July 3, 2024
Episode #254
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David and Karen Mains have recently celebrated their 63rd Wedding Anniversary. They reflect on the goodness of God down through the years, with an emphasis that: “The God Hunt is one of the most wonderful ways we can search for God in our daily world and this discipline will certainly change our lives for the good.”
Episode Transcript
Karen: The God Hunt is one of the most wonderful ways we can search for God in our daily world and will change our lives for the good for certain.
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David: We were reminded last week that over the years our home state of Illinois has sent four count them, four men to the White House. Karen, do you remember who those men were?
Karen: I’ve remembered a couple of them.
David: Okay, go ahead and prove it.
Karen: Okay, let me see. Well, Ulysses Grant.
David: It’s fine. Okay, go ahead. Three more.
Karen: Ronald Reagan, Obama.
David: Yes, good.
Karen: Oh, gosh, who’s the fourth one?
David: Well, it’s the one you always think up first. Illinois is the land of Lincoln. Okay, good. Good.
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
David: Last week, Karen, we celebrated our… what number wedding anniversary?
Karen: I have to count it up every time, but it was the 63rd wedding anniversary.
David: Yeah, we’re very fortunate, aren’t we?
Karen: Oh, David, it hasn’t just been a wedding. When God put us together He formed a team. We didn’t really know it when we were young, but we have been a team in ministry and marriage for 63 years. I mean, it’s been a journey of extraordinary meaning. There have been hard times, but we’ve wedded them together. We haven’t had a perfect marriage, but it’s become more perfect.
David: You’re improving.
Karen: That’s what happens when you marry a younger woman. You get your girl wrap.
David: I would like to review just my thought process because wedding anniversaries, I always get a card. I’m good at giving cards to people in special days, but I thought this year I want to make it special.
What would Karen really enjoy doing? And I came up with a great idea. Sometime back, I can’t even remember how far back, we went to Galena, Illinois. That’s not going to mean a whole lot to people who aren’t from Illinois, but Galena is in the northwest corner of Illinois, and it’s where the home of Ulysses Etz Grantis. We got to visit the home and we saw all the shops. It’s just a delightful area, and I thought, let’s go back there. We haven’t been there for a long time, and so I started to make plans, and I called ahead to book a motel. All of a sudden, I thought, “Oh that’s kind of expensive. Let’s get a cheaper one.”
Karen: And I went on the internet and did a search. They were all…
David: …$250 for a night. And I thought, “Wow, if we stay there three nights, then we got to go to restaurants. This is going to be an expensive thing.”
Karen: We don’t want to do this so much.
David: So, I kind of gulfed, and I didn’t realize, and then I thought, “Well, Lord, maybe I’m not supposed to do this.” And I’m not a cheapskate. Well, maybe I’m a cheapskate.
Karen: No, you’re not. But those are the tourist prices before the tourist season.
David: Yeah, I mean, you can get a hotel room in Chicago on Lake Michigan for $250 a night. And I said, “Am I missing something?” And I prayed, and I was kind of agonizing because it had gone a couple of days, and nothing came to mind, and I know the anniversary is coming up. And then all of a sudden, I thought, you know what, Karen would really enjoy visiting her brother Craig in Des Moines, and we would be able to see Mary, his wonderful wife. She’s been in ill health. And maybe that would be a good idea. I should call Craig because Craig’s busy. He’s a minister. He’s probably preaching this weekend, and that would be the last thing he’d need is to have guests come in over the weekend when he’s preaching. Anyway, I gave him a call, and he said he would have loved that. That was really good.
Karen: He had nothing on.
David: Not until the following Monday that he was involved. And so that just seemed like the perfect solution. So, we decided that’s what we were going to do.
Karen: So, it’s a five-hour drive to Des Moines, which we’re really realizing that our stage in life is not a little trip. And then, of course, five hours drive home.
David: But it was a great time.
Karen: A wonderful time.
David: Talk about his wife, Mary. Just the situation she’s in.
Karen: She’s just a beautiful sister-in-law in every way.
David: Every way.
Karen: But she had a stroke eight years ago, and then a series of small strokes then. The last time I saw them, I had gone to Des Moines and again, I stayed with Craig. She was still at home with him in a wheelchair.
David: He was the caregiver.
