The Little Theatre
by Sue
My life has definitely seen both trials and uncertainties but I also have many happy and fond memories. When I was very young we lived in a small house, and I loved to watch the world go by from the window - the dustman walking down the pathway to collect the rubbish bin and the coalman delivering the coal each week. But we faced some hard times as the money would only last a while. I remember mum and dad trying to find the loose change needed to put into the gas and electric meters. It was often a struggle. Mum would slog away in the kitchen and dad would come home tired, to three young ‘energetic’ children.
We didn’t have much in the way of luxuries, but Mum and Dad coped really well and certainly as best as they could. My mum, like most mums around the early 1960s, would buy material at the local haberdashery shop and would make rompers for my two younger brothers and little dresses for me. Occasionally we might get a bought item -either new from a clothes shop or more often than not, from a jumble sale. One time my mum bought me a beautiful frilly apple green dress, to wear for a social gathering, and how thrilled I was to wear it - and nice smart trousers for my brothers.
One Christmas, we had as usual been invited up to London to visit my auntie and uncle. They had three children too. Mum put on me the nice red coat which had white fur around the collar and cuffs, with a white muff to go with the outfit, and all of us in our best clothes, we caught the bus to the station. The journey was long and tiring and by the time we reached London where my Aunt and Uncle lived - not too far from St Pauls Cathedral, about a 15-minute walk from there.
They lived in a very old block of flats, built in Victorian times, and the building was very dark and the steps up to their flat were made of hard stone. Mum and dad carried my brothers up the stairs in their arms, and when we reached flat number 319, my aunt and uncles flat, I was a very tired 5-year-old, and my little legs felt weary. Dad knocked on the big black door knocker, and the door would open with my auntie and uncle greeting us all with smiles and kisses, and we would all march in, down the hallway and into the ‘front room’ with its old Victorian fireplace. My cousins were always so pleased to see us and there were usually other guests from my uncle’s family there too. My uncle would put 1950s music on the old radiogram (I think they might have had a couple of 1960s songs too) and me and my cousins would dance the night away.
Growing up I used to spend quite some time going to stay with my cousins in London especially during the school holidays as both my mum and my dad worked. A couple of times they took me along to the little marionette theatre in Islington and we watched Rapunzel and another time, Rumpelstiltskin. We would try to get there early as lots of families came to watch so there were always lots of boys and girls squeezed into that tiny place.
When I first met Malc and we talked about where we grew up and about our families, it turned out that he had also, on one occasion, gone to that little theatre, with his eldest sister who lived at the Angel, Islington in those days. Malc and I are nearly the same age, and I would think, just imagine - we might have been there at the same time during the same school holiday.
Who would have known that might have been a handsome little boy sitting in the row in front of me, grinning away as he sat and watched the same marionette show, that I would meet many years later and end up marrying?
Well, the Lord knew of course - even back then, and He was watching our lives and making plans for us to meet at a specific time when we would begin a wonderful journey together. I was to meet Malc years later (when we were both eighteen) and the two of us began our journey on a pathway of faith. That journey included laughter, tears, trials and testing, pain, and blessing. It has even been a path of hardship and suffering at times, but a journey that has also set us free. Free from sin and its consequences and has given us real and lasting peace as we walk that path with Jesus walking alongside us. And it leads ultimately to the place He has prepared for us where we shall spend eternity.
The reassuring verse in the Bible makes that very promise to us when it says:
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)
Do you have that assurance in your heart of everlasting peace now, and an eternal home prepared for you to look forward to? You can have.