After dinner, Ben took Rebecca back out onto the promenade and they walked back up the hill toward the Statue of Faith where it overlooked the sea. He found a private bench, away from the streetlights, where they could have a good view without distracting lights. He invited Rebecca to sit down. They sat quietly together for a few minutes enjoying the view of the city lights, the Mediterranean, and the light breeze. As they looked out to sea, they could also see the navigational lights of airliners stacked up for their approach to Ben Gurion Airport, not far to the south.
As they looked out at the lights, Ben said, “I called your dad this afternoon, and we had a long talk before he went to work. It was nine in the morning his time.”
“A long talk?” asked Rebecca quizzically.
“Yes.”
“And so?”
“So, I asked him for his blessing, and he said yes.”
“That’s kind of a roundabout way of asking me…”
“Yes, but I was getting to that. I mean, I am asking you, I mean…”
Rebecca gave a nod and gently urged, “So what exactly are you asking?”
“You are a gift from the Lord, Rebecca. You’ve become my best friend. I find myself constantly thinking about you. I have thoroughly enjoyed working beside you with the Youth Group and the service projects that we’ve done. I love the way you think! I love communicating with you and can’t wait to ask you questions, getting your opinion and hearing your insights. I have come to love you with all my heart and soul. I would be incredibly blessed if you would become my wife. I believe that the two of us together will be a strong team for furthering Adonai’s Kingdom.”
Ben then reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring, saying deliberately, “I want to give you something that I found on the beach this morning during my quiet time. I have been praying for you and about you for more than a year now. I’ve been asking Adonai for the timing and the confirmation. And seeing how much you love God’s creation and enjoy finding perfectly created natural objects, I believe this find is a gift to us, a gift to you from the Lord. It is His confirmation for us to marry.”
He held out the seashell, clutched between his thumb and forefinger.
Unexpectedly, Rebecca extended her ring finger, and Ben slid it on. She gave a gentle laugh, as she carefully turned the ring around on her finger and murmured, “It’s beautiful, Ben! So perfectly shaped and such a pure unblemished white! You really just found this on the beach this morning? It’s a miracle. I believe it is confirmation and I say ‘Yes.’ Yes, Benjamin, I will be your wife! I love you and I’ve been praying and hoping, too, that you were the one and that you would choose me!” She smiled and laughed out loud, shouting “Hallelujah,” and began dancing around. Ben stood up and Rebecca ran into his arms and gave him a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. Ben lifted Rebecca and swung her around, laughing, praising Adonai and telling of his love for her.
They stopped dancing and Ben took both of Rebecca’s hands in his and facing her he said, “I will always protect you.”
Rebecca replied: “Ben, I will respect you, and I will honor you. I will listen to you. I will pray for you.”
Then and there he prayed that God would orchestrate the timing of the wedding and that he would give them much self-control and that he would train them and use them for His kingdom.
They slowly retraced their steps back to Beit Immanuel, talking the whole way about their dreams for their future. They married eighteen months after their first meeting, just shortly after Ben took the Tennessee State Bar exam. The wedding band that he then slipped on her finger was a platinum casting of the seashell that he had found on the beach in Israel. Rebecca often wore the fragile original seashell as a necklace, on a light gold chain.
Following law school, Ben’s first job was with a firm in Nashville. In Nashville, Ben and Rebecca found Beth Israel, a small Messianic Jewish congregation. A few of the members of the congregation were standoffish and associated only with other Jewish Believers. They thought of Ben and Rebecca as a “mixed” couple. But most of the congregation was friendly.
Discouraged to find that a small, vocal minority of members of Beth Israel were over-legalistic and some too rabbinical, Ben and Rebecca were happy to find a new congregation when they eventually moved to rural Muddy Pond, Tennessee.
Rebecca had grown up in Richmond, but many of her childhood friends in her homeschooling co-op group had lived in the country outside town. This made Rebecca long for a home in the country, a large garden, and livestock. It was not until the Fieldings moved to Muddy Pond that her dream came true. Drawing on the wisdom and experience of Dorris, a widowed “ex-hippie” grandmother who lived just a quarter mile away, Rebecca gradually accumulated a useful assortment of livestock. She had a Guernsey cow named Matilda, dozens of chickens, a few ducks, some sheep, and a few barn cats. When Rebecca would go out to milk Matilda she would dance out the kitchen door with her milking bucket singing “Milking Matilda” to the tune of the Australian folk song “Waltzing Matilda.” Rebecca loved drinking their own fresh raw milk, making their own butter, yogurt, cheese, and ice cream; and growing, canning, freezing, and drying her own homegrown fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
Although he was a city boy, Ben learned to love their place in the boonies. The wild game was abundant, and the fishing was good, both in ponds and in the local streams and rivers. Under the tutelage of a retired neighbor, Ben learned how to shoot, and he in turn started teaching his son to shoot when he was just six years old.
Later, after the Crunch, when Ben and Rebecca’s oldest son, Joseph, had turned thirteen, he was trusted to hunt on his own. He hunted on the Fieldings’ own property and the 320 acres of adjoining timber company land. Joseph dearly loved fishing and hunting. After his homeschooling was completed each day, if the weather was passable, the thirteen-year-old would go out with either his fishing pole or his Mossberg single-shot .22 rimfire rifle. He was proud that he could help feed the family in a substantial way, and his parents were appreciative of his efforts. Joseph was a patient, self-taught hunter, and was famous for rarely missing a shot. (His .22 rimfire cartridges were strictly rationed, and the use of every one had to be accounted for.) He often brought home bullfrogs, grouse, opossums, quail, rabbits, raccoons, and even armadillos. (The latter they called “possum on the half shell.”) Less frequently, he would bag wild turkeys and deer with head shots. In all, Joseph made a substantial contribution to the family’s food needs.
Ben preferred trapping and snaring to hunting. As he explained it, “A trap is hunting twenty-four hours a day.” He used wire snares in various sizes ranging from squirrel size to deer size. Most of his success around the house was with rabbits. He also used Conibear #110 traps for squirrels. Between Joseph’s hunting, Ben’s trapping, milk from Matilda, and Rebecca’s big vegetable garden, the Fielding family ate much better than most other families in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Crunch.
4. Rushes
“A nuclear-missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high Cyclone fence; but to the imagination, it is the end of the world.”