchanged hands between Germany and France several times, the last time in the Second World War. And though most of the territory had been, and still was, ethnically German, there was a part in northwest Lorraine that was exclusively French. Stan had argued for the return of the whole territory as an autonomous part of Germany, as once it had been during the last Kaiser's reign, even though he knew well enough that her own home town of Château Salins was located in the French part. She was in love with Stan but dicovering the Prussian side of him had triggered something she didn't like. She had thought he was "all Polish" only to discover that he was much more complicated.

It was 7 o'clock in the morning. As Estelle sat up in bed, she got to thinking about Stan's character. Who was he really? Could she really get married to the hated Boche? Did she really know what she was getting herself into? As her thoughts darted here and there, she began to pray silently, asking, "Who is this man, Father?"

"I decided to get up, Hèlène," she said to me, "when I suddenly saw a vision of a black cat sitting on the ground looking sweetly at me. It had very thin arms! At first I thought, 'Oh no, this can't be from Father,' but then something made me pause. Then the Lord replied: 'Look more closely. What do you think the thin arms represent?' 'Fragility,' I said. 'Yes', that's it, delicacy. Yes. Sophisticated. Yes. But black?' I asked. 'Mystery' He replied'. Catching the Spirit now, I took over - 'to be approached with care, not because he's dangerous, but because his depths can only be accessed through extreme gentleness. Certain truths are deep and fragile. Like precious porcelain carefully and painstakingly molded in the way of the Chinese artisan.' I knew that Stan, like me, greatly admired Chinese artistic ways. 'Intuition', I said. 'Yes', God replied: 'To be approached softly and tenderly'. I already knew this but seeing it laid out in a single image was what impacted me, an image that matches my own deepest places too. And no one has ever found them. Until now. Father reminded me that He dwells in darkness, not the bad kind, but the mysterious, unknown kind, that takes great patience and sensitivity to approach, with few ever let in."

I knew exactly what she meant. Estelle had to be gently reminded that Stan not some brutish monster like the Prussian "Soldier-King", Frederick William I, but more like the classical musical composer and lover of all things French, Frederick the Great, who loved French literature and art. Of course, how could she have thought otherwise? Stan - or at least one part of him - was more like Germany's poets, theologians and philosophers of old. A sensitive man. A lover of culture, not of conquest. A man of many national impulses.

I remembered the words of Malachi that Stan had often shared with me but which until this moment had had no meaning for me:

"See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of Yahweh. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse" (Malachi 4:5-6, NIV).

And then I saw that part of the ministry of John the Baptist, who had come in the spirit of Elijah (Luke 1:17; Matthew 11:13-14; 17:12-13; Mark 9:11-13), was to reconcile sinners not only with God through the atonement of Christ but with one another, including all races and nationalities. Even more, it was to re-establish the old patriarchal way. We in Western Christianity, in spite of having Christ, had lost the patriarchal bridge with our fathers because we had gone our own separate ways. We had turned our backs on the family by breaking it up into ever smaller and smaller units, until we, as a people and a culture, were reduced to aloneness and isolation, easy pickings for modern day Amalekites. Then, suddenly, the glory of plural marriage began to burst upon my consciousness in a new way. I began to see it as a reconciler and gatherer of families back into the very heart of God. Stan and other patriarchs were coming in the spirit of Elijah also, restoring that precious fellowship of children to parents that Satan has so cleverly destroyed in his so-called sexual and musical revolution.

More of Malachi came flooding into my mind: "'I hate divorce', says Yahweh-Elohim of Israel ..." (Malachi 2:16, NIV). Of course He does. It destroys the sacred tie that binds families to Him. "So guard yourself in your spirit and do not break faith", the verse continued.

Stan had not broken faith with his ancestors. He felt a deep love and responsibility for them, and he knew that one day he would dwell with the saved amongst them in heaven and then back on earth during the Millennium, perhaps even in his ancestral homeland. He looked forward to that reunion as only a small child can long for his birthday.

"'Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire,' says Yahweh Almighty. 'Not a root or a branch will be left to them. But for you who revere My Name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. And you will go out and leap like the calves released from the stall. Then you will trample down the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I do these things,' says Yahweh Almighty. Remember the law of My servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel" (Malachi 4:1-4, NIV)

My soul was filled with astonishment as more of the great puzzle of life began to fit together. All these verses were connected. The last verses in the Old Testament were telling us a vital truth about not only the importance of our families and patriarchy, but about the place of the law even to the day of judgment. The law is to be remembered and obeyed even until the end of time, just as Christ had foretold (Matthew 5:18), but now from the heart outwards in Christ (Romans 7:6; Philippians 3:9).

Hanna came in to tell me that Tom was awake and I had to leave. I kissed my husband and went off to my precious little bundle. He was growing fast and was already crawling. There always seemed to be a smile on his face, the kind of smile that engages your whole heart and makes you want to thank the Lord for His loving kindness.