Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571)

by Bachmann, Michele

  Marcus is never a complainer, but when he returned from San Antonio, I could tell that something was troubling him. We just looked at each other, not saying a word. And I thought of the verse from Isaiah: “In quietness and trust is your strength.” So we both prayed, sharing our feelings and our concerns with God and with each other. For now we faced a dilemma: I loved being in Tulsa, but Marcus didn’t.

  But then I came to see that it wasn’t a dilemma at all—I knew what I had to do. Marcus was my husband, the leader of our home and family. Between my law school and my marriage, it wasn’t even a contest. I now realized, deep in my heart, that however much I would hate to leave ORU, I would hate even more causing hurt to Marcus. And then God reminded me of the famous words of Paul to the Corinthians: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

  So at the end of my first year in law school, in the spring of 1980, we packed up in Tulsa and moved back to Minnesota. I won’t say I didn’t shed a few tears, but I knew it was for the best.

  Now, back on his home turf, Marcus was thriving. Helped along by mentors Peter and Susan Roehl, he established a youth ministry as part of the Youth for Christ organization, teaming up with ten local churches that couldn’t afford to set up a youth outreach program on their own. This work is what Marcus was meant to do. He could help create a wholesome environment for kids while carefully advancing his goal of helping kids find faith in God. And cleverly, he held meetings at exactly 7:17 P.M. on Tuesday nights. “Why 7:17 P.M.?” I asked. “Because kids will remember it,” he answered. And he was right. As always.

  I could now see that Marcus was on an upward career path, the path that God intended him to walk. But unfortunately, now I wasn’t sure about mine. I wanted to finish law school. To that end, I had worked hard to get into college, just as hard to get into law school, and yet now I felt I was stopped short of my goal. On the other hand, far more important, I was in the arms of a loving husband, and, of course, in the arms of a loving God. So as I cheered Marcus on in his new career success and asked the Lord for strength, I myself felt that I was waiting, waiting for whatever might come next. I was calmed with love, hope, and faith. And sure enough, new challenges—and greater joys—awaited both of us.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Life and Taxes

  I wasn’t all that happy to be away from law school, but then something big happened that changed everything. We knew we wanted to have a baby, but I also wanted to be prepared. So I spent six months changing our nutrition habits. We adopted a 100 percent health-food eating regimen so my body would be ready for my baby. And sure enough, six months later, I was pregnant! When I told Marcus, we hugged and then we prayed, recalling the 127th Psalm, which tells us that children are a gift from the Lord. Now my priorities were different; I talked with Mom about what to expect during pregnancy, and, of course, I read books that helped put me at ease. I knew that God was shaping the baby in my womb, but I wanted to do everything I possibly could to help. My overwhelming goal was to be a good expectant mother and then a good mother.

  Lucas Barrett Paul Bachmann was born in Winona on April 30, 1982. Delivery took all of an hour after we got to the hospital. It was 12:30 a.m. The birth of a first child is so exciting! I wanted to call everyone, all our friends and family, to share the good news, but Marcus was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep. The irony: I had just had a baby, but he was tired. My mother said she would drive right down to stay for a week. Marcus also called my father, who by now was living in northern Illinois. Lucas was dad’s second grandchild, but first grandson; soon, Lucas was the proud owner of a Chicago Cubs jacket. Marcus and I reconfirmed a decision we had made when we got married—that one of us would always be there for the children. And so we would get by on one paycheck, if need be. Our children would be our first priority as a couple; money would come second.

  Marcus continued his work in the youth ministry and I assisted him. When he came home, he helped care for our very colicky baby boy. We didn’t have much money, but we always had fun as a young couple. We realized that walking was free; we could stroll along the banks of the Mississippi River and watch the Father of Waters, as the Native Americans called it, go flowing by, headed all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. We could look at the blue sky and occasionally see the eagles that made their nests in the hilly woods all around us.

  About the only luxury I had back then was a 1983 visit to California to see my lifelong friend Barbara Norbie, who was now Mrs. Meyer, having married a wonderful man, David Meyer. Barbara and David had by then moved to the northern part of California, to a little town called Willits, where David taught school. There they had been blessed with twins, Christy and Daniel, born just six weeks after Lucas. So all three of these kids have more or less grown up together, even two thousand miles apart. Indeed, Marcus and I are godparents to Christy and Daniel, just as Barbara is godmother to one of our children. On that trip west—Marcus stayed at home to work—Barbara’s husband David volunteered to take care of the toddler trio, and so Barbara and I sneaked off to a little inn for a couple of nights devoted to girl talk, prayer, and heart-to-heart discussions about the challenges we faced as new mothers of seemingly perpetual screamers. This was during the early Reagan era, when things had been getting better after the “malaise” years of Jimmy Carter; yet both of us still felt called to do our part in renewing the nation, especially in the supremely important issue of life. In later years, Barbara would enjoy a fine career as the director of a Christian clinic, where the goal was always to provide compassionate, life-affirming health care to patients, including, of course, the unborn baby.

