Pat Finch, a transplanted Chicagoan, is at home near Rochester, New York. She is married to her high school sweetheart, Bill. Together they have shared 27 years of friendship, almost 24 of those as husband and wife. Bill is an electronics engineer; Pat is a homemaker and has also been a homeschooler forever (well, it seems that way sometimes!).  Bill and Pat have three children, ages 21, 19, and 17. This past May they were privileged to add a fourth "child" to their family when their son married. Her new daughter-in-law is as dear to her as her own children.

In addition to homemaking and homeschooling, Pat has been a hospice volunteer and is currently a volunteer for Special Olympics of New York and a volunteer dispatcher for her local ambulance corps.

Pat and her family attend the Rochester Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America.

Below is Pat's testimony of her Christian faith and how she became acquainted with the works of the Schaeffers:

I was blessed to have been brought up in a Christian home. Some of my earliest memories are of my Dad and I reading the Bible together--in fact it is how I learned to read. I cannot look back and choose a specific date when I became "born again". I honestly don't remember a time I didn't have an assurance that Jesus died for my sins and was my Saviour. That isn't to say there haven't been struggles and moments of doubt in my life--there have been many! But the question is often asked, "When did you accept Jesus into you heart?" or some variation, and I am at a loss for a specific date.

My heaviest struggle came as a young wife and mother. Before I married Bill I had been a physical therapy major. However, physical therapy was not a career one could leave for a number of years in order to stay home and raise a family and then return. I dropped out of college in favor of marriage and [eventually] starting a family. In the mid-seventies it wasn't exactly politically correct to choose homemaking as a career. I went through a very lonely time as many of my friends couldn't understand my choice to "bury myself at home". I even experienced censure from some family members.

It was at this time that I read Edith Schaeffer's What is a Family? and Hidden Art of Homemaking. I also read Francis Schaeffer's The God Who is There. As always, God's timing is perfect and He sent these books my way at a particularly low time for me.

Mrs. Schaeffer's books helped encourage me and showed me many ways I could make my house a home and a haven for family, friends, and those whom God brought to the door. I've never been the creative-type, but I have found certain "gifts" that help bring comfort to those in my home (at least I hope so).

More than that--her books helped cement for me the fact that homemaking was a worthy career; not just a retreat for someone who wasn't intelligent enough to do anything else (something I was told more than once!). A quote from What Is A Family best sums it up for me:

" What is a family? A formation center for human relationships--worth fighting for, worth calling a career, worth the dignity of hard work."

You may contact her by writing to cworkers@yahoogroups.com.