Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

sacrificial love

A sentimental journey: Review of Promise Me This by Cathy Gohlke

The Titanic sinks. Britain enters World War I.

I promise, I’m not reviewing the first season of Downton Abbey. But my husband and I had just finished watching that when I started reading Promise Me This by Cathy Gohlke. Set in the same time period but  nowhere near the same story. I was all set for the setting, and with the Olympics starting this week in London, I have England on the brain.

All of that, and the fact that this is a heartwarming, breathtaking, gut-wrenching story of sacrificial love, made for an enjoyable read. I can’t wait to pick of Gohlke’s next book, releasing in September.

Orphan and “gutter rat” Michael Dunnegan forms an unlikely friendship with Owen Allen, who is sailing for America on the Titanic. Michael stows away on the ill-fated ship and Owen saves Michael’s life — at the expense of his own — when the ship sinks. Michael makes it to America and takes up Owen’s dream of prospering the family garden business and bringing Owen’s sister Annie to America. What follows is the lengths to which the characters will go to protect family and make good on promises in light of the sacrifices of a man they all loved. It is painfully sad and joyously hopeful and even if you’re tired of Titanic-themed stories (I thought I was), check this one out. The ship’s sinking is the catalyst for the story but not the main action.

Even when I enjoy a book, it’s rare that I dog-ear a page to save a quote, but I did just that. (To my husband’s mock horror that I would “ruin” a library book.) I was moved by this:

It can’t be that easy. It can’t be that whatever happens, you  just keep going. Michael was sure of it.

“That’s all there is to it,” she said as if she’d heard his thoughts. “Each morning, when we wake — if we wake — we pick up whatever it is we’ve been given to carry for that day, with the sweet Lord Jesus in the yoke beside us to tote the load. Each night we lay it down, giving it into God’s hands. If it’s still there in the morning, we pick it up and begin again. If the burden is gone or if there is something different, we know where to start.”

Want to read more? You can find the first chapter here.

The characters in this book face some heavy burdens. Don’t we all? This story is a ray of hope in ever-increasing darkness.

Anything for love

Maybe it’s all the “Celebrity Apprentice” I’ve been watching lately, but I’ve been humming Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” since watching a Royal Wedding special earlier this week. Meatloaf and the royal wedding — kind of a stretch, right? (By the way, did anyone ever figure out what “that” was? You know, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”)

I was captivated by the Royal Wedding this morning. My husband set the alarm for me on his way out to the Y, and I had one hour of uninterrupted fairy tale romance time before the children woke up. (Side note: This bone china mug arrived in the mail this afternoon, straight from England, for my birthday. I’m a little giddy about it.)

Weddings, in general, have taken on new meaning for me since I’ve been married. My husband and I celebrate four years of marriage in less than a month, and it’s been a roller coaster ride so far but worth every crested hill and sharp turn.

During this television special earlier in the week, one of the reporters commented that he thought Kate would prefer that she wasn’t marrying a prince, that she would like to lead a nice, quiet life in the country and raise a family outside of the public arena. That struck me as truly amazing and sacrificial. Despite her personal preference, for the sake of love, she is entering a life she would not have chosen for herself, a life that will have its difficulties in lack of privacy, rules of etiquette, public appearances and possibly even threats to personal safety. All for love. She could have decided it wasn’t worth it, but for love of a man, who happens to be prince, she is choosing to sacrifice her idea of an ideal life and enter a world that certainly is different from what she has known.

In a sense, it’s what we all do when we get married. We join our lives to someone else’s, aligning our dreams, ambitions and goals to theirs, come what may. I didn’t understand this fully when I got married, and I’m not sure I ever will understand it fully, but joining my life to a man preparing to be a pastor has required sacrifice of things I thought I wanted and expectations I had for how life would be. But I wouldn’t change the choice I made to marry him. For me, there was no one else. He could have been a beggar asking me to live in a cardboard box with him or an astronaut with dreams of living on the moon. That’s the thing about love, the craziest of notions don’t seem all that crazy and as long as I’ve got my husband walking next to me hand-in-hand, I believe we can face anything together.

I imagine Kate could be afraid of the future. She will be queen someday. How do you live every day with that knowledge? Most little girls dream of being a princess; she literally is one. All because she loved a man.

Those of us who choose to join our lives with Christ experience this kind of love, too. For love of the one who first loved us, we’ll do things we never thought we could, give up the lives we’ve always wanted for the lives we never thought we could have. Living the Christ-life is scary, risky, unpredictable and difficult sometimes, but it’s also fulfilling, joyful, purposeful, abundant and freeing. Having experienced life with Christ, I hope that we would say we can’t imagine life any other way.