Karen: He was the caregiver, and she was much more lucid at that point in time. He’s lifting her in and out of bed and getting up in the middle of the night several times to lift her to the washroom and fixing meals. And he did have a caregiver who came in. But you can’t do that every day for years without it becoming exhausting. And then she began to decline more and more.
So, he is the chaplain of a retirement center there that also has a nursing wing. And he decided the best thing that he could do in consultation with the other people was just to put her in that nursing wing in that retirement center.
David: And that’s where we got a chance to see her. We were with her probably for 45 minutes.
Karen: So, she was in bed, she was prone. She can talk.
David: Very little.
Karen: But she has the cycle. We did laugh a lot. We always laugh a lot. She was sharp enough to laugh along with what we were saying. But there is a sign on the wall that said, “Do not resist the days.” So, she’s at the end of her days. We were so glad that we had gone.
David: Yes.
Karen: And Craig was able to talk about his feelings and things that maybe you don’t talk with other people about who are not family. So that felt like that was God’s direction. Part of the talk about the God in your life, we felt like that we had been really directed to go at that time to have time with Craig.
David: And then he fixed breakfast for us.
Karen: Yeah.
David: Pancakes and scrambled eggs.
Karen: Yeah, that’s so sweet.
David: Another long talk and then we hit the road once again and drove back to West Chicago. It was a wonderful time. And I’m just grateful, not that I didn’t get to go to Galena, but grateful that the Lord…
Karen: …put that plan in your heart.
David: Yes, right. It was really good. We talked last week on the podcast about going on the God hunt on a daily basis. And we said we’re starting that practice once again in our lives.
Karen: We developed this spiritual game because I came across the concept that what’s learned with pleasure is learned full measure. Unfortunately, in our concern as parents for children to grow up to be Godly, sometimes we impose disciplines and strictures and ways of functioning that they look back on and it has developed sometimes the negative reaction to faith. So, putting this in the God hunt game for our kids so that they would learn full measure because of the pleasure of going on the hunt. It’s sort of like hide and seek, but it’s the hunt for God. It became just a wonderful tool in our family life.
David: And then it kind of dropped out of our routine and we hadn’t done it. So, we picked that up again.
Karen: Because I was going through my books that I’ve written and I wrote a book on the God hunt and I thought, “Oh my goodness, are we practicing this?” We need to step it up again if we aren’t.
David: You know what I did after our podcast last week? Come on, look at this.
Karen: Oh, you have a notebook. You said your God hunt notebook. A new God hunt notebook.
David: Part of the God hunt is to write down your sightings.
Karen: Yes.
David: I saw God at work at this point in time. Look at, I got all of the sightings we talked about on our anniversary trip. So, the first page is filled out and I’m ready. There must be 100 pages there to fill out the next 100 items in our God hunting.
Karen: Well, let’s review those again. We also spoke about this on the last podcast, but not everyone listens in all the time. So, there are four categories to the God hunt.
David: Just to help people. There are going to be God hunt sightings you have that may not fit these categories, but it’s just a helpful tool. Okay, let’s go through those categories and we’ll talk how this happened on our last trip to celebrate our wedding.
Karen: We’ll name the four categories, then we can go over each individual one.
David: Okay, one of the categories is unusual linkage and timing. Okay, another one?
Karen: Second category is obvious answer to prayer.
David: Okay, another one is unexpected evidence of God’s care.
Karen: And the last one is help to do God’s work in the world.
David: Okay, and what we’re going to do is what exactly we were doing on our way home from Des Moines to West Chicago where we live. We were saying, okay, let’s go over those categories and see if any of them were touched on in this wonderful trip on our wedding time.
So unusual linkage and timing. Okay, Karen, we didn’t get on the grants home again, but on the way home in Illinois, we saw… well, actually on our way to Des Moines, there was a sign stop at Dixon, boyhood home of Ronald Reagan. You know, now I’ve never been to Dixon before. So, we kind of thought that that might be a good idea.
Okay? What I didn’t know is that on the way back, because there was an improvement on the highway, we were put on a detour, there was another sign that we saw that said visit the birthplace of President Reagan. And that was in a town called Tampico.
Karen: Tampico or Tampico, we’re not sure how.
David: We don’t know. I never heard of it before, but we said, “Well, let’s do that as well.” I just assumed he was in one town and that was it. You know, Dixon, but Tampico is a…
Karen: It’s a typical small town.
David: Yeah.