  In the meantime, Marcus was making a new decision for us. He was enjoying his work at the youth ministry, but as he prayed about it, he sensed that it was time for me to finish law school, that my career calling was to be a lawyer. And that meant finishing law school in Tulsa. It was a poignant reversal: Four years earlier, I hadn’t wanted to hurt him by staying in Tulsa, and now, because he didn’t want to hurt me, we were once again going to Tulsa. I love my husband, truly and deeply, for a million reasons, but that reason is way up toward the top. He is a good man and a prayerful man, and when prayerful consideration told him what he should do, he did not hesitate to put his own interests second. In fact, we both knew we would have grad school in our future—Marcus was eager to gain at least a master’s degree in Christian counseling—and so we agreed that we would somehow “tag team” our way through the next few years. That is, I would finish law school, and then he would pursue his own graduate degree.

  So in the fall of 1984, four years after leaving Tulsa, the Bachmanns, now “plus one,” returned to T-Town, as residents sometimes call it.

  This time, Marcus found jobs more suited to his talents. He worked as the vice president of admissions for Oral Roberts University, which meant he could continue his work with young people. Also, interestingly, he once again became connected with the elderly; he became director of a senior center in the nearby town of Jenks. He organized the usual activities and events: coffee and doughnuts in the morning, ice-cream socials in the afternoon, art and exercise classes, plus the occasional speaker. In addition, Marcus arranged excursions; he and the seniors visited local churches and a nearby synagogue. Marcus loved every minute of it—these oldsters were the grandparents he had never really had; Marcus had seen his grandparents only rarely. And these seniors, too, were more than happy to share their life experience with a young man eager to learn more about how best to deal with social and psychological concerns.

  Meanwhile, I attended my law school classes, then left immediately for home to care for Lucas. Then after work, Marcus stayed with Lucas so I could return to study at the law school library at night. We lived a Spartan life—all work, studying, and caring for our son. I earned my JD in 1986. Although matters of life and family would always be central to me, I grew increasingly interested in economic issue
s, including the nation’s tax code. My reading in economics had told me that a too-complicated tax system and too-high tax rates were particularly damaging to the economy. But if I wanted to make a real change in the tax code, I knew I had to come armed with more than just my own personal opinions. I needed to know the facts of each particular case. I also needed to understand how the tax code was shaping—and misshaping—the American economy. That summer I took and passed the bar exam back home in Minnesota.

  In the meantime, as the other half of the Bachmann tag team, I knew it was my turn to follow along after Marcus so that he could continue his own schooling. Marcus was equally committed to education with a biblical worldview, and so he chose what is now Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, founded by the evangelist Pat Robertson. Marcus entered the school’s Christian counseling program, seeking a master’s degree. At the same time, he worked full time counseling people over the telephone for the Christian Broadcasting Network.

  Yet during the summer of 1986, friends pointed out that given that we would be living in the Tidewater area of Virginia, it was silly not to think about my studying tax law at nearby William & Mary; the university boasted one of the best tax-law programs in the nation. I already had my JD, but now I wanted to earn a legum magister, or LLM, a master’s degree, in tax law. I knew I had received a great education at Oral Roberts, but I was looking forward to specializing in understanding the tax system because I wanted to lower taxes!

  Now the pressure was really on both of us. Marcus and I shared in the homeschooling of Lucas, while I commuted, sometimes by car pool, to my new school in Williamsburg, more than an hour’s drive away. And Marcus was going to school too, of course, as well as working. We were two full-time graduate students; Marcus also worked full time as we homeschooled Lucas. Our universities were an hour apart, and we could afford only one car. I often caught rides with other students, or Marcus figured out an alternate plan. I had back-to-back classes sometimes, evenings and mornings, and through the kindness of a married couple at the law school, I could sleep on their couch in a small graduate-dorm apartment. I was by now in my early thirties, and yet I was still sleeping on a couch!

  And oh, by the way, during that time, we welcomed our second child into the world—Harrison Sterling Bachmann. Perhaps realizing that we were busy and didn’t have time for a lengthy labor, Harrison took only seven minutes to be born. I kid you not. It is called a precipitous birth, and it happened suddenly one morning. In other words, our little boy was in the world before we were barely awake. It is the best way to have a baby! That was on February 2, 1987.

