It was the autumn
of 1965 when my dad decided to cut ties from his secure nine to fiver in
Atlanta and move our family to an uncertain future in a tiny western North
Carolina mountain town. Dad loathed sameness and monotony and especially detested
working for someone else. He wanted to be bold, take a risk, and make his own
way in the world. And so, sight unseen; he made a deal to purchase the Bonaire
Motel in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
My mother may
have been skeptical of this uncertain venture; she may have been downright
terrified of taking a young family with two little kids and heading off to
parts unknown. But there was no way she’d ever tell my father that. Mom was
solidly in Pops’ corner, for better or worse, and would be for the rest of his
far-too-brief life.
And so it came to
be that on an autumn evening in `65 we Millers packed into the family wagon and
headed off on the five-hour drive to our new life. I was only three years old
at the time but still remember the trip clear as yesterday. In those days, kids
were allowed to bounce around a car like a jumping bean on speed, and nobody
paid it any mind. There were no seatbelt or car seat laws. You could hang your body
out the window and yodel at the moon if you wanted.
It was already past
my bedtime when we started our journey, so I curled up on the floor beneath the
glove compartment. It was a wonderfully dark and comfy little nook, and the rhythmic
clacks of the highway pleats soon lulled me to sleep.
I awoke sometime the next morning in my new
bed in our new home – which happened to be the dank basement of a quaint little
roadside motel. Truth be told, the Bonaire looked a bit like Bates Motel - only
no scary house on the hill. From the lobby in the main building, you looked out
through a large picture frame window on a row of eight rooms just across the
parking lot. The rates ranged from six to eight dollars a night.
It was still peak autumn colors season when
we arrived, so the joint was packed. And, though the first few days were a
little chaotic for my parents, they were happy as clams in their new life. All
was well for a few weeks…and then it wasn’t.
The problem with
North Carolina’s stunningly colorful fall is that it doesn’t last. The bright
hues fade, and the leaves die and shrivel and fall. And, for my novice
innkeeper parents, that fact of nature was not good news. Soon the leafy
lookers had all gone home, and the Bonaire parking lot was left empty.
My parents weren’t
worried at first. They figured it was just a temporary downturn. But, as days
turned into weeks and autumn turned to winter, Mom and Dad’s initial optimism faded.
Each evening, my
mother would stand in the lobby and gaze out the window at the darkened row of
empty rooms. She’d watch and wish and pray.
“Please, God.
Send us guests for our rooms.”
It was a simple
prayer that she repeated again and again. Whenever a car would come rolling down
Ol’ Highway 25, she’d perk up, thinking maybe her prayer had finally worked.
She watched for the car to slow, to flip on its blinker and turn into the motel
lot. But, despite her tirelessly hopeful one-sided conversation with God, there
were no blinkers that winter. The cars kept going.
As the icy
January of 1966 morphed into frigid February, things began to look bleaker and
bleaker. My parents’ meager savings had been used up. My father was despondent.
Again and again he lamented his mistake in moving us away from our safe and
secure life. He talked about packing us up and heading back to Atlanta. Maybe
he could beg for his old job back. Mom convinced him to wait a little while
longer. She wasn’t ready to give up – just yet.
Each night she
continued to hold her fruitless vigil, staring out that lobby window at the
cold and empty rooms. “Please, God. Send us guests for our rooms. We’re good people.
Our rooms are clean and comfortable. Please help my family.” She knew that God
was up there and that He had to hear her, so she couldn’t understand why he
wasn’t helping out. “Show me what I need to know,” Mom despaired one night.
“Show me the way.”
Then a flicker of
a thought crossed her mind. What if she was going about it all wrong? What if the
tone of her prayer had been misguided all along? She knew at that moment that
she’d had it all backwards. My mother would call this inspiration an “angel
message.”
She suddenly remembered Elisha’s prayer for his servant in
II Kings:
“Open his
eyes, Lord, so that he may see.”
My mother asked
that God open her eyes. In an instant, she switched from fear and doubt to gratitude
and hope. She’d been so busy asking God to bail out her family, she’d forgotten
to give thanks to God for all the blessings He’d bestowed on her family. The
Millers had so much to be grateful for, and she really had no business asking
for more. She knew this was the answer to her prayers. Mom remembered how Jesus
thanked God before he raised Lazarus
from the tomb:
“Father, I thank thee that thou hast
heard me.”
She realized that
- if she truly believed in the power of prayer - she shouldn’t wait to give
gratitude until after she received
what she was praying for. She needed to be grateful first to prove her faith. So,
right then and there – without any change in the present desperate
circumstances - she gave thanks to God. It was like an impromptu Thanksgiving
in the dead of a dark winter’s night. She knew at that moment that everything
was going to be okay.
“Within just a
few minutes,” my Mom recalled years later, “a pair of headlights appeared down
Highway 25. As the car drew near the motel, the blinker came on. As they pulled
into the drive, another car appeared, then another and another. In less than
fifteen minutes there was a line of people waiting at the counter to check-in.
The rooms were filled that night, and, in all the years we owned that motel, we
never faced that problem again.”
“Every good gift and
every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights,
with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” James 1:17.
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