Karen: American small towns kind of dying and he had, usually have five churches. There are no industries or anything in the town.
David: Yeah, and they have a small museum.
Karen: … for Ronald Reagan.
David: Delightful.
Karen: Yeah.
David: And it’s in the building, which was a bank before. We think of a large bank, the very small bank. And then upstairs is the place where first his brother and then Ronald Reagan were born. You look at it and say, “My, golly, the guy was the president of the United States.”
Karen: So, we went in, there were no other people around. The guide was there. She was very intelligent. Wasn’t she, David?
David: And delightful as well.
Karen: And delightful and welcoming and very informative and had so much background that she gave on the family. Reagan’s dad was an alcoholic.
David: Yeah. And she was careful how she spoke about that.
Karen: She was very careful how she spoke about it, but he was an alcoholic. She had one story that were, I think it was there that Ronald Reagan had come back and his dad was drunk in the snow, had fallen face down in the snow. And there was sort of a temptation according to Reagan’s statements. “What do you do? Just leave him there. Maybe it would solve all kinds of problems.” But he didn’t. He went in and got his older brother, and they carried him into the house. But that’s what they contended with all the time.
Now his mom was a different sort of person altogether. She was godly. She loved the Lord. She used these circumstances in her life to draw herself closer to the Lord and to teach her boys godly things. She had a couple jobs to keep things going and she became a dressmaker. And that was the little industry that she did out of her home in that time. It was extraordinary.
David: In Tampico, even the guide said, “You can see from just visiting here that this little town is dying.”
Karen: Yeah.
David: We went on to Dixon. Dixon is flourishing.
Karen: It’s flourishing. It’s a beautiful Illinois town.
David: Small town still. But just really, really nice. You drive through it.
Karen: The older houses have been restored. It’s a beautiful community.
David: Yeah.
Karen: It’s lovely.
David: Because of the alcohol problem, they moved to, and they were in five different homes or houses, I guess you’d say, in Dixon, Illinois.
Karen: Yeah.
David: But it’s only one that’s still remaining. And the guy who was the guide, in my mind, and I’m going to get to the God hunt site in here in just a second, he saw us. We were kind of standing around.
Karen: He had taken his last tour around.
David: And another couple and their mother, there had been a death in that family, and they stopped by and then there was another gentleman.
Karen: Single man.
David: And the question was whether this guide wanted to take one more tour and he graciously did that for us.
Karen: Right.
David: So, it was a God hunt sighting as far as we were concerned because we learned so much. It was just a fascinating experience and Ronald Reagan had come back to Dixon, Illinois and there was a huge rally with thousands of people.
Karen: When he was president. So, this guy that one little particular thing about him who was taking us through the boyhood home, he had some technology that he used. So, the secret service pulled him in on that whole visit of Reagan’s to his hometown.
David: He was very fascinating things he said and he spent almost a whole day with the President because he had the electronic.
Karen: Yeah, the brother of the President was needed to stay in touch with the sacred service.
David: And he had all kinds of stories. It was just very, very fascinating. One of the things, Karen, that was most interesting to me is that when you went upstairs in that house where the mother lived, there was a Bible.
Karen: It was her room. It was open on the bed.
David: To what passage, do you remember?
Karen: Well, it was if my people who were called by my name. I think you knew it by heart.
David: 2 Chronicles 7:14.
Karen: Yeah.
David: I called them, I humbled themselves in prayer, turned from their wicked ways and I’ll hear from heaven and so I’ll heal their land. It was really, really neat.
Karen: It was beautiful, wasn’t it?
David: Yeah, just there were those moments that was kind of electrifying when you were able to go back in history and hear some of these stories.
Another one that was interesting to me, you know, Reagan was kind of a football hero in high school, little high school, you know, but another person who was from Dixon, Illinois, now this is going to date us because I still remember these names.
Karen: But this is to show the pattern of God in his language. You’re saying right now he went from Dixon; he had the stardom days and I can’t remember exactly how he got out to California.
David: He was an announcer for the football games in Iowa, then he went out to California, and he actually announced some Cubs games. Now I don’t know if those were spring-fringing or what. I have no idea, but he was heard then because of his voice on radio as a sports announcer and that opened up opportunities in filmmaking.
Karen: But Luella Parsons.
David: She was the huge gossip columnist of the day.
Karen: There were two, but she was the only one from, guess what, Dixon, Illinois.