  By this time, Marcus was so overworked and tired that he fell asleep in the dentist’s chair; it wasn’t from novocaine but from sheer exhaustion. As for me, there were days when I wondered if I would ever have time even to put conditioner in my hair. In a typical week, Marcus and I were able to find time for each other only on Friday nights and on Sundays. But I’m proud to say that Lucas and baby Harrison always saw at least one of us. We were tag-team parents; one of us was always there to care for the boys, but we couldn’t both be there simultaneously. So while it was sad to miss some together times, Marcus and I always had plenty of stories to share about the boys and what they were up to. Still it was tough sometimes, but as I liked to remind myself, I had the built-in advantage of being married to a marriage counselor!

  Moreover, Marcus and I both knew we were doing something important. Not just in raising those two boys, but also in the work we were preparing to do. Tax law is tough, even for those who love it. We were very tired pups that year, but we knew our sacrifice would be worth it. I worked hard because I always wanted to be prepared for class; I went to class and paid attention because I wanted to absorb this fascinating material to the best of my ability. With hard work and God’s help, I made it through.

  I earned my LLM degree from William & Mary, Marshall-Wythe School of Law, in 1988. And Marcus too received his master’s in Christian counseling from what is now Regent University.

  We moved back to Minnesota in the summer of 1988, just as the Reagan presidency was coming to its glorious close. Ronald Reagan had done what he had promised. For one thing, he had dramatically cut taxes, reducing the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. He had also pared back regulation, notably energy price controls, bringing big government at least somewhat to heel and giving the economy room to grow.

  More than that, Reagan had restored the basic confidence of Americans not only in their economy but also in their country as a whole. Reagan had put the bitter hangover of Vietnam behind us; I still remember watching the ceremony, back in 1984, when our president presided over the laying to rest of the Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War. And when Reagan presented the Unknown with the Congressional Medal of Honor, tears were streaming down my face. Later that year, our president traveled to Normandy for the fortieth-anniversary commemoration of D-day, reminding Americans of the heroism of U.S. forces, particularly the Army Rangers: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” Not since the Gettysburg Address had a U.S. president paid better homage to our fighting men.

  In fact, I wonder if we would have seen the revival of interest in World War II—Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan—were it not for the Reagan presidency.

  But of course, Reagan was much more than a rhetorician. He was real in his deeds—he walked the walk. Don’t take my word for it; ask the post-Soviet Russians. Reagan stood tall against the Soviet Union, which he rightly labeled, in a 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, the “evil empire.” In that same speech he went even further, boldly predicting the demise of the USSR and its dictatorial system: “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.” That was a remarkably prescient statement, at a time when the foreign-policy elites were saying that communism would last forever, maybe even ultimately prevail.

  Yet Reagan never left anything to chance. To put pressure on the Soviets, he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, working toward neutralizing the Russian nuclear threat. In addition, he coordinated with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and two courageous sons of Poland, Pope John Paul II and Lech Wałesa, to block Soviet expansion and to support anticommunist dissidents. Reagan and company broke communism’s grip, first on Eastern Europe, then on Russia itself. And so international events were unfolding just as Reagan had said they would. In 1987 he traveled to Berlin, standing in the shadow of the Berlin wall. He told the Soviet leadership what it had to do: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Two years later, in 1989, the Berlin wall came down, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

  So it was in that resonant 1983 speech, years before the collapse of Soviet communism, that Reagan had foretold the future; he had predicted communism’s “last pages.” How did Reagan know what would happen? What inspired him in this prophecy? Well, the man answered those questions in the very next sentence of that speech: “The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.” Right there, Reagan’s words provided an instructive window into the vital concept of God-given natural law—that is, the realization that God has imprinted certain truths on the hearts of all mankind, including knowledge of our inherent right to life and to dignity. And if totalitarian oppressors stomped on those rights with which we were born, that’s when the people rise up. And so we can see the powerful fusion of the natural-law tradition and the American Revolution. The founders held natural-law truths to be self-evident, and when they saw that the British were trampling their liberties, they took up arms. They knew that Providence was on their side in the fi
ght for freedom.

  And in that same 1983 speech, Reagan didn’t just cite a spiritual source of strength; he cited chapter and verse from the Bible, quoting from Isaiah 40: “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength.” Continuing, the president added: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.” Amen to that.

  I love those verses of Isaiah, because while Reagan invoked biblical words to help inspire worldwide opposition to communism, those same hopeful words—“He giveth power to the faint”—also prove useful in helping to heal wounded hearts here at home. And let me tell you, as a married mom out there in the provinces, when I heard the president of the United States saying, “They shall mount up with wings as eagles,” well, my heart soared. God spoke to me in those words, and here on earth, so did Ronald Reagan. Now I knew I had to do something. I thought of the commitment that God made to each of us in Hebrews 13:21, offering to make us fully perfect instruments of His plan. I wanted God to lead me to do what I could, each effort of which “is well pleasing in His sight.”