After the disastrous day in Reedville, Dr. Stephan Pearson was a changed man. His colleagues attest to this with one voice. It was incredible, they claim, how his quiet assurance crumbled overnight. Though he continued to go through all the well-ordered motions of the past eleven years—lecturing regularly, assisting students in the laboratories faithfully, attending chapel daily—there was now a perfunctoriness in it that dismayed those who had known and admired the zestful sincerity that had once been his. His lectures were in the main lifeless and stripped clean of any visionary rambling. His assistance in the laboratories was reduced to the role of a walking computer. His attendance at chapel was devoid of the prayerful spirit that had once been its hallmark. Something had indeed happened to him at Reedville, and his associates experienced it as an emptiness where he had once been so full, a dryness where a well-spring of joy had once overflowed in him.
There was one relationship, however, that suffered no loss as a result of the Reedville crisis. Steve and Kay now found themselves back in the position they had been in eleven years before, with Steve hovering on the brink of collapse and Kay as his sole reason for hope and his sole support. The cloud of disillusionment and apathy that hung over him everywhere else was mercifully absent from his home. His awakening to the fact that the very uses, the good and peaceful uses, to which he had trusted that God would ultimately put the fruits of science, were themselves the catalyst of immense personal and societal degeneration had him backed into the same corner that its wartime uses had backed him into eleven years before. But now there was no obvious escape route, no clear recourse to a better alternative. If a good God was directing human destiny above the stage of human folly, where was the evidence of it? Surely He could not be guiding and blessing advances in science if they were destroying man both from without and from within! So once again Steve found himself falling back on Kay and starting all over from there. She, after all, was the very embodiment of goodness, a goodness which if it had been the common property of the human race would have taken the world in a completely different direction.
Kay, for her part, fully grasped how much he needed the soothing effect of her love and affection now. She nourished within herself those qualities she knew he cherished most, creating for him a sanctuary within their home where hope could be reborn in him. She sought to distract him from pondering the issues that had brought him down so low, not by artificially trivializing them but by creating an atmosphere in the little world of their home that superseded them. She knew of no other way to prevent the man she loved from falling to pieces, and her with him.
Firmly she resolved to devote all she had to sustaining her husband. She considered for a time resigning from teaching, but thought better of it. Mary Thorsheim, to whom she confided everything, helped her to reason that Steve ought not to be aware of any special or forced efforts on her part to buoy him up, but that she could help him best just by being her winsome self.
So she made a point of enriching their home life with things that make life worth living. Almost every day she brought home with her from school a tale about something especially fine which a pupil of hers had done or said during the day which she managed to inject skillfully into their conversation. Sometimes she would relate how she had tried to bring out the best in a challenging situation, and occasionally even Steve would cite something encouraging from his day. She purchased a set of devotional books written by a popular pastor from Minneapolis. The message drawn from each day’s anecdote always affirmed the divine order of things in some way, and Steve found them good therapy. In addition, Kay’s sense of humor, always one of her assets, sharpened and lightened things up in response to life’s little anomalies day by day, providing unexpected little turns in their conversation that made them both laugh.
And, of course, he got to embrace her every night and hold her soft warmth as close to himself as he could. And she loved it, and let him know it.
Naturally, Steve was not unmoved by the peace and loveliness that radiated from his wife and greeted him whenever he came home. They were so genuinely the products of mutual admiration and love, and so perfectly the expression of what he was seeking on a universal scale, that he would now find himself being drawn home every day the moment classes were over. There he could wash off any “radioactive fallout” that had alighted on him during the day. And there he could rekindle whatever ray of hope remained in him that God might yet turn things around in the world.
Thanks to Kay, home was a refuge and sanctuary for Stephan Pearson in the months following the debacle in Reedville. Reluctantly he left it in the morning and eagerly he retreated to it at the end of the day. It was his one hallowed spot on the face of the earth. It kept him going from one day to the next. The goodness he experienced in his wife had to come from somewhere, he told himself.
But why, he asked himself over and over again, aren’t there more people like her in the world? Why can’t every home be like ours?