Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find.
—Matthew 7:7
Only one thing remained to complete my fairy tale.
Marriage to Chuck proved exciting for a girl still in her teens. We moved into an apartment my parents owned right across East Ross Street from them. Chuck soon moved on from working as a mason to a good position at Armstrong Ceiling Plant. But his ambition was to become a police officer. His military training and strong, competent personality made law enforcement a perfect fit. Chuck entered the ten-week police training program, and in 1972 he joined Manor Township Police Department. He would go on to earn a degree in law enforcement from Penn State and serve more than thirty years with MTPD, eventually rising to sergeant.
My parents loved Chuck, but his penchant for fast, sporty means of transportation raised my mother’s eyebrows. The dark green Firebird was followed by seven other cars and a motorcycle within our first two years of marriage. My mother, with her wry Irish humor, commented, “I’m sure glad he doesn’t trade in his women like he does his cars!”
So was I. (Four and a half decades later, we are still married, and our love has grown far stronger and sent down deep roots since the young passion of our early years.) But by this time in my story, Chuck was a policeman, and I was aware that people in his profession ranked among the highest in divorce rates. As a young policeman’s wife, I was invited to classes to help me understand the stresses he faced. A majority of his law enforcement colleagues were divorced. Attending those classes gave me a determination that Chuck and I were going to work on our marriage to keep it healthy.
I continued working at Armstrong World Industries. But I longed to be a mother as well as a wife. A year or so after our wedding, I suffered a miscarriage. Neither Chuck nor I was attending church at this time. We were both working full-time, and weekends when Chuck wasn’t on patrol were our time to be together as a couple. Though I’d pushed my faith to a back burner, I remember well praying fervently that God would allow me to get pregnant.
God answered my prayers. On December 7, 1973, almost four years after our wedding, our firstborn son, Charles Carl Roberts IV, was laid in my arms at Lancaster General Hospital. But my joy turned to tears as the doctor began explaining that there was a problem. My precious baby boy was not perfect—not even normal. I could see at a glance that his tiny feet were twisted into the same ugly club position that my own had been.
This was no gentle cloudburst, but a life storm. Worse, it was my child who bore the brunt of it. And I discovered—as mothers have through the generations—how much more my child’s suffering could tear at my heart than any storms I had borne myself. I was not only distraught, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain responsibility. Why shouldn’t my husband blame me for his firstborn’s abnormality? It was from my faulty genes that my baby had inherited this deformity.
But Chuck never made me feel at fault. From the moment he took his son into his arms, he loved Charlie unconditionally. We both did. And the pediatrician was optimistic. The recommended treatment of casts and braces, probably even surgery when Charlie was older, to force my son’s twisted feet into proper position, would not be pleasant. But with time, there was every hope he would eventually walk and grow normally.
If I did not remember my own discomfort as an infant, I felt every moment of Charlie’s. The casts were heavy and cumbersome, and since their purpose was to force his tiny feet out of their unnatural alignment, they were also painful. Charlie’s screams tore at my heart. The worst was when his casts had to be changed, which was every couple of weeks due to his rapid growth. This involved dunking him over and over into a sink of water to soak off the plaster of Paris so that the bandages could be unwound. Then there was the excruciating ordeal of readjusting his diminutive limbs before rewrapping, and holding him still long enough for the plaster of Paris to harden in its new position.
Thankfully, by the end of six months the casts were discontinued. For the next two years, Charlie wore braces, but eventually this too was reduced to the nighttime hours. As expected, Charlie’s walking skills developed later than normal. But by the time he turned three, he was running around. As with my own childhood experience, he seemed to have no memory of the pain or constraints. In fact, Charlie healed so well that when I took him back for a follow-up consultation at six years old, the specialist decided he wouldn’t need surgery after all.
I could not easily forget my faith. Before Charlie’s birth, I began attending church again. My continuing to do so was not because of a renewed prayer life or closeness to God. Simply put, I was a mother, and I wanted my children to enjoy the same rich heritage of faith and church I had experienced growing up. While faith was not at this time a central part of Chuck’s world, he honored me by at least attending Christmas and Easter church celebrations with me.
Over the next years, our family expanded. Our second son, Joshua, was born one day before Charlie’s third birthday. Zachary arrived twenty-two months later, and he was almost five when Jonathan was born. I loved my four precious sons, though I sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a daughter, to be laundering frilly little dresses instead of T-shirts and jeans, or fussing with French braids and hair ribbons. I’d have to wait for granddaughters to find out.
By this time we’d moved twice. When my parents relocated to a home in the country just south of Strasburg, we purchased their home on East Ross Street. The row house gave us more room than the apartment where we’d been living, but it had only a tiny backyard and no driveway, so Chuck often had to find parking several blocks away. When Charlie was six years old, we moved again to a suburban neighborhood on the west side of Lancaster City. What a thrill to pull into our own driveway instead of parking down the street!