David: That wild. I mean she was a huge name.
Karen: And don’t you think she got the high-nosed on boy?
David: Yeah, so it’s Hedda Hopper and then Luella Parsons, those were the two. They didn’t like each other.
Karen: No, they had a combative relationship.
David: Anyway, the Lord used that in a way to promote Ronald Reagan and a guy from nowhere.
Karen: He became the governor of California.
David: Yeah, eventually. And I think most people think of an artist from Illinois as much as from California.
Karen: So, isn’t this an extraordinary story? And I was again impressed, deeply impressed with the concept of being an American. If you’re an American, it doesn’t matter what your roots are. If you will work hard and if you will choose to do the right things, you can become anything you want, i.e., the President of the United States.
David: That was amazing, yeah.
Karen: So, this was a wonderful, revelatory journey for us.
David: Let’s go back to the God hunt side. One of the categories you look for is unusual linkage and timing. You know, that didn’t just happen.
Karen: For us, you mean our visit.
David: I think God arranged it so that we would be kind of hanging around there and just seeing if somebody arrived back at three o’clock. Nobody was there. And then this gentleman, who was a believer. It was very obvious.
Karen: He was very open about his faith.
David: Yeah, he was. That he would take us, this small group of people on this tour and it was just a wonderful time and I’m so grateful. I learned so much and want to read more about this history.
Karen: Well, that second category is any obvious answer to prayer again. We’re going through the four categories in the God hunt. So how would you say?
David: Well, to me, the reason we went to Des Moines instead of Galena was the prices were pretty high on the motels. But it was also because the Lord said to me, “Slow down. You need to go out and visit with Craig and then be able to see Mary once again.” All that was very beautiful. And that was to me an obvious answer to prayer. And I saw it in perspective rather than trying to figure it out ahead of time. I just kind of was saying, “Okay, I’m going to go slow here and figure out what God’s trying to say in this.”
And I feel it’s as clear to me now looking back on it that God arranged that whole trip. And then instead of being able to go to Galena, the guy that originally thought we got to go to Dixon and Tampico and spend hours there, there was no way to pull.
Karen: We don’t know if we’re pronouncing Tampico right. It could be pronounced another way, but that’s where we went.
David: It could be Tampico. I don’t know. There are probably other ways as well. The funny thing, Karen, is we got back in the car and then we had hours to drive before we got home. It was just wonderful to talk about the trip and do it through the God hunt lens and say, “What has God done in this? This is very, very nice. He arranged this.” Everything was so special.
Okay. We’ve gotten categories. Okay. Unusual linkage and timing, obvious answers to prayer, unexpected evidence of God’s care.
Now, I don’t know how he put the highway together because we came back a little bit different than the way we had gone.
Karen: Yeah, that’s true.
David: But there was road construction and that put us on a different route than we expected. And all those farmland homes or the topography is gorgeous. Flat as a pancake, but miles and miles of cornfield. That was wonderful on the trip. And then us being able to slow down and say unexpected evidence of God’s care is like he set the agenda as the way we go.
Karen: Like he was the tour guide.
David: Right. That’s well put. That’s well put. This was wonderful. Okay.
Karen: One more category.
David: Well, help to do God’s work in the world.
Karen: Okay.
David: So, he shows his hand. Go ahead.
Karen: So, we get home. Our anniversary was actually right when we got home. We got home on Sunday and the next day was our anniversary that Monday. So, I don’t know how God does this, but there were, I think, four or five letters in the mail. Our mail has decreased because we don’t have the listenership that we used to have. We’re so grateful for people who are still supporting us in every, almost every day is kind of a miracle. But on our anniversary, we had five letters.
David: We very seldom get that many letters.
Karen: Yeah, there weren’t any more. We used to get maybe a thousand a day, one time in our lives. Five letters and when we opened that up, there were checks for the ministry, but that’s supporting us.
David: Yeah, there was almost $2,000 in the mail.
Karen: $2,000. But my amazement was “How, Lord, do you get checks from different people from all over the country to land on our anniversary?”
David: That was very nice. And on top of that, Craig, dear, dear Craig, bless his heart. He gave us a large check. They had to do the total. So, it’s always on our minds, should we retire or should we keep going? And it’s the people who not only send gifts to the ministry, but it’s people who say, still praying for you David. And a lot of times they’ll say daily.
