I received an e-mail yesterday that touched me deeply:

I discovered The Dawn Patrol yesterday, and I love it!  I got there from the Kevin McCullough site. I've started a blog of my own, and yours was the first one I linked to it. Dawn, you never know what God has in store for you. 

Ten years ago I was a 33-year-old spinster. I fell in love with a longtime friend from another city, moved there, and married him. We were married for seven years and eleven days when I became a childless widow.   

During my occasional indulgences in self-pity, I wonder why God gave me Daniel only to take him away. I have known the joy (and heartbreak) of marriage and the gift of married love, and now it is gone. Sometimes I think it I would have been better off never having known what I am now very much missing.  But our faith tells us that God's reasons are best, even if we never know what they are.  May He continue to bless you.

Judie

Another thing Judie's story reminds me of is my bat-mitzvah Haftorah (reading from the prophets), Isaiah 54:

Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord....

For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God.

For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.

In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.

For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee.

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.

God promises to fill our space—both now and in the future. He is telling us to enlarge our tent—not to make room for material blessings, as the Jabez book would have it, but in a spiritual way. The more room we make for God in our hearts and in every area of our lives, the more He will fill it. We only have to make it clear to ourselves and to God that the space is one that only He can fill—not the "empty, swept, and garnished" space of the man in Matthew 12, which was always at the disposal of an unclean spirit.

I myself find it quite easy to let unclean spirits pass through, in the form of snide and gossipy remarks, poison-pen e-mails, lustful fantasies, and pity parties. I'm thankful to Judie and other believers who encourage me, for reminding me that while God's way may seem difficult—going against the world as it does—it gives me strength and comfort beyond anything I could achieve outside the Lord. This is true regardless of whether I have no immediate material rewards from faith. The faith in God itself is its own reward, in a very real sense that goes beyond what any positive thinking could do. For faith is the substance of things not seen.

The "Roll" Truth ("N" Nothing But the Truth)

As promised, another Dawn Patrol exclusive, courtesy of our fave rave shang-a-lang Scheherazade, Alan Merrill. Today it's the story of "I Love Rock N Roll," which Alan originally recorded with his own group, the Arrows, as he explains:

"I Love Rock N Roll" took two days to write. The chorus came first. The verses the next day. It was not a quick write. It was labored upon very carefully.

The Arrows recording was quick, because our producer, Mickie Most, didn't like the song and he put it on the B-side of our single. EMI pressured him to flip it, but too late for any major promotion. It hovered around the U.K. Top 50 for a while on sales from radio play, but the distribution was really weak, it wasn't in the shops, and it dropped.

The chorus was about a fictitious song on the jukebox called "I Love Rock N Roll" that the kids whom I described in the verses loved—their favorite song. So for me, it was more than a little ironic when it became a massive hit. Fiction becomes real—Rod Serling-esque.