A new and bigger house was not the only change in my life. Sometime around the birth of my third son, Zach—as he came to be known—my mother started to attend a Bible study. Though all my family was devout Catholic, in-depth study of Scripture was not part of our heritage. A family Bible had always sat on our coffee table but was only opened to look at the pictures. And though I’d purchased a Bible while in high school, I’d rarely opened it.
Now as my mother began studying the Bible, I saw her change. Her spiritual growth, her deepened faith in God, impressed me. I longed for such a change in my own life. The program my mother attended was called Neighborhood Bible Studies (NBS). When I heard of an organizational meeting being held to start an NBS program for women in our area, I decided to attend. I drove out to the chicken farm where the meeting was held. With a group of other women, I listened to one of the authors of the NBS material share how to knock on doors and invite women to Bible study. You didn’t have to be a trained Bible teacher. Each of the women in the group would take turns leading the study from material provided to us.
I’d never taken part in a Bible study, much less led one. Nor did I consider myself in any way a leader. But I could knock on a door. Rather to my own astonishment, I found myself volunteering to start a group. I went door to door throughout my neighborhood.
“I’m starting a group to study the Bible on Wednesday mornings at 9 a.m.,” I explained. “It isn’t tied to any particular church, just a study to see for ourselves what the Bible has to say.”
I wondered if I’d find a single neighbor interested in coming. So I was amazed when a dozen women from my own age to white-haired grandmothers responded. The group represented various church denominations and faith backgrounds. Like me, many were mothers of young children, so we found someone willing to watch the children at one home while we held the Bible study at another. Each week we would rotate to a different home for child care and study.
Our first Bible study was on the life of Christ as portrayed in the gospel of Mark. I knew Jesus was God’s Son. Because I’d always attended church and believed the Bible to be true, I’d never really considered my own need for a Savior. But by the time I’d finished studying the book of Mark, I got down on my knees and surrendered my life in a new way to God, asking forgiveness for my sins and committing my life to Jesus Christ, not just as my Savior, but as Lord of my life in every aspect and every moment.
At this time, Chuck still did not share my interest in spiritual things. His job as a patrol officer kept him busy and away from home for long hours every week. What were his thoughts about my new interest in attending church and studying the Bible? While he said little, he must have approved of the changes he saw in my life and character, because when I asked Chuck if he’d be willing to attend an evening couples’ Bible study, he agreed. That was the beginning of Chuck’s own journey of faith. Within a short time, he was not only participating in the Bible study, but attending church with the rest of the family.
My hunger to know God more and to understand God’s Word continued to grow. I loved being with these other women who were my neighbors, sharing day-to-day issues on husbands, raising children, and family life; praying together; and digging into God’s Word to find answers to our questions. I had never felt so secure in who I was and who God was calling me to be as a wife and mother. I look back on my experience in Neighborhood Bible Study—the friendships developed and my own faith growth through studying God’s Word—as one of the richest times in my life.
By now I was pregnant with our fourth child. Life changes when you have children. Their hurts become your own. It was one thing to have been careless and dismissive of my faith—to place God on a back burner if not out of my thoughts completely—when life centered on my own wants and enjoyment, even the delight of being wife to the man I loved. But life was different with children to think about, to protect, and to weep over. When I could not spare them from harm or hurt, not to mention a husband whose profession took him into harm’s way on a daily basis, I found myself crying out more and more to the only One in whose almighty hands I could place my loved ones’ lives and futures. Prayer and memorizing God’s promises given in Scripture became my lifeline.
I clung to one such Scripture passage as I sat in my doctor’s office, my hands protectively cradling the child growing in my womb.
“The sonogram has revealed a defect,” the doctor told me. “Your baby’s kidneys are not functioning properly.”
There was nothing to be done except wait and hope—and pray. I cried out a passage of Scripture I’d memorized, Matthew 7:7–11:
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find. . . . Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
Heavenly Father, I wouldn’t give my son a snake if he were hungry and asking for fish, I prayed. I know how much I love my own sons. Whatever they needed, I would never turn away from giving it to them. You love me so much more than I can love them. You say to ask and it will be given to me. I am asking you, please heal my baby!
The rest of my pregnancy was routine. When Jonathan was born healthy and full-term, the doctor found no signs of a kidney defect. He could not explain it. I in turn had no doubt God had answered my prayers with a miracle of healing.
Years later, in the aftermath of the Nickel Mines schoolhouse tragedy, I would cry out in confusion. How is it that God answers one heart cry, but does not answer another equally sincere and urgent? Why does He permit in the lives of His children rain and drought, blue skies and tsunamis? If answered prayer brings strengthened faith, why does He not always respond to the heart cry of His children? How is it that our heavenly Father does indeed appear at times to give a poisonous reptile instead of succulent fish, a cold, hard stone to fill an empty stomach instead of bread?
I cannot claim to have found any definitive answers. But I have found hope. I believe that the almighty Creator who permits tragedies to enter into my life and into the lives of others is the same loving heavenly Father who healed my precious fourth-born in my womb.
I will cling to that hope and conviction even when I do not understand.