Karen: Yeah, it’s extraordinary.
David: That’s really so neat. So, there was the help to do God’s work in the world. That was a part of our time together. All that was really, really wonderful. I’m going to change the topic here for a moment, okay?
You have not been with me on the podcast for several weeks. Our son, Joel, took your place and people are going to assume Karen got that book done that we’ve been praying about because she’s back on the podcast. And the answer is no, you didn’t.
Karen: There’s no thought I would have gotten the book done. I got it organized and I’m into the first chapters of it. I don’t know what the book will be titled, but it tentatively is titled, Lessons in Love, Learned from a Dying Son. And it starts with the onset of cancer, lymphoma with our youngest son Jeremy, who died at age 42. He came down with cancer in May and died the next November. So, I mean, that’s a journey, an extraordinary journey. And I started to read the things I had written about that. I have all kinds of pieces that have all been written, but that it’ll be getting them all in order. And I put me back into the grief process for two days.
David: Yeah, you were really grieving too.
Karen: Oh, gosh, going through all of that was rough. Has anyone who’s done that knows? So anyway, thank you, David, for your care about that and being considerate of me. I’d like to talk about the God-hunt book just one moment.
David: The original book, Karen, was published by Intervarsity.
Karen: Yes. And you can get copies of it two ways if the people are interested in it. One is buy used books over thrift books.
David: Spell that.
Karen: T-H-R-I-F-T.
David: Thrift or thrifts?
Karen: Thrift.
David: Thrift.
Karen: T-H-R-I-F-T. And they kindly tell you what kind of condition the book is in. And then Amazon, if you just put my name in, and also has a list of my books and you can order it through either of those places.
David: Yeah, this is called the God Hunt. The delightful chase and the wonder of being found. So, you can get books yet, they’re still available. I don’t know that you can get new books. Don’t write to us for it because we’ve sent the last ones out that we have. Okay, so you mentioned that the book goes through these categories and is a whole book. It’s almost 200 pages as I recall, Karen.
Karen: And as I read it, I thought, oh, this is wonderful. This was a wonderful spiritual journey for all of us. So, I would highly recommend my own book.
David: Let’s go back to the God hunt. I would say that we probably talked about God-hunt sightings on the way back from the morning for at least a half hour. And it was fun. It wasn’t drudgery. It wasn’t like, let’s do it because it’s a discipline and we ought to do it. It was just one of those wonderful experiences again that we used to do all the time. And now we’re picking it up again of God’s goodness and God drawing very close to us and say, “63 years, I don’t know how you ever made it. You guys, I want to be recognized that I was in all of that as well.”
Karen: And this is how much I love you too. That’s the message of the God-hunt for everyone.
David: Yeah. Okay. Well, I’m going to be going on my own because I love you and because I want you to get this book done. We will look forward to that coming out.
The whole process, Karen, just so that people get an idea, and they don’t give up too soon. How long do you think it’s going to be before you actually have finished your part as far as writing this book?
Karen: The book’s written, David. It just has to be organized. It’s in pieces here and the file here and that sort of stuff. Now I’ve gathered everything.
David: Is it typed already?
Karen: No, it has to be retyped. And put into manuscript format. There’s a kind of format you use as a writer called the manuscript format. So, that’s where the work is. And I’m probably, once I get going, I will not find it to be so taxing. And we’ll be back on the podcast again from time to time. It’s nice to pull Joel in or interview other people too, I think. So that’s pretty much where we are. And we do appreciate everyone’s prayers. It’s just so meaningful when people tell us that they’ve been praying for us.
David: Last time we were on together, we didn’t ever come to the place where we said, in a sentence, here’s what it is we’re attempting to say. And I thought, I don’t know whether people know this or not. I know they are going to realize that we talked about going on the God hunt. I don’t have a sentence for this one because I’m not sure what you’re going to say sometimes when we do these things together.
Karen: It’s just a risky business.
David: I’m going to ask you to do your best at putting into a sentence what it is we’re trying to get across to people who are listening to us this time.
Karen: The God Hunt is one of the most wonderful ways we can search for God in our daily world and will change our lives for the good for certain.
David: I’ll go along with that. Good job. Just off the top of your head.
Karen: Yep.
David: Could you repeat it?
Karen: The God Hunt is one of the most wonderful ways we can search for God in our daily world and will change our lives for the good for certain.
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