The Search Abbie Creed   © Copyright 2025 by Abbie Creed

Photo courtesy of the author.

It was Christmas, 1951 when Dan was home on leave, and we were planning our wedding for the end of the month. It was such a busy but exciting time for us. We had been dating almost three years and engaged for a year, so decided that we would tie the knot when he was home for the holidays. He had joined the Air Force in October the year before, had completed his training as an instructor in communications and was ready to settle down.

The morning of the wedding, Dan’s dad, who was quite a teaser, whispered the news that Dan almost did not make it to the wedding. At first, I thought he was joking but even so I, of course, was imagining all kinds of awful things had happened. It was no joke! The truth was that Dan had stepped one foot out of the shower and turned off the electric heater. It shocked him and threw him across the bathroom floor. Dan’s dad assured me that Dan was fine and ready for the big day. Dan’s guardian angel had a busy morning!

Weddings in those days were early in the morning. Ours was at 9:00am. After the wedding, breakfast, an afternoon reception, and a brief honeymoon, we headed to our new home in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was there that we again experienced God’s activity in our young marriage. When Dan received his paycheck, it was for a whole month and that made for stretching our income a whole month before he would be paid again. This routine was hard to get used to, but we budgeted and overcame the obstacles.

Getting ready for Church one Sunday, all we had left after going to the grocery store was $2.00. That was between us and payday on Friday. We put that $2.00 in our church envelope. Dan took his uniforms once a week on Monday mornings to be cleaned. I could never get them stiff enough, so we budgeted for that expense. Dan always checked his pockets, but we had already done that on Sunday. Monday morning for some reason, he double checked his shirt pocket and to our amazement there was a folded up $20.00 bill. That twenty looked like a million at that time.

In the spring I was expecting Kathy, our first child. Dan had received a raise in pay, and we began budgeting for the hospital. Dan did not want me to have the baby at the base hospital. He had heard some bad reports about the care there, so that became a real no-no. We needed, however, to have $125 up front for me to go to the hospital in Gulfport. We were immensely proud of ourselves for accomplishing that goal by September, because Kathy was not due until November.

Disaster hit via a letter from the IRS. It seemed that three years before, when Dan was working at the bank, an employee had figured his taxes for him, but she had goofed. With taxes and interest Dan owed them $115.00. We thought of several possibilities, but we also were determined not to borrow from our parents. Dan wrote the check to the IRS and reluctantly mailed it. Two days later, a letter came from Baldwin Piano Company where I used to work. In the letter there was a check for $100. It seemed that while working there, I had given the manager the name of a person who was

interested in buying a piano. The company gave a bonus to the person who had given them the name of a prospective buyer. Because they purchased a Baldwin Grand Piano, the bonus was $100 instead of the usual $75. We could not believe our eyes when that check came but we never forgot that God provided for us.

Dan’s dad had begun writing to us in the last week of the month. He always included a $10 bill with his short letter. We were putting that aside, so it did not take much effort to raise the extra money needed to get me into the hospital. Kathy was born in November as planned. I must laugh today when I look at the bill from the hospital. My room was $12.00 a day and the nursery for Kathy was $6.00 a day. Hard to believe!

The next March, when Kathy was four months old, we had a treacherous storm in Biloxi. The windows in our bedroom were very wide and went from ceiling to floor and there were six of them, three on each of the two outside walls. The lightning was so bad that it kept the room lit up all night long. Dan picked Kathy up out of her bed and put her between us in our bed. I was always frightened to death of storms anyway, but this one was the worst I had ever seen. Dan was afraid that the wind was going to break the windows because they were rattling so hard that he was sure they would break. The three of us huddled up and prayed. We covered ourselves with a sheet for protection from the glass if it shattered. That awful storm lasted most of the night.

The next day, it was reported that there were three storms from different directions that converged on the city causing all kinds of destruction. It seems that it was a rare weather phenomenon that we had lived through, everyone was excited about it, and it was the topic of conversation everywhere. Again, we felt God’s activity in our life protecting us from harm.

I took those Scripture classes many years after these events took place. But these events popped right into my head, along with other less noticeable ones through our earlier years, having six children and feeding and educating them. The more I learned about Scripture the clearer the pattern of God’s being involved in people’s lives was developing in my own life. Just as God was active in and through the events and everyday lives of his people in Scripture times, I came to believe, that God continues this same process in our lives today. We just need to look for God’s presence in all that we do. However, there is so much evil in our world today and news of it spreads so rapidly through the media, cell phones and computers, that bad news seems to be all we hear about. There are so many good things going on around us. I think the pandemic proved that. I believe that the story of God’s activity in our world continues to be written today, and that God’s goodness and kindness will always be recognizable, but we may have to turn off the negative news and put more energy into our search for God’s presence in the events and lives of our own times. In other words, we need to, “Seek God where he can be found.” And the search goes on!