The family that faith built

From 1953 on, I was old enough to understand our family's circumstances. We lived in a 1951 Dodge for about a year before my father built us a shack. My older sister Rose and I helped where we could. The lumber came from a barn that had burned down, and the nails were square. It took about six months to build, and when it was done it was so cold in winter and so hot in summer that it was very nearly like living outside. Ten of us lived in that shack for nine years.

We were about a hundred feet from grandma's house and three-quarters of a mile from the main road, and the road to us was all mud — when it rained, sometimes we got stuck. We had a garden, pigs, and chickens that helped feed us, and a cistern for water that we filled from a truck at seven dollars a load. When the cistern started leaking, we drove four miles to the creek for spring water in whatever containers we had, and we did it every day. My father worked as a florist, making forty-eight dollars a week.

In 1965 we managed to put two hundred dollars down on a house with electricity and plumbing. That was heaven to us. I had five sisters and two younger brothers, and we had our fights at times, like any family growing up. We took the bus to an all-Black school, and integration came when I was thirteen — we left that school and mixed with our white brothers and sisters in a school with better buildings and better teaching. I learned early that community is bigger than the walls we are born inside.

Rich in the things that count

I don't tell that story for pity. I tell it because, by the only measure that lasts, we were rich. We had good, loving parents. We had each other. We were fed and we were held, and no cold winter ever changed that. If you had asked me then, I might have counted what we lacked. Ask me now, at the far end of a long life, and I will tell you we lacked nothing that mattered.

A home is not built out of square footage. Ours was built out of love and out of faith, and it held when the walls themselves barely did. That is the part I most want to pass on: you can start a family with almost nothing in your hands and still give your children the one thing they truly need.

The truth that turned us around

The heart of my testimony is simple: the truth of God's Word turned our family's life around. We learned to build our life on the foundation of Christ — our home, our relationships, the way we spoke to one another, our very sense of who we were. On that foundation you get things a bigger house can never give: confident trust, real faith, good morals, integrity, and a steady sense of worth that you can hand down to your children.

That work is not dramatic. It is a family reading the Word together, praying together, giving God thanks and building an altar of gratitude in the middle of an ordinary week. When you give God a real place in your home and your heart, He becomes the beam the whole house rests on.

Two worlds, one family

When integration came, two worlds that had been kept apart were set down in the same room, and I watched something I never forgot: people are people, and community is bigger than the walls we are born inside. The family I grew up in taught me to love the ones under my own roof; the wider world taught me that the same love was meant to reach past the fence line.

An altar in an ordinary week

The way you turn a house into that kind of home is not complicated, though it is daily. When we give God thanks, we build an altar — we mark the place where He met us, so the children never forget it was Him. A family that reads the Word together, prays together, and keeps giving thanks in the middle of an ordinary week is quietly handing the next generation the only inheritance that never loses its value.

We did not have much to leave our children in the way of money. But faith, gratitude, and a foundation — those we could give, and those are the things they have carried long after the shack was gone.

That house with the electricity and plumbing felt like heaven to us in 1965. But the real home had been built long before we ever moved in — built on faith, on love, and on parents who served the Lord in a one-room shack on a muddy road. That is the family that faith built. It is the kind any of us can build, wherever we are starting from.