So what is Prevenient Grace? prevenient |priˈvēnēənt|

adjective formal preceding in time or order; antecedent: John Wesley referred to God’s work in the unconverted as prevenient grace.ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin praevenient- ‘coming before,’ from the verb praevenire, from prae ‘before’ + venire ‘come.’

Shellstone Hill Beginnings (1916 – 1921) Age 0 – 5

I was born Feb. 1, 1916, at the Rulison homestead on Shellstone Hill. Dr. Harry Howard of Minaville was the country doctor who came in all kinds of weather, sometimes in winter in a car fitted with skis on the front and caterpillar track on the back, as we lived on an unsurfaced dirt road.

My dad’s name was Earl Rulison. His father was Norwegian and his mother, Henrietta, was English. My mother, Anna Elisabeth Larson was of Norwegian parents, Barney and Lesa Larson, who migrated from Norway and settled in the Delanson area.

Because I was sometimes sickly, Dad bought a goat which daily produced milk, primarily for my nutrition to help my heart condition (whatever it was).

We acquired a harness for Nancy, the goat, but never succeeded in getting her to pull the sled in the snow as we dreamed. After many years, Nancy suffered a painful death from bee stings as she was tethered too close to the bee yard and couldn’t flee to safety in the nearby woods.

My earliest memories include playing in the upstairs of the barn, in the grain bins, hay loft and sort of workshop, and also down in the woods making dams with stones and mud in the creek. I have been persuaded to include another little incident dug up in memories from pre-school days. It was springtime and we Rulisons were all involved in planting our vegetable garden down between the bee yard and the woods. While my elders were busy cultivating the soil, marking out the rows and planting seed, I was playing around and somehow got into the container of seeds, just investigating and exploring, I suppose. Well, a couple of days later, I complained of pain in my nose. Home remedies didn’t help. So finally I was taken to Dr. Howard’s office in Minaville. His examination revealed a growth in my nose cavity which he removed with tweezers. It was indeed a non-malignant growth, a germinating pea seed that somehow had got stuck in my nose instead of in the garden soil. Thankfully, it didn’t take root. That should have taught me to keep inappropriate things out of my nose as well as to keep my nose out of inappropriate matters.

Dad was a bee-keeper and our home was known as Sunnyside Apiaries. Dad started keeping bees and selling honey back before 1900. So the honey house furnished early memories for me, especially during the “honey flow” each year when Dad extracted honey and the old gasoline engine powered the 4-framed centrifugal honey extractor after Dad uncapped the combs by hand with the uncapping knife.

I had two older brothers, John (four years older than I) and Howard (three years older), also sister Ruth (one year younger) and a third brother, Richard (seven years younger). I recall the thrill of rocking baby Richard to sleep in my arms when he was only a week or two old. It was mid-winter in that upstairs bedroom with heat coming up through a vent in the floor from the heated dining room below.